Easy Seeding with a Sun Joe Scarifier (aka dethatcher)

[Music] i recently moved into a house that has lawn maintenance done by an hoa the house is only two years old and this lawn started as sod installed by the builder i discovered that many of my neighbors including the ones on both sides pay a private landscaper for supplemental treatments so many of the lawns look awesome my lawn however was a bit neglected this year so they were dominating me big time when i moved in now that it's fall i'm gonna overseed and fertilize to have the best lawn in the neighborhood next year but first i wanted to do a baseline soil test to know what i was dealing with [Music] really sandy soil and really hard and compacted soil so now i'm going to mix it up so it's nice and random get rid of the clumps any uh any roots or anything like that that i see i'll take out too but for the most part it's all good all right so all this comes with is a little test kit that you put in the soil and a scoop that tells you exactly how much soil to get it really is easy you open this file up and you don't spill out the liquid the liquid is important and so is that pill that's in there and what that pill is it's actually going to start testing the soil while it's in the mail and then they actually i guess all the nutrients get absorbed by that pill and that's what they actually analyze so it's really pretty cool so i'm gonna take a nice random take out anything organic any kind of roots and things like that and this doesn't have to be exact i mean it's just going to give you a good idea of where the soil is to begin with and that's all that's needed now there's a code number on here that's what i'll use to get my results they also give you a sheet here that has the same number on it so that's how i can remember to go and register it and take care of it let me put my return address on here and i'll mail that off if you need shade on your deck or patio this summer check out toya grid pergola kits you source the lumber locally and can assemble this modular system in as little as 30 minutes check the video description for links to videos and more information about toya grid here's the report i got from the yard mastery soil test it showed that my ph was a little acidic which is typical for new jersey and that i'm low on a few nutrients i'm not going to correct them all right now but it gives me direction for my next application and for next year now if you just throw seed on the ground and water it a percentage of the seed will germinate and thrive you can increase that germination rate by increasing the seed to soil contact the best most professional results are achieved using an aerator and a slit seeder now you can rent these machines and do it yourself or you can pay a lawn company to do it for you like i did in 2016. i seated again in 2019 but i used a simpler diy approach to prep the lawn i used a thatch rake to remove dead spots by hand and then i aerated the whole lawn with a spike aerator attachment on my tractor i chose to seed with turf type tall fescue from gci turf academy and use x-start fertilizer from carbon earth's and i got awesome results the following spring i had the best lawn i've ever had just look at the thickness of this turf so i figured this year i'd use the same products as last year and hopefully i'd get the same results i like gci seed because it's high quality it has no other crop seeds or weed seeds [Music] i like extart fertilizer because it's high in phosphate and has some micronutrients and biochar which improves the soil magikal helps raise the ph like lime but this variety also has other soil conditioners too for preparation this year i tried something slightly easier because i have a much smaller lawn four thousand square feet versus fourteen thousand square feet in my old house i also don't have my tractor and aerator anymore i saw a lot of youtubers using this sun joe scarifier so i decided to buy one and try it myself it's a smaller electric version of a power rake that i've rented in the past it has rotating blades underneath it that pull up dead grass much faster than the thatchrick that i used last year it also thins the lawn so more of my seed will come in contact with the soil [Music] i was impressed by how much material it removed from the lawn in just one pass well it certainly does the job the bagger was pretty much useless i took it off and just raked up the debris in the front yard but i got to use a leaf blower in the back i'm fortunate to back up to woods in my backyard now some of the areas you can see definitely there's a lot more exposure to dirt and this is really sandy soil where i am so this i mean has very little here so i got to do some work on this soil amendments things like that will really thicken it up plus the uh the seed i'm gonna put down in the fertilizer it's gonna do great after the hoa mode lawn a few days later i was ready to go i applied the seed at around five pounds per thousand square feet using a small scot spreader [Music] all right the life of a youtuber i had a little mishap here because i left the spreader to go turn off the damn camera and it fell over i put some of it back in the hopper and the rest i'm just gonna spread by hand back here where you can clearly see that's the line where the sod stopped so i'm just spreading it back here by [Music] hand [Music] i put extra down by hand on the really dead spots and then i used a leaf rake to mix them into the soil [Music] after seeding i put down the extart fertilizer and the magical and then i slightly rake the whole lawn to get everything down into the soil as best as possible after that i watered the lawn really good and then i was fortunate to have three days of rain the following week six days later my babies were born and the bare spots were already starting to fill in so fingers crossed this application will turn out just as good as i got last year and i'll be proud as can be with my nice green lawn please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts i'll do a follow-up in the spring to show how well this method worked out for me thanks for watching home be sure to subscribe and watch our new series the living flip and that has inch and a quarter

Channel: HandyDadTV

Views: 117,510

Keywords: gci turf, gci turf academy, seeding a lawn, lawn care nut overseeding, lawn overseeding, reseeding lawn, tall fescue grass seed, gci seed, handy dad tv, handydad.tv, handydadtv, lawn care, lawn care nut, grass seed, diy lawn care, the lawn care nut, tall fescue, lawn fertilizer, turf type tall fescue, gci turf type tall fescue, xstart fertilizer, xstart carbon earth, carbon earth, x-start, sun joe scarifier, sun joe dethatcher, power rake, dethatcher

Id: 7MV2mbDveWc

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2020