Fix and Repair Bare Spots in Lawns

morning fixing bare spots in your lawn that's we're going to talk about today i'm going to get right to the point where we're going to cover i guess you could call it three or four different methods that you can fix bare spots or bare areas in your lawn i'll walk you through it show us a hold on one sec [Music] hey guys before i get started don't forget click that little red subscribe button it's on one of these sides get the bermuda lawn guide which is free and walks you through the entire year process of maintaining your lawn and problems and questions that you might have use it it's free don't forget also on the website while you're over there sign up for the email list it's not a marketing email list but if you want to uh be involved with our giveaways that's the with that's what we use as a random number generator um and we send out a newsletter twice a year with special information so sign up for that while you're there okay so let's talk about let's talk about bare spots in our lawn so i've got that problem on that we're working on across the street i'm going to go over there and i'm going to show you how we kind of work this and i'll show you some areas of my lawn if you've done any sand leveling or if you're doing leveling um you'll have this issue come up as well because you'll have some areas that are really full of sand and the bermuda's not going to want to go in there so understand the way that bermuda grows first of all bermuda roots are really deep your bermuda lawn roots can be an easy 20 to 48 inches deep bermuda roots are really really deep it's a lot different than a cool season lawn and the way that bermuda grows is it basically has runners so you have these runners now there's rhizomes and stolen some it's a it's under the ground it's a rhizome and then above the ground it's called the stone and so they sort of creep and if you have flower beds you'll understand how much of a pain in the butt this is bermuda's really evasive matter of fact it's it's um outlawed in some areas because it's so invasive so if you can encourage your bermuda to go into these areas that's one way to do it and we'll talk about that that's method number one so method number one if you have a bare area is let's get that area let's make it really attractive to bermuda and let's allow the bermuda that's around it to create runners and go into that area now i've done that thousands of times i've just made bear areas healthy made it attractive and the bermuda just boom wants to go right in so that's method one the other method that you can do or a combination of that is to make it attractive and then steal some of these little stolens steal some of the runners and transplant them into that area and then they'll start to grow up so that's kind of method number two is taking some of these runners and transplanting them in now you're going to have to keep them water i'm going to tell you that you need to keep those water number three which is kind of a last resort and i'm going to give you a caveat before we go here this is your warning you have to watch the seating videos that we've done explaining the difference between common bermuda and hybrid bermuda you don't go down to lowe's or home depot whatever you do and do not buy that bermuda seed don't go online and order bermuda seed without understanding the difference between the varieties of bermuda's because it'll look totally messed up if you have a real nice bermuda saw and a hybrid which is a really fine grass and then you go put common bermuda seed on it it's going to look weird it's going to look different and trust me i know a lot of you guys have that issue because you didn't understand that you went and bought cheap bermuda seed so i have some um princess 77 which i believe is actually no longer in existence it's been replaced by another seed which is expensive this these hybrid seeds i call them hybrid but they're really fine and they replicate the look of sod and they're really expensive it's not cheap you can't go buy a big bag of bermuda seed for 20 bucks when you buy a bag of bermuda seed for 20 bucks it's not a big bag it's usually a little bag like this for me good bermuda seed can easily be 15 to 35 dollars a pound for good specialty bermuda seed so the last resort is to go into an area and get a little bit of seed and put a little bit of seed down we'll probably do that across the sea across the street because we've got a big patch over there i want to work on so those are the basic three basic methods number one make the area attractive when we do that with either some type of like potting soil i'm actually going to use some of our dirt booster um and you're going to be shocked if you put dirt booster compost piles on your lawn it's going to be dark dark green i'm going to warn you because it's full of nutrients and organic matter but that's one way you can do it then the other way is is to do that add some natural stuff and then put in these runners and then the third method is of course to do a little bit of an overseed on it so that's what i'm going to walk you through today so let's go ahead okay so one of the things we can do is we can pull some of these runners you really want to try and get the grab runner with a little bit of root on it if you can but you can take these and if you'll bury them about half an inch deep and you'll keep them wet and watered some of them do take not all of them but some of them do take so the one thing you don't want to do is don't edge for a while so you can see we've done a nice clean edging so i have no runners so you'll want to go somewhere that has a lawn that's similar to yours so this is what we're going to pull we're going to find a runner and then we're going to sort of just try and reach back into that and get as much as we can and we're going to try and pull a little bit of root out of there if we can with it go to your neighbor's house that has sod like mine and look for these runners and then you can go in here sort of work down in there we go there's a section that has that nice little see that piece of root right there that's kind of what i'm wanting wanting a little bit of that root on so now what i can do is i can come over here now that i got a nice little root section here i can come over to this spot take down a little bit and put this guy in here and cover him up and do a few of those in here and now not just from the outside in but the inside out i'll have grass growing in here holy cow it's windy out here today so basically there's a couple ways you can do this all i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna sort of break up the soil just like this loosen it this is almost like a scarifier action [Music] really bend that shovel back and get it there you go so what we're doing is we're just loosening this whole area up that'll be step number one that'll get lots of drainage and allow the other things that we're putting in here to sort of get deep down and again oxygen water everything we want all right so now that we've got this opened up one thing that we could do if we wanted to and just take these little stones and actually just go in here and push these in just like that get them in deep same thing get these things push these down inside here what i'm going to do is i'm going to put down some pgf balance 10 10 10 and i have found that the balance really encourages this growth this run or shoot growth down not only on that area but also around it to help encourage it so the next thing we're going to do is i'm going to put my dirt booster compost on top and if you had potting soil you could put potting soil on it as well too again we're just adding clean organic making it attractive um so we'll just i'll just sprinkle some of that on um what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to take a little bit of seed and put some seed on this in a minute i'm going to take you out back on the backyard and show you where we use this princess or whatever you want to use it just takes a little bit not much so i don't necessarily want to pull these out so you can see these are active these are active runners so i want to keep them in here and they will just start to fill up this whole area in here if you do see like we just did if you have irrigation you can water water water the seed will come up in about 10 days looks pretty good huh man that lawn looks great considering we just had it sand leveled just a couple of weeks ago but ryan just came out here and cut this and man we're cutting it just about half an inch and it just looks fabulous out here so let's talk real quick about special circumstances number one let's talk about shade i always joke that there's only one type of bermuda that will grow in shade and it's called chainsaw bermuda google it you take a chainsaw and cut down the trees that are blocking the sunlight and your bermuda will grow that's the joke people are googling chainsaw bermuda but bermuda has to have minimum six if not more it really it needs a full eight hours of sun a full eight hours of sun to grow well okay so let me give you an example look at all this shade over here and it's only four o'clock in the afternoon so this whole area is hit by these trees over here and what happens is in the winter time the sun is comes in at this angle i'll show you that comes in at this angle and then as the summer comes the earth rotates and it gets a little bit higher so especially in the spring this area just doesn't start off well at all it almost looks bare as the time progresses it goes on it gets better but what i did the other day we did an overseed with annual rye and that annual rye had a bunch of weed seeds in it like quackgrass and johnson i mean it's just horrible so i've been out here treating that which means that it's impacting my bermuda a little bit so i decided i had some princess um 77 left over from a year and a half ago let's put it out here it's gonna replicate pretty much my sod over here so let's put some out and see if we can get it to grow i don't know and the reason being is we put some pre-emergent down here about a month and a half ago i don't know that it's gonna take um i don't know if the seed's good but instead of throwing the seed out i figured let's go ahead and do it here so that's what i'm gonna do i'll put it up just for the hell of it just to show you how i reseeded this area okay so i want to be really careful here you do not go down to lowe's or home depot or go online and just order bermuda seed you have to buy a specialty seed to replicate salt there's a big difference and i explained that go look at my other videos about overseeding i explain the difference explain i explain the difference between common bermuda grass and hybrid bermuda grass in replicas this is princess 77 which i believe has been replaced by i forget the name of it but i have had this bag for over a year now and i got to use it so this overseeding project really hurt our bermuda over here um the other issue i've got is i don't remember the last time we put down pre-emergent to be honest um so i'm just gonna i said today i said what the heck i'm gonna take what i've got instead of you know throwing this away or something i'm gonna take this bag of princess which costs a lot of money because this is um two pounds and i'm guessing this stuff was probably like 25 30 a pound and the only the only way to properly put out bermuda seed because it's so tiny it looks like grains of salt is to use a hand spreader that you can really control that's the only way you do not mix bermuda seed with sand i know a lot of people say that don't do that just take the seed put it in a hand spreader these things are cheap you can buy them and this one i've had this one for like three years now four years five years now it's still working and i'm just gonna put it down and i'm just gonna throw it out i don't expect it to take but rather than throw it away we'll see what happens so you can see you can probably see just how fine this is it is super super fine tiny tiny tiny seeds all right so dude fat guys shouldn't break so a key element here is seeds should be planted two to three times the depth of their height so maybe eighth of an inch that's it i'll finish freaking this have a heart attack and get the true cut runner over water three times a day three times a day there are just some areas of my lawn right now that just look fantastic just gorgeous so don't forget we've done the sand leveling and i'll give you an example this area over here was real two to three inches of sand you can see we've mixed in organic matter over here but the question is is this going to take so is this seeding going to take over here i don't know i really don't the fact that we had pre-immersion put down over here the fact that i've been treating these weeds over here like old seed i got a bunch of negative factors but the problem with bermuda seed is it generally takes 7 to 11 days to germinate it's pretty slow to germinate so you got to get out here unfortunately i got to get out here and i got a ward of this stuff the green the same way when we oversee this green back over here we have to do the same thing we have to come out here and we have to constantly wet this and keep it wet and keep it wet all i do is just take you know a little shutoff valve here and i have real good pressure back here and one little trick i've learned is that um right at sunset if you'll come out here and if you'll water this right at sunset early evening that seed will stay wet all night long and it's you get a much better chance of germination doing that so anyways the rest of the lawn looks pretty darn good to be honest so guys treating your spots hope this helps talk to you later click subscribe

Channel: How To with Doc

Views: 93,103

Keywords: bare spots lawn, fix bare spots in lawn, fix bare spots in bermuda lawn, fix bare spots in grass, how to fix bare spots in bermudagrass, dirt patches in, dirt patches in lawn, dirt patches in grass, dirt patches in my lawn, fix weak spots lawn, make Bermuda spread, thicken up bermuda grass, lawn care, lawn care tips, lawn tips, repair dead spots in lawn, seeding bare spots, seeding lawn, how to fix bare spots in lawn

Id: Q5vJyKdpq9w

Length: 18min 9sec (1089 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021