How To Dethatch and Overseed a Lawn - Greenworks Dethatcher

[Music] hello everyone thank you for joining me for this video it's like the worst time in the day right now to be filming it's super sunny but it is a super nice day today and that's going to give me an opportunity today to talk about some dethatching that I'm going to be doing in the backyard I wanted to take you long for that and kind of show you the process so let's go first off let's talk a little bit about what thatch is so that she's gonna be a buildup of organic matter on the soil and you actually won a little bit of this to be there if we want maybe a quarter to an half an inch or so to be there just to protect the soil make sure it doesn't get a super amount of heat directly on the soil when you're walking on the grass and all that things it kind of protects a little bit down there on the soil as well so we want a little bit of it to be there but then when we get a build up of too much of this it's going to do a few things it's going to inhibit a lot of our air and our water and fertilizer and all that to get down into the soil and into the root zone right there where we need it to be that's gonna kind of make the grass look a little bit patchy it's just not gonna look as good as it should look so from about an eye level view my grass looks pretty good actually and you don't notice too much of that thatch down in there then when you take a little bit of a closer look you'll see that things are kind of building up a little bit more than I would like them to be it's creating a problem there because it's just too thick so the grass looks kind of patchy when you really take a close up look of it and so today we're going to be ripping out all that dead thatch and then I'm also going to be putting down a little bit of seed and then we'll start to water it and then eventually I'll be adding a little bit of starter fertilizer too to that once that seeds about to germinate then after that this thing should really start thriving and take off for the past couple years I've been doing aerating and that has worked really well for me because you leave those cores on top of there and as they break down all those microbes and things that are going on to break that down into the soil are also eating on that thatch layer so that does help a lot but it's not quite as good of a process as dethatching on its own so because last year I bought a dethatching machine this Green Works one that I'm gonna be showing you today I decided that we would test it out again today and actually do a complete dethatching process so that's what we're gonna be doing and I'm gonna show you how this machine works right now all right so here's this Green Works machine like I talked about especially what happens here are these tines just kind of spin around and as we go through the grass it's gonna rip out all that thatch and all that dead stuff that's in there it's gonna just shoot it out the backside of here and we'll end up picking it up either with a rake or what I like to do is just put my bag on my mower and pick it up that way that's pretty much how the process works here I'll show you exactly how this machine works and also how to set it to different settings so this is a pretty simple setup as far as how it works to get the adjustment right on it so whatever it says here at the top which I don't know if you can read it says low that is going to be what you're setting at so it just kind of moves this wheel up and down to set it into a setting there so I have mine set at low right now last year when I was doing some dethatching I actually had it set at the highest setting for my front yard that seemed to work okay but yesterday when I was going to through this a little bit and doing a little bit of a test on my bluegrass it's just so thick that I wasn't able to get down in there on the higher settings so I went down to the lowest setting eventually after I tested it and that's kind of what I came up with but essentially you just pull this thing out turn it to what you want pop it back in and that's it so it's very very simple you just pull this out like that put it down to the low setting for me right now and there you have it next step then is pretty simple just plug it in make sure you have a long enough extension cord for the area that you need to get to and use a heavier extension cord if you can I believe mine it's a 14 gauge so usually when you get the cheapest cords that's going to be 16 gauge and I haven't found too many problems with things this thing heating up too much so you might be ok with the cord but if you just get a heavier cord that's going to help out if people and I can't remember exactly what the manual says I don't have it on me handy right now but it is going to give you a guide there as far as what chord to use as well so let's get out here and I'm going to show you how this thing works how well it works from my testing and from the limited use that I did last year I found that it works really really well without tearing out too much of your good grass and then just tearing out the stuff that you want to get rid of so let's show you how it works [Music] so it's very simple but let me explain here what I'm doing real quick so this little button right here is your little safety button that you have to push in in order for you to pull up the lever to get the tines going but I usually just like to lick the Machine off the ground a little bit get these things spinning before I place it in the grass because if you start it down here you're just going to start tearing into the grass right away so you want to pull this up and then get it moving along a little bit before you start putting it into the ground that's pretty much it and then we're just going to go back and forth here in a few passes and I'll show you kind of what comes out of the grass [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] alright that's a couple passes down I'll show you a view kind of what it looks like here but don't be alarmed there's going to be some green stuff that comes out too as it kind of just rips through the grass but it does a pretty good job of grabbing that dead stuff without doing too much damage to the existing grass there so just like I said don't be too long there's gonna be some green that comes out too that's okay it's gonna fill back in no problem so as far as pace goes when I'm walking on that machine I just kind of go at a gingerly pace and I listen for the motor so it's kind of humming along at the same sound that it normally does like even when you're not in the grass or very close to it then I know I'm walking at a good pace if it starts to bog down a little bit then I know I need to just slow my pace down a little bit and get through that thicker section of that right there so that's usually what I do as far as how fast to walk there but let's go through a few more passes see what it looks like [Music] a couple other things to mention while I think about it here is you definitely want to cut your grass a little bit lower if possible I think the manual says that this thing's going to work best if the grass is cut at two inches or somewhere around there and I found that if I let it get any taller than that it just has trouble kind of getting through all that thickness now if you have a pretty thin lawn and it was a little bit taller it might not be a problem but that's kind of something to keep in mind so I know if you keep your grass a lot taller I'm not sure how well this would be able to tear through that the other thing to mention I usually go over each section twice so I'll go down the line that kind of opens it up a little bit and then I'll come back up the other direction on that same line and that seems to do the most tearing out there of the thatch part so that's what I'm going to be doing here for the rest of the time and then I'll eventually show you what I'm going to do after that which is some over seeding and some watering get this thing back in shape because it will look a little bit rough after we do this process [Music] [Music] right the dethatching portion is done and that's a pretty extensive job but we'll say for sure so definitely a lot some time to do that if you want to do it right probably took me I don't know I didn't time it exactly but it's definitely much more of a process compared to like mowing your lawn or something like that so it's going to take you some time definitely keep that in mind now I'm going to be cleaning this thing up with my mower now you could rake this up if you had to it's just gonna be more work but if you have a bagger for your mower that's the best-case scenario it's going to suck all that stuff up pick it up and then just get rid of it [Music] [Music] okay everything's pretty much nicely thinned out there now so what I'm gonna do next is put down some seed over this and it's just a process that you really have to do no not necessarily if you really didn't want to put down seed now that's okay you could just hit it with some nitrogen some fertilizer and make sure that if it's not going to be raining any time soon that you hit it with some water to kind of get a jump-start backbone on that but speaking of jumpstart I'm gonna be using this jumpstart Kentucky blue grass from seed superstore and the reason for this is that bluegrass is very slow to germinate so because of this my existing grass will pretty quickly out-compete all of that seed if I don't use something that germinates really quickly so I could put down something like perennial ryegrass which would be four to seven days what need start to see it germinating however I have a hundred percent bluegrass back yard so that's the way I want to keep it so we're gonna be using this bluegrass hope that it comes up and just the main thing when you're over seeding is make sure to keep it watered don't go crazy over watering it but you want to make sure that it does not dry out lastly with this bluegrass I have about four thousand square feet in my backyard and you want to go about one pound per thousand four over seeding somewhere around there so we're gonna be just over one pound if I use half of this bag so I'll just set my spreader at a low setting just walk around in multiple directions until we have all the seed put down so I'm just as happy you put down seed because I've thinned out the lawn enough that I want to get some new varieties and mixed in with this bluegrass if possible so even if a little bit of this takes hold it's very nice just to get a fresh variety in there and give us a little bit of something different as far as what's back here [Music] [Music] if you're interested in more lawn related content I have tons of things on my channel for you to check out I'd appreciate you checking out some more videos thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Ryan Knorr Lawn Care

Views: 709,675

Keywords: how to dethatch a lawn, how to dethatch your lawn, how to dethatch, how to dethatch a yard, how to dethatch grass, dethatch and overseed, dethatch and overseed in spring, how to overseed your lawn, how to overseed in spring, how to overseed your yard, overseeding, greenworks dethatcher, greenworks dethatcher before and after, greenworks dethatcher video, ryan knorr lawn care, kentucky bluegrass, overseed kentucky bluegrass, lawn care, lawn care tips, lawn care how to

Id: TRcLATjbf3E

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 27 2018