Fall Lawn Care | How To Grow Grass From Seed & Overseed In Fall

seating and over seating lawn is a fantastic value meaning it's not very expensive that's why you should want to know about it we're going to teach you all about it in this video [Music] this is chip valentino he's here assisting us on a large pro residential project we've been working on for a few weeks and i'm john valentino i'm president of john and bob's corporation i'm a landscape architect a landscape contractor and a general engineering contractor we got a lot of feedback when we did our spring overseeding video this is a very similar concept but in the fall and fall is every bit as good maybe a little better than the spring and what's really neat about fall is a lot of you have problems on your lawn because of the summer you just endured and this is a quick easy time to completely change what your lawn looks like by doing a fall over seeding as an example let's talk some real numbers if you had a sixty five hundred square foot lawn you'd spend about three thousand dollars or actually three thousand dollars would be our cost so a homeowner would spend more like four thousand dollars on sod and the amendments that you need to plant the sod and you could do the same thing with seed buying the seed and the john and bob's products that you need for about four hundred dollars a dramatic difference there's a huge savings in material so as a homeowner the seeded route is excellent because it's the least expensive it also is not more difficult in the short term it's just that as a process it's more difficult laying sod applying seed and top dressing mulch and some other products and they're about equal ones one's not easier than the other but what is more difficult in the seated is you have to manage that germination process which we'll talk about in this video how best to accomplish that but you know the seed doesn't just pop up out of the ground you got to do everything properly to get it to pop up out of the ground and then usually you'll have to reseed you'll have to mow it a few times and you'll have to feed it a few times and so there's more involved to produce a complete thorough beautiful lawn with seed but way less expensive and the real key to saving that money is to pick the right time of the year to plant the seeds so if you're doing a warm season grass in the western part of the united states you can't seed before april 1 and you can't seed after september 1 for warm season grass for cool season grass it's pretty much the opposite if you seed between probably may and september 1 it doesn't germinate good it just cool season grasses seed don't germinate good if the highs are too high so you would want to do the seeding from about september 1 through april 1 but then there's a period of time in the middle of the winter where they don't germinate well either because we don't have enough sun we don't have enough warmth and so those periods in december january probably even parts of february aren't good for seeding and that goes for overseeding which is a part of this video also that's an excellent way to refresh lawns and make them look brand new every year i like the idea of seeding lawns in the fall and or the spring we did a video for you how to overseed your lawn in the spring and you would do it very similarly in the fall and so now we're coming upon fall that's an excellent time to essentially give yourself a brand new looking lawn we'll talk about the best way to do that so the preparation for seed and sod especially for new lawns is very similar actually identical we still want to get a real good exchange of air and water in that soil so we can rip it or till it somehow we want to break up compacted hard soil because that is going to be a problem for your lawn roots so that's different than what we talked about in ongoing vegetable gardening where we don't want to be tilling all the time because that damages all these networks of mycorrhizae and other types of beneficial bacteria and fungi and protozoa that develop life in the soil we don't want to damage that but in this case when you're planting a new lawn usually there's not much life there not much has been done previously so we go in there on a one time basis and we work the soil very thoroughly and get down as deeply as we can there's a slight difference if you're doing your over seeding which this is an excellent time to overseed we got a lot of emails and concerns this past summer with all kinds of fungal activity and turf we coached a lot of people in law along on how to limit that fungal activity for next year which is to infuse your soil with life and it's that beneficial fungi that's way stronger than the fungi that's that caused your fungal problem so in that case you're not going to go in and till we just want to limit the growth on the ground because we want to apply that seed more to soil than to dead grass so we either rake it or mow it real low or somehow prepare this area where we're going to apply seeds so those are the two methods of preparation for seeding a lawn [Music] one mistake i see frequently when people either over seed or seed for the first time and they're trying to produce this beautiful lawn from seed is under application of seed amount so seed rates that are too low especially with cool season grass you want to be very generous in the amount of seed you use i'd say 10 to 12 pounds per thousand square feet so a bolero plus lawn you'll need at least 10 to 12 pounds per thousand to reproduce something that looks like this sod that i'm standing next to warm season grass you're at a lot lower rates two to four pounds per thousand so there's a big difference when you over seed also be very generous in the seed and i'd say the same 10 to 12 pounds per thousand whether you use perennial rye or whatever you like to over seed we're going to use this overseeding to refresh your lawn any information you need about your lawn and your fall issues mostly related to summer and i know there's a lot of them out there tell us what kind of problems you've been having and we'll help you solve them [Music] i get a lot of questions about the order of things how you apply them if you're going to see the lawn i always want our products to be put on over the top of the lawn some people might want to spray penetrate liquid bio tiller first but i really like putting all penetrate liquid bio tiller over the top of seed so in the case of over seeding i would get that area ready as we already covered so that your seed is going to have good contact with the soil and then i would use our dry products right over the top of the seed all of those dry products help that seed germinate faster and help you have a higher rate of successful germination then if you're going to try to do your over seeding without a top dressing that's that 8 inch thick layer of some type of composted material or wood-based humus or something like that if you're going to do it without that and you're just going to rely on your irrigation system to keep the seed moist then i would spray the penetrate right over the top of our blend and the seed and and penetrate liquid biotiller also helps with seed rate germination speed and amount of seeds that germinate and so then you would spray it and start your watering process if you're going to put a top dressing over it then i would put the top dressing right over the top we'll show you right here how a top dressing is applied you can get one of these rollers or you can throw it on with a shovel and then i would spray the penetrate liquid bio tiller right over the top of that about eight inch thick layer of composted wood-based material that's going to help keep our seed moist help create a little heat if you're doing it late into the season and it really does help with makes germination a little easier to be successful so watering the seed is critical and it's important to understand exactly what you're trying to accomplish you not you don't want to just water it a lot you want to keep the seed moist when the sun is out because it's that combination of heat warmth and moisture that makes that seed pop up out of the soil and grow really successfully so we want to come up with some kind of strategy that allows us to water frequently but not very much we're not you know normally you want to water a lawn deeply but you don't want to water lawn seed deeply you want a water lawn seed very shallow and just keep that seed moist so we time our watering around sun exposure so if the sun comes up at eight usually there's still a little bit of dew in the ground so i would wait till nine or ten i water it the first time then then i water again around noon and i water it again around 1 30 or 2 water again around 3 or 4. i'm trying to keep that seed moist as long as the sun's shining on it and that will make really great germination speed and germination rate in terms of the number of seeds that germinate last week's plant was raphaeleppus indica miner so the cultivar is minor m-i-n-o-r and that's the one that gives a white flower really pretty basic plant but it's fairly unique for the ref to have a white flower there's only a couple that have that so we're going to make it a little harder this week and it's a really interesting plant that has a lot of uses and we've been using it a lot see if you can figure out what it is it is a special cultivar of a fairly common genus and species and that special cultivar makes the size smaller that's my hint of the week and if you can tell us what it is the first five correct respondents will get a bag of blend click the link in the comments in order to submit your answer we have a prior video on fall winter lawn fertilization check it out it applies to this issue of uh improving and overseeding your lawn in the fall and we've got a lot of good tips on there to have it looking great right through the winter

Channel: John & Bob's Smart Soil Solutions

Views: 254,393

Keywords: soil, garden, gardening, garden soil, organic, garden tips, compost, soil food web, johnandbobs, soil life, soil based gardening, lawn care, sod, lawn, grass seed, lawn care tips, tall fescue, blend, penetrate, fresno, california, growing grass, overseeding lawn, fall lawn, overseeding, lawn renovation, how to overseed a lawn, fall lawn fertilizer, fall lawn seeding, overseeding lawn in the fall, overseed grass, overseeding an existing lawn, how to plant grass seed, grass seeding a lawn

Id: 4l-sNMFDJnE

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021