Fixing an Ugly Lawn - 2 Week Cure

have you ever cut a lawn like that like a golf course cut never no so this is a learning experience so you've got uh john starting up sort of starting his own lawn care business you got about 15 customers or so and this is a real good learning experience work with a pain in the ass like me someone who's real detail oriented look at this type of lawn and go dude this is insane this is this is insane and we're out here we're edging all my little rules where we don't when we blow the grass we don't blow the crap back on the grass we blow it down if we have to pick it up all my little crazy rules this is the this is that little yard care insanity line that you cross at some point in your life when you get old so anyways it's a good experience for him the front yard's looking really good came back quick yeah it came back really scalping it and it's quick yeah so ryan's saying it was a week and a half after our scalp again i put down pgf balance put down pgf complete and then about seven days later i hit it with green shocker and dirt booster and i'm gonna hit it again with green green shocker and dirt booster but that just looks fabulous the backyard different story that's just insane isn't it it's very great i'm back to i'm back to being happy now is it perfect no there's a couple little brown spots on here but hey it's tough being anal good morning guys so i've been promising this video for a long time and it's the rehabilitation of a lawn that just looks horrible look at all these browns see all these bare spots and you guys know that my lawn is always perfect but we abandoned this lawn for two months we shut off all treatments we shut off all water and today what i'm going to do is we're going to finally show you the recovery the front is recovering great the back not so much so if you have some of these problems hold on i'll go over real quick so what i'm going to do i'm going to jump right to how you fix your lawn and then what i'll do is i'll show you some of the footage of us actually out here cutting john is a new guy that's working for me he's actually working out at the farm and he has his own little lawn care business that he's starting up and so i'm bringing him over here to help because guess who's going to law school ryan's going to law school soon so i'm losing my my assistant out here so i figured since john's already out there working out at the farm and he has his lawn care business and he said man i'd love to come over and learn so i brought him over here we're learning first we cover so much of this in the lawn guides especially when it comes to grubs when it comes to fixing your lawn fixing your ugly lawn so go to freelawncareguy.com if you have a bermuda grass there's always your grass or any cool season grass the guys cover almost every subject it's in there and there's no app there's no sign up there's no email use them next any product that i'm talking about or that i'm using in the description below there's one link it'll all be on that page including the lawn care guides so after you're done watching the video go to the link and everything will be on that page okay so before i begin i want to really strongly emphasize if you have a lawn that has these big brown patches or even if it's just bare spots i really want you to check for grubs that could be the number one reason when i start to see these brown patches like how i've got out here my immediate attention is grubs because here's what happens you have your grass and grubs go in and eat the roots well when the roots are cut off guess what happens the lawn up above it dies so when you have these big brown patches there's a very very good chance you have grubs and you need to treat and treat heavy i mean treat it hard i mean put it out and even possibly do two different separate treatments of different products i don't care kill the grubs if you've got them you can dig up a patch i show you in the lawn guides i show you how to fold back the lawn and look for grubs and test form typically when we see the little spots all over that's usually more of a fungus when you see little brown spots all over the place that's typically more of a fungus like a dollar spot or something like that but when you get these larger patches that are that are sort of in together that's usually grubbed so be careful of that also i just did a video about grubs and army worms this time of year if your lawn's starting to look weak in areas check for army worms so watch that video but on this recovery project there's something that you have to understand and regardless of the products that um you're gonna put down or what i recommend you gotta have water and that's one of the reasons why this lawn shut down is because we left for over two months and we shut the irrigation system off we just shut it off and we had a drought we had extreme temperatures and guess what happens your lawn basically goes into a period of almost dormancy it pulls back and shuts down and says no way dude i am not putting energy into growth and so that's where you can get a lot of these brown patches so when i go look at areas of my lawn that are like high up on a hill or they're naturally dry areas they're dead and brown when i go to the deep areas where the water sort of accumulates and pools they're a lot greener so water is a huge factor in this and once you start putting your products down you have got to commit to water water water and it can be expensive so i'm just telling you don't complain about the price of products your water is going to be expensive you've got to have irrigation you can't rely on mother nature if you want to recover a lawn you've got to get water on it next what we really want to do is we really want to push this lawn hard look warm season lawns especially love the heat zoysia and bermuda loves the heat as long as there's water you can put down fertilizer you can really push it and that's what we're doing with the front you're going to see that recovery on the front today we scalped it down to almost bare to bare dirt and it looked horrible when we came home and right now i'm really happy with it it looks really really nice now the backyard's a different story this backyard has a ton of just bare areas that i could probably go ahead and push it and push it but it would probably take a good three four five weeks to get this lawn to recover and so what we may do next week i may come back out here and do a heavy core aeration do a scarify and actually put out something like a yukon a real high-end hybrid bermuda seed now i've told you in the lawn guides i cover this if you have a bermuda lawn you don't go to home depot or lowe's and buy seed you have to buy a high-end hybrid replicated seed and that's what i want to do you don't want to put down common bermuda and the big box stores they do not sell that stuff they sell common bermuda so you go to the lawn guides and learn about that but basically all we're gonna do is we're gonna hit it with water we're gonna push it we're gonna put down pgf balance we're gonna put down pgf complete yes two on top of each other because look they're mild fertilizers pgf balance is a 10 10 10 all fast release it's only 10 nitrogen so i can put it out and then i can come back with a little bit slower release pgf complete which is a 1648 percent nitrogen it's not that strong come right on top of it so i'm not out here dumping a thirty zero five on my lawn i'm actually putting out two coats of light mild fertilizer then what i'm doing is i'm coming back and i'm going to hit it with green chalker and dirt booster every single week until this lawn gets to the point that i like it and then i'll sort of stop maybe put out some pgf slow release just leave it alone but the backyard there's definitely a chance that i may throw some seed down here so that's what i'm doing that's what you can do you really have if you have bare spots on your lawn if you have weak areas if you have these crazy spots you really got to push that lawn and you got to do it during the heat of the the summer or at least the end of summer when temperatures are 90s and 80s you can't do this in cool weather you can't do this you know when it's coming off winter and you really can't do it in the late fall when temperatures are falling so now is the time to start this process where you can really push that lawn hit it with water hit it with nutrients let me go ahead and i'll just show you what we did today on as far as the cutting goes anyways the first thing i'm going to do today and i recommend this if you come out and want to get a a real mowing done early reel mowers don't like a lot of water you can see the lawn the lawn looks pretty darn good right now uh so i'm taking my leveling rake and i'm just going across and all i'm doing is knocking this dew off so it dries a little bit faster so after looking at this yard and treating this yard let me tell you what i think happened and some of the causes and some of the cures number one this is primary and this is bermuda shutdown when bermuda gets stressed drought heat just like any other grass bermuda will just shut down it sort of goes into a summer dormancy shuts off stops the growth it goes and uh that's really what happened that was number one number two a little bit of grub damage i think we have some grubs because the armadillos i showed you the other day they're armadillo holes and they're digging up great i didn't have a massive grub problem but i had some uh and i have treated it with a double kill so i've done that i don't think fungus is an issue because it's been so dry that's not the issue let me show you the back maybe before that let me walk over and show you barbs now she has had a lawn service so you can see her little flag she has a treatment company coming out but i want you to see something she's been letting her lawn get long and i want you to look at all these holes see all these holes in it see how it's not tight look at them there's just millions of these holes and you know what that probably is that probably is a mixture of some fungus and some grub damage like this over here see that see how we've got this green and then we got these big patches of brown i guarantee you she's got a ton of grub so i think i'm going to treat her lawn for her for growth lawn care companies that come out and spray typically do not treat for grubs this time of year they're not gonna do it so i'm gonna order some double kill for her and i'm gonna treat her okay so let me walk out back and let me show you the backyard the backyard i think was hit the worst and most severe and probably because we put a lot more treatments on the front than we did on the back so there was a residual effect of all the carbon that we had put on the lawn it it really helped i really think back here that we didn't haven't done this heavy and let me show you some of these bad spots okay so if i come back over here you're gonna say wow that lawn doesn't look too bad doc but let's zoom in look at this area over here see this see how it's almost all brown there's no grass there see all these bare spots over here now this is more there may be a little bit of grub damage here but this is more of what i call bermuda shut down where the the warm season grass has been neglected no water no treatments no anything and it just has shut down so but if you look closely we have put out fertilizer we started watering and look what happens so see this i've got little brown little green sprouts coming out of this brown now so it's not dead so it's not like these areas are dead they just shut down they were like i'm protecting myself i'm shutting down i'm not growing at all and i've got them all over here jack walker she has to walk down the path she doesn't walk down grass she's very prestigious so i've had the easy go up in storage for about a year now i was going to take this to the beach but let me tell you what i'm going to do with it uh out at the farm we have tall fescue and a little bit of kentucky blue that's going out to the farm and i'm going to start to cut that backyard with with this right here so uh i've been out just playing with it making sure everything works right and she's good to go so when i first we need to cut that fescue out there we'll cut it with the easy here we're doing a real mowing session and it's a little bit confusing there's a lot going on when you're running a reel mower not only do you have to engage the handle you have to worry about the wheel then you come to the end so there's a lot to learn so ryan i've been teaching him out back on the sort of practice ryan's going to do the front and he's going to watch him but then we're going to have him go out back and just sort of play with it more so things that throws a lot of people when they're doing this is you have the engage handle then you have the wheel handle and then you get to the end you're like oh crap i got to stop this thing so it becomes second nature to me and to ryan we're just so used to it but for someone like john who's he's like we got to send him out back so we can practice with this and get used to the feeling of that so now what i have ryan doing is i told ryan i said talk to him about the intricacies of cutting this lawn where what we do is we actually go around the bricks and then come around the bricks and we make two lanes so that we can turn around in here but this is not looking bad considering where we were last month on this one that is not too shabby i did do the edging before uh before anything else but i'm pretty happy with that [Music] man it's pretty pretty good right there that is a great recovery from a lawn that was looking like crap oh what a month ago very good i'm not going to complain about that recovery right there so everything's cut we went out back we were doing some weed eating we were doing a bunch of different stuff out back but man i'm just so happy that this is recovered it looks really really good so the next thing i'm going to do is let me show you what i'm going to do next i've got it cut and we have a chance this week of thunderstorms coming by in the evenings we've been having some real nice thunderstorms not super heavy so in a few minutes i'll be putting out green shocker which is all fast release this is the superfine 712 instant release fertilizer and then dirt booster and dirt booster of course is the organic and has humid char organic matter good microbes and good mycorrhizal fungi so i'll be putting both of these out and i'll be doing these two probably every week for the next three or four weeks that's all i'm doing now i did get in today i did get in some yukon bermuda grass from outside pride and i will probably do a very light overseeding on the back with some of this um next week hit subscribe that little red button and because we're gonna do a core aeration a scarifying and put down some seed so anyways if you've got a weak lawn you've got brown patches understand about grubs and understand that you if you're going to push your lawn real heavy you've got to do that in the warm season you got to do it while that heat's here hello birdie anyways hope that's helped talk to you later [Music]

Channel: How To with Doc

Views: 37,668

Keywords: ugly lawn, ugly lawn doc, ugly lawn makeover, ugly bermuda lawn, fix ugly lawn in summer, fixing ugly lawn, bare spots in lawn, grub damage in lawn, lawn care, how to fix an ugly lawn, fix ugly lawn, reviving lawn, fix an ugly lawn, how to fix ugly lawn

Id: K1iJGZSxqdw

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022