DIY how to repair lawn Patchy dead areas, brown dead grass, turf insects. What's wrong with my lawn

[Music] hello my friends Peston LAN ginger here for another episode of what's wrong with my latte another day another person coming up saying hey I've given it all I've got and I can't figure it out let's bring in the experts so here I am let's jump into the guys here we go I love these older well established neighborhoods and when he get lawns to look like that they're really good and then he crossed the street looks like this little kind of bad for him but it looks like they tried really hard really just kind of want to walk you through this and we'll go from there so in the front yard we've got about if I were to guess somewhere between six thousand sixty five hundred square feet you can see we've got a little bit of problems everywhere now you could really tell that the homeowners tried at this point and they just couldn't figure it out so they started throwing mud at the walls to see what was gonna stick trying to diagnose themselves and that's why it's really important to have a guy like me then kind of come through here piece it all together now just to run you guys through my guide we're gonna be looking at a few things and the number one issue is going to be pattern so let's talk about that for a second and we've walked through all the way through the front yard and the backyard and I think it's safe to say we don't have an established pattern of issues here it's very uneven we've got some areas like this one behind me that aren't even growing the same height and then we've got these blotchy spots and you know patterns gonna tell us a lot we have isolated incidences and so doing a uniform fix is not going to work now I think it's safe to say everybody wants the Better Homes Garden look myself included it's not as easy as it seems especially when you're getting these older more established homes we're gonna have a few maintenance issues that if you put them off in the long run it's gonna haunt you now keep in mind it's been a little over a hundred degrees a couple days this last week and we've been in the mid to high 90s so I know that some of this we're gonna deal with the sprinkler coverage but we know that we're dealing with an uneven distribution of pattern so we're gonna have to go through this one section at a time so we're gonna go back to the front yard just kind of take an overall look at it next in line step number two we're gonna be looking at color so there's a couple of random things with the color here on this section we've got kind of a haze this section I wish you could see it more in person it looks orange now this section over here is gray and then we have a section up on the far end up over here where it goes yellow or brown and yellow is typically the color of herbicide burn now the one thing I want you homeowners to do to see if you've got herbicide burn is look and touch it almost feels like hey it's very very crispy it's crunchy it almost feels like pine needles on the hand and I think it's safe to say that that this area was definitely herbicide burn we start running through we'll start seeing these calico patterns and I'll get to that in a minute want to focus on the coloring the coloring in this section is brown brown is typically going to insinuate that we have lack of water and straight brown you know watering is going to be the catalyst it's 90 degrees this week we're gonna have to force them grow through this but then you can see around this area we've got kind of that hazy green it's got a little bit of brown color to it the one thing I want to point out though is the grass type changes and we go from having a blue grass which you can see there's chunks of blue in here with a rye so two completely different grass types now the interesting thing about that is they carry two different pH balances your rye grass wants to sit about a 5 and your blue grass wants to sit between a 6 and a 6 5 but then in this section we start looking at almost kind of a burnt aqua color and now this this color it's got a little bit aqua to it a little bit of brown to it again this is going to come down to watering the ones the spots that bothered me the most are these orange areas now orange is commonly a sign of fertilizer burn now our last color on the list is this white area now white or gray matter typically insinuate some type of fungal activity now keep in mind once grass starts decaying it also exhibits fungal matter and so this could just be so dead that it sat here for so long that we are just dealing with dead grass so this one's kind of hard to say there are a couple of funguses that do make similar patterns like this in the state of Utah and around the mountain West Region we get too much humidity called Pythium blight so there is a small chance we had some Pythium run through here because they were over watering trying to compensate for the areas of sprinkler coverage okay guys we're gonna start digging into this gray area and the first thing I want to point out is we've got moss that is not super common especially in our dry region I think we can safely say this is being over watered now I don't want to use this as an excuse not to use the soil probe because this moss could have set in overnight due to topical watering now I'm gonna do a little bit of a pull test here in the same area which is I'm fast-forwarding to step four but the one thing I kind of want to point out is you can kind of see these little pieces right here and right here and it looks like that's fertilizer but I also want to so just kind of push it around some of this matter and let me see if I can get a good close-up on this so I can show you right here start seeing these orange casings and I've got one of them I've got two three four let's see if I could just pick one up that you guys can see these are fertilizer capsules and my guess I'm starting to believe and I don't know yet I haven't quite made up my mind but I'm starting to believe we may have had a slight case of over fertilization that caused all of this so I still want to attack these random patterns just see what we're going after and in the backyard we've got a little bit more than orange haze I think at this point it's safe to say we've got some fertilized burn now this section is just a little bit different I still want to go through this these are our Brown hazy sections now Brown haze typically just watering issues and that's why we want to check it out but I also want to see exactly what we're dealing with so we're gonna do a pull test here you can see there's really nothing coming out in this section but then boom we've got it going on now just to dispel some rumors out there sod webworms cranberry burglars they don't really like the live grass as much as they like the dead grass so having a little bit of thatch in your lawn is not a big deal but you definitely don't want this much and inviting these critters to just kind of stay in your house forever but as you can see our poll test is testing positive for insect activities and that's pretty common with Alumnus distressed I would say it's probably been under stress for probably almost two months would be my best guess here without knowing a history on this lawn overall pattern is telling us that we've got uneven distribution we've got isolated instances now at this point we've got a couple of issues going on we know that we've got insect activity and we also know that we've got fertilizer burning and we also know that we end up having sprinkler coverage issues due to lack of water but we don't want to just guess and we want to do the doing and not the guessing work so we're gonna grab the soil probe and the thatch rake and we're gonna really get in here and just make sure that everything lines up checking water saturation what the soil probe is really important you've got this area right here we go through here and the plug it's dry now the funny thing is though is if you look at it I mean it's it's bone-dry then we move over a couple of feet pull another one you can see the water is saturating deeper but it's not particularly where we want it still drunk this is a couple of reasons why I love the soil probe soil probe never lies it tells me if there's water or not we get in here as you can see this area it's bone-dry like there's just no water it just crumbles out and there's nothing in it chances are they tried to treat this for weeds they've got spurge right next to it you can see here it's not going away and my guess is they sprayed it now as we come just do eased it's wet plenty of water in the soil grass goes straight green now this area over here ended up being really wet but you can see it's still got that brown haze on it which tells me they were working on the sprinkler covers and most likely knew they had a coverage problem so they up the minutes on the timer but as we get closer and closer to the neighboring property this whole area is dry and you can kind of see where the biggest problems are with the sprinklers are right here and I love it when we have these round patterns round patterns and see any weights to the sprinkler head it's pushing the water most sprinklers push it in a 90 or 180 but they're gonna have real round edges to it so that makes it really easy to figure these areas out but we still want to run a cup test which I'm not going to do I'm gonna leave that up to the potential client here to do so I don't have to deal with that but ultimately we're definitely causation is going to be lack of sprinklers or lack of water so our secondary issues are going to be insects and then we've got some tertiary issues going on with fungal matter that need to be dealt with so doing a thatch test is really important for a couple different reasons number one when we have too much thatch we get some really weird things going on the water gets stuck in the evaporation and then the grass is forced to transpire faster but that thatch also heats up so leaves you prone for fungal activity and fungal spores the other issue is is too much Stach will lead to insect activity so you don't want to have too much of that either the other issue that we have is the water eventually can't get down to where it needs to go so you end up having to water more as a result the roots will curl back and start growing upward and we also don't want that either but let's take a look at these stats results to see we're looking at well start up to top in this area and we know that's lack of water coupled with too much fertilizer to cause some burning now I'm not as concerned with this spot there's not a ton of thatch that needs to be removed and I remove about a 2 foot by 2 foot section is how I do it it's not excessive which is nice in that section this section was a little bit more excessive you can start to see that the rye grass which naturally does this in Utah kind of lives and dies a couple of times a year so this actually could definitely use a power rake moving on to this heavily burned area you can see I'm not pulling a lot of fats but the one thing that I want to call to action here is you definitely want to rake over this we need more oxygen in the area and as you can see after I remove the matter you can physically see into the roots now if we dig in here a little bit further you'll start to see new growth which is right here I don't know if you guys can see that in TV land but we're starting to get some of these rhizomes popping through just like this one right here and it's really important that you let this grass breathe so a light raking we definitely don't want to just scrape it out as hard as we can that wouldn't make any sense you'll just ruin some of that rhizomatous activity now this area all not a ton of thatch could it use a little cleanup maybe a slight cleanup but nothin abrasive no one thing I found really interesting I don't run into this quite often but this whole area is getting overrun with Bermuda grass and in Utah this doesn't match any of the perennial rye fescue or blue that we have and how you identify blue grass is pretty simple it grows off of a Stalin instead of a rhizome this creeping stock grows above the ground and we get grass shooting upward so I'm gonna make them aware of this issue you guys in TV land there have made me aware of a couple different types of sprays for Bermuda grass that I'm gonna recommend that they do that first before hitting it with lice of fate over here is our healthiest patch of blue that we have in the lawn and oddly enough we have one patch of rye right in the middle and as you can see the interesting part about this bats test so we started getting a lot of crown on top which tells me that they more than likely been over watering and leaving it on top now you can see leaving the water at the top layers instead of deep you can see I started digging through and I'm getting roots coming up with live grass and that crown now once I dig into the grass as you can see you guys can do this at home one easy way that you can check for thatch is just by parting it with your hands like as if you would part your hair now one thing that I like to see is I like to start seeing the dirt in here which you can clearly see at this point so there's that sitting on top but a pretty healthy layer the roots are a little shallow but not enough to balk at so I kind of feel like this episode of what's wrong with my lawn is going to hit home with a lot of you guys this lawn has several problems we're not even close to getting to a maintenance fertilizer plan and that's kind of what we need to build up to don't get too frustrated with this kind of a problem just like I did in this video you just have to take it section by section to identify the overall issues now because we have over a lack of water overall burning the one thing that I was gonna point out that maybe I forgot to earlier was those fertilizer pellets already dissipated they're already gone so I don't really need to worry about focusing on neutralizing them and oddly enough I'm going to show you what I'm gonna use we're gonna end up using more ammoniacal nitrates to stimulate and cause growth now they've got to do a couple of things before we come out here and we start hitting it with chemical so the biggest recommendation I'm gonna make is to hire a sprinkler specialist to go through the lawn and to fix the sprinkler coverage this is pretty bad we know that we've got sections that aren't hitting some of these sections are too wet and some sections just have almost enough so the one question I get asked a lot is how can I tell if the guy who ran the sprinklers and I made the adjustments did a good enough job so I always refer people to a water cup test go down to Dollar Tree go down to your local dollar store you can get little pieces of Tupperware that about three inches in diameter three inches in Tull what you're going to do is you're going to label those on the bottom of the cups a through K you're going to set those between each one of the sprinklers so if you have one here and here one right in the middle if you have a sprinkler here and one over here right in the middle of that one too so you're going to grid that out go to Google Maps grid it out on a piece of paper then you're going to run a twenty minute cycle and you're going to record and measure with a measuring tape how much water depth is in each one of the supper work cups this is going to expose some of the outliers some of your cups are going to have an eighth of an inch some one we're gonna have a quarter some we're gonna have a half if you don't have something fairly consistent you know that station needs to be adjusted tip of the day guys pretty simple to do now here's the part you've all been waiting for how do we fix this ginger well let's take a look here is our plan of action number one they've got a lightly rake through all the dead areas get those microbial stirring we also want to be make sure that the oxygen is flowing and not getting choked out by matted grass number two we want to check and make sure with a soil probe or a screwdriver that we've got even saturation four to six inches into the soil before we start this process if we don't have enough in the soil we're going to burn now as for chemicals number one we're going to be using the essentials Plus now just like I've shown you guys before this is chock-full of L amino acids and I know sometimes I call them al aminos I'm I apologize now the vitamin B 2 and B 6 this is really important it's not really the phosphorus that causes the gross growth as much as it is the root growth as much as the vitamin b2 and the b6 so that's why it's really important to have now the kelp the humic acid ratios is going to help slough off the salt sediments off of the roots and help your beneficial bacteria 'z as such as your micro rise a hit now we're gonna give it a boost of micro raisa and I know this is rated for trees guys and shrubs but it's great for grass now on the back end in the same backpack I like to use demand CS it's got lambda sigh how through this microencapsulated for a quick fix for the bugs now if you're looking for something cheaper than demand CS you can pick up sayonara 9.1 if memory serves me right off of Amazon and it's also a great product for hitting sod webworms and cut worms that we're dealing with in this lawn it's really important to remember to replenish the nutrients that have been lost by the lack of microbial action so the micro riser pushing that in is really going to help but we're still gonna need some micronutrients and that's why I like the max back you don't necessarily need to buy max pack per se you can find a product that's got just much sulfur boron copper cobalt manganese molybdenum and zinc and another product these are your primary micronutrients that you want to focus on now on the back end we need to cause some quick growth because we want to make sure that we push those rhizomes and thicken up the grass as naturally as we possibly can but we also want to give it a little sugar to get out of its funk and so we get it to start growing again I like to use nitric King it's a 21-2 for again you do not have to use this product you just need to find something like nitric King which is 16 to 17 percent ammonium nitrate with a 4% nitrate nitrogen on the backend so that's the numbers I'm really looking at is getting that 16 percent ammonium nitrate down to cause the quick growth all right guys this is a tough one I'm glad we got through it together now that I'm giving you all my trade secrets don't forget to hit the subscribe button and the like button on your way out you guys have any questions or concerns hit me up in the comments a couple lists of the products that I use in the description till next time guys what's wrong with my lawn see it

Channel: Pest and Lawn Ginja

Views: 749,998

Keywords: pest and lawn ginja, what's wrong with my lawn, orange dead grass, yellow dead grass, patchy dead grass, spotted dead grass, overwatering, diy lawn care, how to repair lawn, brown dead grass, help me fix my lawn, best lawn, lawn care nut, my lawn is dead, my lawn is dead what do i do, turf insects, lawn insect control, diagnose my lawn, sprinkler coverage, broken sprinkler head, fertilizer burn, lack of water in my lawn

Id: 9edL-mTk45M

Length: 21min 14sec (1274 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 28 2018