DON’T make these 7 STUPID Mistakes when OVERSEEDING your LAWN

overseeding your lawn can make it look incredible the only issue is if you're not fully prepared for your seeding project you might run into a few setbacks and in that case you just kind of have to hope for the best or wait until next year to finish your seating process so in this video i'm going to show you seven common mistakes that most beginners make when seating their lawn and what you can do to avoid [Applause] [Applause] all right so let's jump right in the first mistake that we see people doing is not cutting their grass short enough this is important because depending what grass seeds you choose whether it's a fescue or rye grass it could take anywhere from three days to a few weeks to germinate so also the goal here for mowing shore is that it's gonna shock our existing lawn and it's really gonna slow that growth down think of it as like a natural plant growth regulator so my rule of thumb is before overseeding i like to cut the lawn usually to about half the height it is maybe a little bit lower i know you're probably used to following the one-third rule but honestly don't worry about it just for this special situation we're gonna make an exception and your lawn might look a little yellowed afterwards and stressed out but don't worry about it because as soon as we get that seed down it's going to be completely transformed in just a few weeks [Music] so we're here with my friend andy aka the lawn father he's a newer youtube on the scene right now if you guys want to go check out his channel he's got an awesome seating project coming up and we want to talk to you guys about the importance of roughing up your soil andy i know that since you have a project coming up what do you like to do do you like the air raid or detach or what's your preferred method i like to do both so this year i'm going to dethatch my entire lawn i'm going to do it two times i'm going to go north and south east and west to make sure i get all that debris out of there and then on top of that i'm going to i'm going to core aerate everything and what that's going to do just like you said is that's going to give me really good seed to soil contact the cores that are sitting on top the seed is going to get the plant onto that as well as down into the holes those cores leave behind [Music] so now that we're done detaching our lawn we're gonna grab our mower we're gonna put it on the bagging setting and we're gonna suck all that dead material [Music] so another common thing we see people doing is tilling their soil before they seed and you don't need to do that unless you're trying to do like major corrections to your soils ph so tilling could cause you a couple troubles in the future number one it's going to disrupt how the water gets down into the ground any time that you till it kind of reorganizes the way that the soil settles so it's going to re-cause compaction and water will actually sit on top of the soil rather than get absorbed fully not to mention it'll also make your lawn bumpy you know on this channel we're always talking about leveling our lawns and by tilling our soil that's just gonna do the complete opposite and over time as it begins to settle you're just going to have a whole bunch of lumps in your lawn so instead i like to use one of these if you have a smaller lawn like mine this is a manual aerator i never recommend you get those hollow time manual aerators because all they'll do is end up clogging on you and it's going to cause you more headaches this is a solid tine aerator i like to put it into the ground and then wiggle it back and forth this won't relieve compaction in your lawn but it will get some air and water down deep into the root system not to mention if you were to overseed on top of it it'll increase your chances of having seed to soil contact all right so another thing we see people doing is not using the right kind of fertilizer a lot of people will throw down regular old starter fertilizer when they oversee their lawn but what i like to use is this stuff right here it's called tsp which stands for triple super phosphate and this is a pure phosphorus fertilizer and what's good about this it doesn't have any nitrogen in it and nitrogen is what encourages top growth in the lawn which we don't really want to apply that because we're doing the overseed and we don't want to encourage the existing grass to compete with our new baby grass now if you're seeding a lawn from bare dirt or from scratch i like to use this fertilizer here a lot of people know that i'm a big fan of the scott starter fertilizer plus wheat preventer the difference between this and that not only does this have a bunch of phosphorus in it but it has a little bit of nitrogen in it as well and it also contains the only herbicide tenacity which you're allowed to use that seeding to prevent wheats actually i like this stuff better than using tenacity because for some reason it ends up working better than using actual tenacity so when it comes to tsp this stuff has a lot of phosphorus in there and i like to apply one pound of product per thousand square feet which equals out to just under a half a pound of phosphorus per thousand square feet another thing that we see people doing is not using the right kind of spreader when spreading their seed so there's two kinds of spreaders there's broadcast spreaders and there's drop spreaders and they both have their place i want to show you this tool right here which is going to be important for getting precise drops of your seed this is a drop spreader i bought it super cheap like 5-10 bucks on facebook marketplace it's pretty old i'm not gonna lie but it gets the job done so i recommend you guys pick up one of these the difference between this and the scott's edge guards that most of you guys probably have from like home depot is that when you put the seat in there it drops it down right below so you get a precise drop of where your seat is so for example if you're going over here around this mulch bed you could use the drop spreader to walk around it and you don't have to worry about throwing any of that seed into your mulch beds which is really going to give you a really good control and you don't have to worry about a whole bunch of grass growing places that you don't want it to grow all right this next mistake might be a little controversial but the way that i look at it is if we're putting all this time and effort into seating our lawn we need to do every single step to ensure that we have good germination and that's rolling your seed in now it is possible to throw seed on top of soil and it'll still germinate but that's only in perfect conditions like if there's no wind uh there's no rain things like that but in this case we're gonna roll it in if you don't have a lawn roller i recommend you go rent one i know at my local home depot it's only about eight bucks me personally i'm going to use my reel mower which has a rolling drum on the back so we can get that seed down into the ground we want to do that because having the seed directly into the soil is going to increase our seed to soil contact which is essentially how the seeds are going to sprout if you just loosely put the seed onto the soil eventually it'll germinate but it's going to take extra time to work its way down into the soil and between then and now you could have a rainstorm or you can have a lot of high winds and it could blow your seed away all right so the last and final thing that we see people doing is giving up on their watering halfway through their project if you're going to go through all this work and water for weeks and weeks you don't want to just stop last minute and then risk you know the seeds not germinating or even worse your new grass die my preferred choice to water my new seed is this right here this is the hunter mp steak which is the first diy professional above ground irrigation system i made a video about it a few weeks ago i'll link it up here if you guys want to see it but with this you connect it to a bluetooth controller and you could schedule times anytime you want want your watering so you just kind of set it and forget about it if you're anything like me you kind of don't like to come out here and hand water your lawn anytime so this really streamlines the process and takes all the guess work out of it so we just went over a bunch of common mistakes that people make when seating their lawn but if you're looking for a more detailed step-by-step process john perry just released the new video i'll link it up here if you guys want to check it out speaking of other creators i want to give a shout out to all the lawn care youtubers that are in our facebook group you guys have been doing an awesome job we've been working non-stop together to bring you guys more engaging content and more valuable content so if any of you guys are watching thank you so much for everything you bring to the community and any of the viewers that are watching thank you so much for watching all of us week after week we really appreciate it [Music]

Channel: Princess Cut Lawn Care

Views: 88,091

Rating: 4.8631792 out of 5

Keywords: Grass seed, Overseeding, Lawn Aerator, Grass seeding a lawn, When to seed your lawn, How to patch grass with seed, Overseeding in fall, Preparing soil for grass seed, How to put grass seed down, Overseeding lawn, How to plant grass seed, how to patch grass with seed, When to plant grass seed, Watering new grass seed, Overseeding grass, Peat moss grass seed, over seeding, aeration, Aeration and overseeding, Lawn, GCI turf, Kentucky bluegrass, princess cut lawn care

Id: l610ZNN0ZkI

Length: 8min 50sec (530 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021