How to Fill in Thin and Bare Areas in Your Lawn (St. Augustine grass) Florida

hi i'm chad with turf organics and today i'm going to show you the best way to fill thin and bare areas in your sin augustine grass follow me here's an example of the thin and bare areas we're going to be filling in today these spots here and some along here you may have bigger areas in smaller areas and that's okay this is just the example we have to work with today now the most important step before you start filling in these areas is going to be what is causing these areas so you're going to want to check for chinch bugs fungus sod webworms if you look on the videos below in our channel we have videos on all those so first the thing is to diagnose what's causing your bare areas to make sure that you don't do all this work and it keeps on dying now for our example here this bare area is we know it is drought damage now it got too dry and it got damaged because an irrigation head wasn't hitting here so we have corrected the irrigation head we have fixed the active issue in this area that way we know what we're about to do is going to fill in these areas and the damage will not continue to happen after identifying what caused those issues and making sure that they're still not active now we can go over the equipment you'll need to complete the job so the first tool that you're gonna need this is not a must but it will help and you'll see in the video is a hard tooth rake so make sure the teeth are hard in metal and it's got this big soft top piece on the bottom our next tool is a soft tooth rake i prefer this kind the plastic now they do have the metal but i think this does a better job make sure cds are soft and they can bend so that way it won't it won't rake out any of the live grass and just the dead stuff next is probably the two most important things which is the soil you're going to use to fill in those bare areas best kind of sand we like to use is leveling sand or paver base don't use play sand they have high levels of silica which is glass and it'll attract a lot of heat so leveling sand and builder sand will attract a lot less heat and a lot better to use the next is the black cow this is what i recommend over topsoil or anything else this will have a lot of good nutrients in it and help retain a lot of moisture a big reason why i recommend this mix is because the black cow will help hold the nutrients and hold moisture and the sand will help it drain what i usually recommend is a good 50 50 mix now if you're in a full sun area you may want to lean more towards the black cow and less sand if you're in a shader area you may want to lean more towards the sam unless the black cow because of moisture issues now all these tools and the the soil you're going to need is also something you should be able to get from your local hardware store which is why i pulled all these things out now the reason i have this bag out is this is a soil called command it has microbial turf builder for turf managers this is the best soil that mix of this in that is pretty much in this bag which is why if you can find this command which it's not very common in stores which is why i'm not going to use it today but if you can find it this is the best soil you can get no mixing or anything like that you can buy it by the bag and lay it down it's very hard to find not in bulk so that's why i'm going to do it with these today because this is most likely what you're going to be able to find but this 50 50 mixture is pretty much what this is because you can put this soil down in areas that are too wet in areas that are too dry then you can do the same thing with the 50 50 mix on these soils now the first step to filling in these bare areas is raking out the dead grass so let's grab our soft tooth rake and rake out that dead grass [Music] as you can see now we finished raking out our spots now you don't have to rake it too hard i like to rake it out to get some of the dead grass out as you can see it's not too big of a pile here but what it'll also do is loosen up some of these runners which that's okay as long as we put soil on top but i highly recommend do not rake out the dead grass until you can replace it with soil that way these bear runners aren't exposed to the sun because what's going to happen is we're going to bury these underneath the new soil and that way they'll be protected and help these areas fill in but as you can see there's still some dead grass it doesn't nearly have to be perfect but a good light raking will loosen up some of those runners to help promote new growth and get out some of that dead grass now when mixing the soil there's several ways you can go about it probably one of the easier ways to get a good mix is to put it in a wheelbarrow a bucket or whatever dump a couple bags in at a time let's say to a black cow to a sand get a shovel and mix it up and then dump it out in the bare areas so that's probably one of the easiest ways but i'm gonna show you how to do it without that way just in case you don't have access to a wheelbarrow or something you can mix the soil in there's absolutely ways of doing it without that and that's the way i'm gonna show you here today so the way i'm gonna do this is i'm going to dump a bag of black cow down then a bag of sand and then kind of mix them up on top of the soil now the most important absolutely most important thing you do is lay the soil thick so what i recommend is to lay it about four inches thick and you're gonna go chat four inches yes four inches i know i know i know it sounds insane but i promise you it's not what happens is this mother nature does its thing with rain and the sun and everything like that and the soil settles so what happens is you lose about half the soil so if you're about two inches out you're going to be left with about one inch of soil which isn't going to do much so you lay a good thick four inches you're gonna have anywhere from two to two and a half inches of soil in that area after about two weeks and it gets weathered in so make sure when you're doing this more is better don't be shy it's okay to cover some of the saint augustine at first and i'll show you so first i'm going to take the black cow and dump this along here in my bear area [Music] and now i'm going to leave it just like this and i'm going to grab the sand and dump the sand on top now next thing you're want to do is grab your hard tooth rake and kind of mix it up and kind of smooth it in now remember i know this looks like a lot of soil but you'll see as we level it out but this is the perfect amount for this little area the trick is when you get bags get more than you think is needed because they don't usually go as far as you think because you need to lay it so thick but if you don't lay thick enough they'll be a big waste of your time it's best to get the bags lay it thick and do it right the first time [Music] [Applause] [Music] now while i was doing that i hope you noticed i used the back side of the hard tooth rake that's the perfect way i was pushing it back and forth mixing it up it left a beautiful beautiful sand dirt mix spot and it's all nice and level and if they know what you're thinking chad this is a little excessive for such a small area i promise you it's not saint augustine sometimes is not very good at being a grass so we gotta help it out as much as we can now also the trick is to do not do not pat it down and make it hard that'll compact the soil leave it loose rake it soft it doesn't have to be perfectly level mother nature will take care of the rest and even sometimes you have to come back on top after two weeks and put down a little more sand or a little more black cow or the mix of two well what i'm gonna do next is do one more time on that other a little bear area that we raked out i'm gonna do a close-up shot on the video so you can see how i work the rake upside down and how i mix the soil and level it out to make it look like this when we're finished so [Music] bang and that's how you do it now that we were all finished this is what the area looks like after now again don't pack it down water in or anything if your lawn needs if it's time to water your lawn anyways just run your irrigation on your normal irrigation cycle but no need to do any extra or anything like that as you can see too the level's not 100 perfect and it doesn't need to be don't break your back trying to make it perfect mother nature will level it out uh itself but most people won't have this small of an area so as you can see a bag a black cow and a bag of sand get you about this big of an area so you have this big of a bare area here uh then that's a good amount there and same thing here this was a total of two bags of black cow two bags of sand do not mow over these areas till they finally start to fill in you may want to skip this area depending what time of year you're doing this which in florida here you can do this all year round so don't worry the time of year in the winter it protects the roots from the cold in the summer it protects the roots from the heat win-win and you'll see i did bury a lot of grass some of it's poking up and that's okay within the next few days a lot of that grass is going to poke through and you're going to see a lot of runners growing in about a month if a lot of the soil is going away it's not filling in quite as much as you want repeat this process doing this much should usually be okay but every now and again then you may need to reapply soil again within a month or so but more is better than less if you found this video useful helpful if you drop a like and subscribe it really means a lot and helps our channel out and motivates us to put out more of these videos for you guys i'm chad with turf organics this was how to fill in thin and bare areas in st augustine grass [Music] you

Channel: Turf Organics

Views: 178,993

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Id: JiRGK6TRYHk

Length: 11min 33sec (693 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020