How To Fix Your Lawn with Renovation // All The Steps In One Video!!

so my neighbor and i completed a lawn renovation at his house just a couple weeks ago now and today i wanted to tell you how you can do all of these steps in one weekend and show you the actual steps to get this lawn renovation done the one caveat here that i have to mention at the beginning is that you do need to plan this out in advance because you do need to kill the grass before you're going to do this lawn renovation usually that will take a couple weeks minimum and sometimes even longer would be better maybe up to a month so if you are planning this out that would be a good thing to plan in advance is to make sure that you have time to get this done before you start the renovation so the first thing that you need to know is how much square footage you're dealing with so you need to measure out your area this is a very simple process you can also do this online sometimes by using satellite views but i like to just take a tape measure length by width that'll give you the square footage of your yard make sure you write that down and make yourself a little map that way all this process going forward you're going to know how to calculate how much seed you need how much fertilizer you need and all those things in general going forward too it's awesome to have a map of your yard and know how much square footage you're dealing with so scalping is actually taking your mower setting it at the lowest setting going over the yard and scalping off all the dead grass that's there the reason that you want to do this is you want to minimize all this dead grass that's in the way so that when you actually seed it will get down to the soil layer you don't want the seed sitting on top of a bunch of dead grass so you're going to do that scalping phase to get rid of that and bagging it obviously is important to remove the clippings you don't want to be leaving the clippings onto the yard and having them in the way of getting that seed down to the soil so after that step it's also a good idea to thin out that dead grass that's there you want to be able to see down to the soil layer so you want to thin it out enough to where you can see the soil and there's not a big matted amount of dead grass there you can use various tools to do this we use a manual thatching rake you can use an electric dethatcher if you happen to have one you can also rent a machine like this usually at rental places but if you don't have a huge large area to do you can get this done with a manual thatching rake or over time i found it really nice to have one of those electric machines they're not extremely expensive so it might be something that you want to consider [Music] now the next optional step you could think about would be core aeration so if you haven't been aerating your yard or you feel like it's pretty compacted so probably before you would do that actual leveling would be when i would do the core aeration on one of my previous renovations i did this step and then i did the leveling work after that so that would be something i would consider if you want to do core aeration make sure you're doing that before your leveling step personally i think it's a great opportunity to take this time when you're going to do a renovation and do some leveling or smoothing of the surface we're just using regular soil here this is green topsoil that would be very similar to the soil that is in our yards here so we bought this just from a local landscape place they came and delivered this this is eight cubic yards so this is just to smooth out the surface we're not doing any major grade changes but we just wanted to get this opportunity to smooth everything out make mowing more enjoyable going forward and take out all those little bumps that were in the yard previously so we started off with this leveling process just spreading out your soil of course if you have some means of doing this without having to do it all by hand that helps a lot but we did this in about three hours with two people so not too bad get everything spread out everything nice and even get it smoother get it level and have it looking good before we move on to the next steps so i know some of you are probably going to wonder what should you use soil versus sand i've done a couple of videos on this this year talking about that topic for me i recommend if you're going to be doing your seeding then use a soil type at this point it's going to help you hold in more moisture it's going to have some nutrients in it so that new grass can take some of that out of there as well there's nothing wrong with sand but it gets more difficult so for me personally i would do the soil now and if you want to do leveling later and you want to consider sand at a later date i would do that after the fact after you've already done your seeding and have an established yard now this leveling tool that i bought a couple years ago has been really awesome for actually doing a lot of smoothing in a yard or whenever you're doing renovation work i found it to be a great tool to spread the things out evenly fills in your low spots and just smooths everything out so it's a great tool to have in every single renovation that i do i'm really glad that i actually bought that thing but this is one thing that i really enjoy as far as tools that i own that's really helped my renovations so now we took a lawn roller and just went over the surface to slightly pack everything in it doesn't need to be a ton of weight that's in there or doing any major compaction but after that leveling work you have a lot of loose soil there so you want to make sure for the most part it's going to stay where you want it to stay just a light roll at this stage will do that for you you can also rent one of these rollers i used to rent these i think for maybe 25 or something locally for a day so check your area if you do need to rent a tool like this usually you can find them fairly inexpensive so now you're actually at the phase of putting down the seed so remember the first thing that you did was measured out your area this is going to be important so that you know how much seed you need to put down different types of grasses have different types of rates in this lawn i was using three varieties of kentucky bluegrass i've been testing these last year on the north side of my house and i had some of this seed left so i decided to mix these together evenly and use that as the basis for this yard we'll also be adding a small amount of perennial rye grass because perennial rye grass will germinate very quickly it will help hold all of that soil in place while the blue grass is getting established and a mixture of kentucky bluegrass and perennial ryegrass is also what i have on my side yard and i think it looks great so choosing a seed is extremely important as well if you're going to go to all this work of doing a renovation i highly recommend that you go ahead and spend the money on a good seed now what is good seed well there's testing that's done on elite varieties these are extensive tests that are done for disease resistance for color for drought resistance and all these things are important factors in your lawn going forward so again if you're going to take the time to do all these steps i would highly recommend to seek out a very good grass seed going forward and make sure you also buy enough of it so that in case you have some washouts in case you have some areas that don't come in as thick as you thought that they should you'll have some of the extra product left and it'll be the exact same seed and you're not going out to buy something else that doesn't match what you have in your yard so if you're looking for some grassy options i do have a link in the [Music] description so i was going with three pounds per thousand square feet on the blue grass and we were just using a broadcast spreader here to put this onto the lawn now you can use a drop spreader if you happen to have one that works really well with seeding or if you were not doing all this leveling work you could also probably use a slice cedar that would be something that most people don't have as far as a tool that you would also have to rent so a lot of times i just go with the simple method of broadcasting and i found no reason to really switch this method because it's worked well for me but again there's different options for actually placing the seed down but what you want to do is just pick a really low setting on your spreader start spreading to where it's coming out evenly but not heavy and then walk in multiple directions until you have a nice even coverage of the seed after i laid down that kentucky bluegrass i then went to the perennial rye grass and i put down a small amount of this so after this step of the seed being down i'll take a metal rake and i'll lightly rake this in now you don't want to place the seed too far under the soil but having it slightly under that soil layer especially in the bare soil areas is going to help a lot in the areas where you might have some dead grass left the seed pretty much is going to fall down to that soil layer as soon as you water it and then the grass that's there will hold things in place pretty well but any of these areas especially with the bare soil i like to lightly rake that in then after this step i will take the roller back over that and i'll take it over everything that we just seeded to press that seed lightly into the soil this is going to help with seed to soil contact that's what the seed needs in order for it to grow the best so a light rolling over everything is going to help to press that into the soil and give you great results at this point is when you can decide if you'd like to use a pre-emergent for weed control if you've had a lot of issues in your yard with weeds or maybe some poa then this would be a step when you can use a product called tenacity this is safe to use at the time of seeding it won't harm any of your actual grass seed that you put down but it will help to prevent weeds that are coming up as you start to water and it's a step that i usually take in order to just give myself the best success possible but if you're not as comfortable with spraying and you'd like to put down a granular product there is a starter fertilizer or a couple of them that actually have the same ingredient in there and you can use this to put your starter fertilizer down and also have that pre-emergent product added at the same time so spray the tenacity or actually use this granular fertilizer that's up to you in the past i've usually done spraying on my renovations just because i had tenacity on hand but you can make your own choice there it's talking about starter fertilizer we're going to use a product like this to help give it some phosphorus here at the beginning stages of the grass growing it needs phosphorus for root development so this is a good time to add a starter fertilizer you can just get this locally at a store or wherever you wish and usually bag rates on the back are going to be pretty accurate for you in terms of doing a new lawn renovation and just choosing that rate that's on the bag now the next step in this process is i like to actually cover the areas that we seeded sometimes people will leave this step out but i found in the past that any areas that were covered compared to just areas that i left with bare soil or just left with some dead grass existing there i didn't have as nearly as quick of germination and as successful germination so personally i've been using peat moss in most of my renovations i was talking to my co-host ryan on our podcast a couple weeks ago when we were talking about renovations he recommended a product like mushroom compost it's not something that i have personally used but he's used it pretty extensively on golf courses and in other renovation works that he's done another option would just be actually using compost itself which would be a really light layer of compost that you could put over top of your seed or over top of your renovation areas so whatever you choose here is kind of hard to say exactly what you need but in terms of the peat moss that we used we use the peat moss spreader that i have and that worked well to place a light layer over everything these were three cubic foot bags as well that i had and i believe we used seven of them to cover the 4 000 square feet that we had then we noticed a couple days in that there were some areas that could probably use a little more than we had so we went back and got three or four more bags so i'd say about 10 bags total is what was used for the 4 000 square feet and if you are interested in this peat moss or compost spreader you can check that out on my website so if you have some slopes or other areas that you might be worried about wash out i have used a couple of different options on those i've used straw blankets on a renovation i've used one of these sort of wood fiber blankets on my other renovation on the north side of my house and i've used some of that easy straw mulch that you can actually buy i think at some of the big box stores and it has a tackifying material in it so it's supposed to stick in place better i found that out of all of these that wood fiber blanket worked the best on some of the larger areas that we completed a renovation on over at a friend's house the straw blankets did a fairly good job on holding things in place there the easy mulch was probably my least favorite it does hold things in place but i found it difficult to get a nice even layer there without smothering some of the actual new grass that i wanted to come up so keep those things in mind i still prefer to use a peat moss or compost type of product for light covering but it will sort of easily wash away in certain situations so sometimes you need to have more on hand and you need to put more down after that may occur so now we're actually to the watering step and not to say that any of these steps aren't important overall but watering is going to be one of the most important things that you have to be on top of in order to have good success with your renovation so we set up a diy sort of system above the ground and many have asked how come this doesn't have an in-ground system here put in well just for budgetary reasons not everyone can afford to do that and personally myself i also use this diy system in my yard for many years did many renovations and watered with the system before i had any in-ground you just have to spend some time kind of thinking it out figuring out where everything needs to go but once you do that it's sort of like having an in-ground in place because you place your heads in pretty much the exact same location and it works out well that's exactly what we did here if you're just going to go with some general sprinklers then make sure you're prepared to get good coverage to move them if you need to and the problem just becomes with those that you have to kind of walk on the yard when you really don't want to sometimes so if you'd like to learn more about this diy system i have a video from earlier this year that explains how to put it together and what the parts are that you actually need to build it otherwise you can use other methods of getting the sprinkling done but what you need to do is keep that seed from drying out in the initial stages of germination so that's why i laid down some of that rye grass as well because i expected it to come up in three or four days which is pretty much what i saw and then the blue grass was coming up around six to seven days so i was probably watering around 10 a.m another shot at about one probably another shot of water around three or four and then gauging whether it needed anything around 7 pm so those are not set times that it's going to work with everyone it's going to be a factor of wind and temperature and humidity but just keep in mind that you need to keep the seed from drying out you don't want puddles sitting on the yard to where you're washing any of the seed or it's actually getting too wet but you want to make sure the water is consistent at this beginning point and then you'll get that seed coming up and you can begin to taper the water off as we go with heavier amounts but less frequent a good soaking of water after the initial seeding is going to be needed once you have that moisture in the ground there though you'll find that usually it doesn't take nearly as much water to keep things going so a good initial soaking of it will be good and then do your maintenance as you go now going forward as you notice things are growing in you need to make a decision on when you would like to do that first mow really that comes down to what height you would like to mow the grass at so if we were targeting a height of two inches on this grass we probably let it grow to about three inches and then make our first mowing at that time so the only thing you want to think about before that first mowing is let the ground dry out a little bit so that it's not going to cause any major damage on the first mowing if you have a manual reel mower or you can find one for cheap this is what i love to use on the first couple modes of a renovation because you can pick it up you don't need to make any turns in the corner and it's really light and able to get onto the yard without doing much damage so after care of this you could do another application in probably three to four weeks of starter fertilizer or another fertilizer then going forward you can kind of make a decision i like to spoon feed some fertilizers throughout the rest of the fall in lower amounts to feed the grass more consistently you can check out more talk about this on our podcast i'll link this in the description on some things that you can think about for after care the last thing that you need to think about is just having patience this takes a lot of time it takes a lot of effort you're dealing with the weather as well you might get some washout periods or you might have some major storms that kind of put a hindrance on what you're doing stay the course make sure you have extra materials that you can place down again and you will get there over time i can promise you i've had many renovations that did not go exactly as planned the first time but the only thing you can do is just keep working on them and you'll find success in the end so i hope this was helpful for you today i'm going to have a whole bunch of links in the description and different videos that we talked about here on this video as well thank you so much for watching we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Ryan Knorr Lawn Care

Views: 359,194

Rating: 4.925241 out of 5

Keywords: lawn, lawn renovation, lawn renovation guide, how to seed a lawn, seeding a lawn, lawn guide, how to fix your lawn, how to fix your lawn with seeding, how to fix your lawn with renovation, how to seed a new lawn, seeding a new yard, lawn renovation steps, lawn care tips, fall lawn care, lawn tips, Ryan Knorr lawn, Ryan Knorr lawn renovation, Ryan Knorr lawn care seeding, fix an ugly lawn, fix an ugly lawn renovation

Id: te6w_IU5y_U

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 16 2020