How to Fix an Ugly Lawn in 5 Easy Steps

alright guys so you want to have an amazing lon but right now let's be honest your lawn is probably ugly if you're watching this video so I'm going to go through the five steps to go from an ugly lawn to an amazing lon the general thing I want you to understand is you're going to make small steps of progress it's not going to happen overnight so do as many of these tips as you can and just you'll get better at it the first one is going to be about mowing technique the most important thing will be that your blades are actually sharp now I've got videos on how to sharpen it it's pretty easy I used to bring them somewhere to get service because I was too afraid to do it myself but then when I saw how easy was I do it now it's pretty cheap also to do it yourself so I look in the video description for that the second thing is mowing height now a lot of people would like to mow short because they think they're going to have to mow less often but there's something called a one-thirds rule basically you want to cut off 1/3 of the lawn at a time that's based on height not area of your lawn and if it's your you're going to have to do it more often because it's going to need it more often the best advice I can give you is for a cool season lawn is to mow as high as you can with your lawn mower as long as your grass is not flopping over a little bit of flopping over is okay but if your lawn is really thin you don't want it to be laying over that's not good so go up every week just go up another notch until it starts to look like the grass can't stand up also you want to be mulch mowing a lot of people like to bag because they think that the clippings will turn into sack that's actually not the case patches of something else don't worry about that most likely you won't have a bad problem what you actually want to do is multi lifting can go back and return nutrients to the soil which they say it if you multiple every year that's like an extra application of fertilizer in nitrogen and it also brings moisture and it's just a lot of good stuff so mulch mow bag only if there's a very specific reason to like if you're scalping or if it rained crazy and your mower just can't mulch mow because it's way too thick so do your best but multiple as much as possible now the next thing will be watering this I did wrong for a while I was under the assumption that if you water for an hour then that's enough water but if you have cheaper sprinklers it might take six hours and the way you find out is you take cups or tunic and put them around turn your sprinklers on I do it for an hour and then measure how much water is in there now if it's not an inch keep watering keep watering and you know you might be surprised I had an old sprinkler that took six hours and it's not the water pressures the sprinkler itself we have amazing water pressure here so you want to be watering one time a week the full inch so once you figure out how much you should be watering you should be watering that much once a week now obviously if you look at weather reports and you already got an inch you can wait seven more days and then water another inch but if you aren't able to do that or you can only have water you know once a week just put it for the full inch you'll be good to go that will help tremendously now you might notice that sometimes you could water the whole lawn like I watered the whole lawn and there are certain areas that were always brown anyways that's where dish soap can come in now I actually use a professional grade surfactant because I wanted to try and see the difference and that works much faster I think for 60 bucks per bag it was within a week that brown spot turned green because it was already getting an inter week of water but you can go this route I've used this another area I've done it at friends houses I've showed them and it works pretty quick too might not be instant results within a week but you know a couple weeks keep doing it it'll it'll get there I also like to make my own lot cheaper I'll put a link to that in the description as well the benefit to that is there's some natural surfactants that you can use a yuca extract and all that stuff that's good for the soil as well so once you're mowing properly nice and tall mulch mowing and you got your watering down one inch a week the next step is proper feeding now for the most part you probably know what this is milorganite for the most part I just use this now if you're if you don't like doing liquid sprays and mixing stuff step one isn't terrible it's better to separate the pre-emergence which I'll get into later but this step one I feel like is it okay sometimes used but for the most part milorganite is going to actually feed the soil and it's a natural way of feeding the grass because the microorganisms break down the natural materials in here and then they feed the grass and the soil and what's nice is you can't really over apply this some people will put twice the bag rate down weekly doesn't burn the lawn it works great but I would recommend I like doing the for most people I like recommending the four times a year method and that's basically before all the major holidays you know fourth of July Memorial Day Thanksgiving I think Labor Day a week before those holidays dump it down at the bag rate then when it comes around to that holiday and you've got people over it looks great pretty simple to do but most people aren't fertilizing enough if you're doing it four times with milorganite that's great that's you you got it all down if you do the four step process that works too you're not going to have as nice simple results because that's not feeding the soil and that that benefit does other stuff than just grow the grass when you feed the soil makes the soil loosen up it holds water better it just got so many better things if you think about like in nature the soil is always nice and fertile so you want fertile soil for your lawn so using a natural SAP certified organic USDA would pay organic but it's an organic fertilizer so and is widely available which is why most people prefer to recommend this because you can find other options out there but you know if I tell you guys to go get this well you don't live where I live chances are you're not going to find it but these guys they got it everywhere so here's where we get into where most people fail most people think ok I'll mow it I'll cut it you know I'll water it and everything will be good then they wonder why they're infested with weeds and then they get frustrated and then it kills it so there's a two-step process to fixing all the weeds in your lawn you need to kill them and prevent the best way to do this is in the springtime when the poor cynthia blooms get your step one product put it down you're going to prevent most of the weeds some will still get through that's fine but just go way reduce the weed pressure now you might be wondering oh well I I just put down milorganite and I put this down yes you can do both at the same time if you really wanted to get off the mow more often but it's not going to burn long so the step one has a pre-emergent in it that's going to prevent new weeds it's not going to prevent every weed type but the majority of it that everybody has troubles with will be prevented then it gets on to killing weeds all right so I like doing things the simple way you're not going to kill all the weeds at the same time some people like to mix a little bit of this and that and this and make a concoction that can kill every type of weed well that's great but I like seeing progress and I also like not stressing the lawn too much so if you've got a ton of weeds the best thing you can do is start out with this it's weed B gon max + crabgrass control now if you look at the active ingredient there's a whole bunch of different companies that make generics or different versions but basically the one that says it kills crabgrass is going to kill most of the weeds in your lawn you'll look at it I don't know if it says a list 200 weeds this will kill 3 so you get one bottle of this 5000 square feet hook it on your hose spray it around go to town you don't need to like drown everything you just spray it so you see that it got wet it's going to kill the majority of the weeks and you're going to go wow this is great so you got this killing everything that's already there you got the other stuff preventing new stuff right there you're already going to be you know way better off then before then the next step would be to start to get into a little bit more difficulty the biggest one being alright buddy the biggest one being clover now I've got this version they do make it in a ready to spray bottle so it's the same exact thing hook it up to your hose spray it around it will kill clover i ground ivy chickweed oxalis and violet a couple other tough ones this will kill most of the tough weeds it's really simple but don't spray it all at once use this spray it around wait a week or two look around see if you need to spray again if there's any more crab grass or whatever Daniel lines you gotta kill if there are then you move on to this and then a few weeks later if you've got a lot of nutsedge you can get one of these in the nutsedge killer I'd like to take this and just spot spray it so this does I think 5,000 square feet again most of its in here because I just spot spray with it but since it hooks up to your hose and you can just go around real quick you don't have to mix anything it's a lot more convenient okay thank you there's a lot of other weed killers that are more specific for the even harder to kill ones but generally those weeds most people don't notice and are like odd that's fine that's part of the law and they didn't even know was there someone like me I like I want the perfect lawn so I start to notice everything that doesn't match up and I try to kill it but watch the rest of my videos stay subscribed I get into those things but this video is more for the standard I just have an ugly lawn and I want to have a nice lawn and I don't want to go crazy spending money because each of these things because are like 10 or 20 bucks the gluten they'll do the average lawn and you're good to go alright so now we got the weeds done next step comes down to repairing rat feed now the thing that most people do wrong when they're repairing their lawns and I see this on forum posts all the time to talk to friends all the time everybody in the spring wants to get going with lawn care and they plant their grass seed and then they wonder why I never grew well that's because you put weed preventer down and that will also prevent the good grass seed and it's also because spring is not the best time to be growing grass seed you can do it I've got a video if you want to see how I did it and it worked fine but you have to pay a lot more attention so if you're watching this video search and how to fix an ugly lon chances are you're not there yet so just wait till the fall after you've killed all the weeds you're going to have holes anyway so why see twice why you know you're going to be killing the new grass seed while you're trying to spray all these chemicals on the weeds so you might as well get rid of the weeds focus on watering and mowing and killing weeds and then in the fall you can start filling in and repairing the spots and now it can be as simple as just throwing the seed down throwing some peat moss on top you can go around with a batching rake and really dig it up if you want to you could aerate and over seed that works as well all those methods work but in the fall the reason most of the time people fail is because they're doing it in the spring and if you you know arene over see any seed in the spring sure it might help a little bit but you're not going to see the results you're expecting and so that's why everybody always says fall fall fall but you don't want to do it late in the fall because then you got winter coming and you know my law and I seeded it a little bit late and it came in it's growing but if I'd been able to see it sooner right now the grass would be amazing so once the temperatures start to go down that's when you can start to grow your grass seeding and do that and I'll put some more links to how to do all that stuff [Music] I guess that was my sign to wrap it up so if you want to see the steps on how to do more in-depth detail all those different steps click on the links in the description this this is my awesome law and it's looking pretty good I'm not it's not perfect yet but I'm working on it and if you love watching videos like this please subscribe I'm going to show you all the crazy stuff that I try in my lawn just to see how much extra oomph I can get out of it because I like to go for I consider it a performance lawn I don't know if that's the right word for it but I want to see how much I can get out of the lawn just has been just as something fun to do so there you go thanks for watching

Channel: Grass Daddy

Views: 2,308,672

Keywords: reviving lawn, how to fix an ugly lawn, ugly lawn, fixing ugly lawn, how to fix ugly lawn, how to revive a lawn, dead lawn, grass daddy, green lawn tips, yard care, lawn tips, Lawn, lawn care tips, lawn care, the lawn care nut, lawn care nut

Id: PbGDH_JOM9w

Length: 15min 6sec (906 seconds)

Published: Sat May 27 2017