How-to Fix Your Ugly Lawn With This Single Lawn Application

[Music] hey there now before this video gets started i want you to know this video is for you beginners those who you have a lawn that looks like this and you want to get it to look like this you could have a lawn that looks just that good by this time next year but it starts with the tips that i'm going to give you in this video now there's also a bunch of you that are more advanced and this is the video that you're going to want to send to your friends who always ask you hey man how come your lawn is so nice this is the video you send them and lastly because i know that not everybody wants to sit through an almost 30 minute video i'll put convenient time stamps in the description below so you can skip ahead to the areas that mean the most to you but again if you're a beginner i encourage you to watch the entire video because there's tons of tips and also a lot of encouragement to help you get started in this video with that let's get right out into the lawn [Music] hi there i'm alan hayne the lawn care nut and as we head into summer here are you someone that maybe you just bought a house in the fall and you're just now starting to look at the lawn or maybe you're somebody that's lived in your house for a while and never cared to look at the lawn and now you're looking at it for the first time and you're like [Music] and you're noticing that it looks like this oh man or this oh no and you're wondering what you can do to not only get rid of all those weeds but to get it nice and green and thick and healthy now i'll be the first one to tell you now i'll be the first one to tell you there is no quick fix for a lawn there is no quick easy simple way to make it beautiful and thick overnight it's just like any relationship it takes time to build it to perfection and by the way no lawn i don't care what anybody tells you or what they show you online no lawn is perfect look at me i got a youtube channel with 300 000 subscribers and i got crab grass in my lawn can you believe that but what i can tell you is i can give you a few simple tips and in fact today one kind of i would call it miracle product we'll say that that can actually get you really far down the road in one single application and that's what today's video is all about and the thing about this product is it works on all grass types no matter where you live there is this product or one very similar available at every home depot lowe's or ace or true value in the united states and i'm not only going to show you what to get and where to find it i'm actually going to show you how to get a cheap spreader a scotch spreader that's available to everyone put it in the spreader and put it on your lawn confidently i'm going to show you everything start to finish so that you can go out within the next 24 hours if you want get this product and put it down on your lawn with confidence and that's really the main thing that i want you to get out of this video sure you're going to get results if you follow along and follow the steps that i teach you here but really the thing i want you to get is confidence because that's the thing that stops most people they're scared of burning the lawn or doing something wrong and i promise you you're not going to burn anything you're going to be just fine the reason i know this is because i've been teaching diyers just like you how to have a beautiful lawn for more than 10 years here online and even before that i worked as a professional in the spray business on the south side of chicago and northwest indiana for 15 years and the tips and the strategies that i give you here on youtube and also in my email newsletter are the same ones that i use to teach my lawn technicians who used to spray 20-25 lawns a day on the south side of chicago day in and day out so before we get too far into this video i would encourage you to click the link in the description below and sign up for my free email newsletter there i'll send you three free guides that over and above this video will get you down the road to better education on pre-emergence like how to stop crab grass post emergence like how to kill dandelions and then a full guide on how to get rid of grub worms because grubs are going to be a problem here coming up in the summer it's all free education for you and it works for all grass types no matter where you live the whole idea here is you're watching this video and i hope you take these tips to heart and i hope you execute on what you learn here but there's a lot more that you can learn and it seems daunting and it seems difficult but it's not because remember you only have one lawn to learn it sounds like a soap opera doesn't it but that's the truth you only have to learn one lawn so once you've applied product two maybe even three times really only one time you're gonna have such confidence that you'll be able to proceed and get your lawn nice and thick and healthy and before you know it you'll be an old pro in your own lawn and everybody will be asking you what you did to get it so green and thick okay now i know you're eager to throw down here i am too but before we can throw down we need to set a good foundation and when i say set a good foundation we have to get a little bit of data so that we can make sure that what we put down is in the right amounts and make sure that we even buy enough to get started so the first key to starting any lawn program is to understand your lawn's square footage if you know the size of your lawn then you can go forward with every other application for the future but you got to know your lawn size first and with that we're going to create just a real quick simple down and dirty property map so you can see this is mine here now mine's laminated a guy named chris sent me this is super cool but basically what i did is i got a satellite photo of my lawn here and you can do this on google maps just go and get a aerial view of your lawn and then kind of section it off into logical sections so you can see for example i have a sidewalk here so that's a logical section right there and that is actually this section right here section two it's just logical because it's corned off with the street and the sidewalk and the landscape beds here's another section now in my youtube channel i call this my main stage but uh on the property map here it's section three and it's also logical because i have a sidewalk over here i have the street over there and then that other sidewalk we just looked at is down there so this is another logical section and i've gone ahead and marked that off on my property map and then i'll show you this section here because this is the one we're mainly going to work on today this is section 4 for me and you can see it's also logical i have my driveway right there sidewalk right here and then my neighbor's lawn right there so it's just another logical section so you can see that the way that my property broke down i have five distinct sections and what i've done is measured each one of them and that's what you're going to do so after you logically mark off each section of your lawn and again just do it based on logic the next thing you want to do is measure each section and in measuring the lawn what we're looking for is the square footage of each area so square footage is length times width so you get the length in feet and you get the width and feet you multiply those together and that'll give you the square footage of each section now what you're going to notice is you're not going to get lucky not everything is going to be a perfect square some things are going to be triangles and in fact the area that we're working on today section 4 here is actually a triangle or a pie shape is what we would call that now i'm not going to make you go through the pain of doing all this measuring here today because i've done plenty of videos on that i'll link in the description below a video where i go through and measure this exact lawn and show you how i did that but i'll also link to you an online tool called map developers it's one that i use and what you can do there is actually draw or highlight each of the areas of your lawn and it will tell you the square footage no matter what the shape is and it's a valuable tool and it's highly accurate so i'm going to go ahead and give you that link below that's mapdevelopers.org i think it is again i'll link it below for you that way you can use that to get the square footage of each area of your lawn now the reason that knowing the square footage of your lawn especially broken down by section the reason that's so important is because all of the lawn products that we use they're actually based on square footage see this one right here treats up to 5 000 square feet so if you were going to use this product you would know that you could cover 5 000 square feet with it see this one says it treats up to 20 000 square feet see this one says it treats up to 5 650 square feet so now you can see why that's so important because if you don't know your lawn square footage you wouldn't even know how many bags of whatever product to buy and then even if you did buy it you wouldn't know how much to put down in each section now one thing i do want to say real quick and folks that have subscribed here for a long time are probably yelling at the screen right now there is no substitute for actually walking this out i really do i want you to get out here with a tape measure or walk it off or get a measuring wheel you should actually do a manual measurement of each lawn area even if you're using one of the online tools that's going to give you really accurate measurements i highly encourage you to walk the areas do this with your kids too teach them some basic math really fun thing to do but the biggest thing that it does is it lets you visualize what does it feel like hey this is a for example this is a 2500 square foot area that we're going to be working on today and by actually walking it off and measuring it you realize ah okay this is the pace that it takes to walk 2 500 square feet this is what it feels like this is what it looks like because a lot of you that are in the trades you can walk into like a room in a construction site and you can kind of eyeball and tell how big that area is you can tell how big a room is just from looking at it if you've been in the trades for a long time you can do the same thing with a lawn but you can't do that only using online tools you actually need to walk the area so i highly encourage you to do that we call that learning your land and it is one of the most important things you can do when you start working on a lawn is learn your land and the best way to learn your land is to walk your land the other thing that walking your land will do is it will help you find you know trouble spots low areas for if you do need to do some you know some flattening or fixing some bumps later on which we're going to actually do in this lawn here coming up sometime in the next several weeks but that's the other reason i want you to walk it is it's going to help you to understand where your weak spots are where your wet spots are where your dry spots are all of that kind of stuff once again learn your land now you have your property map and you have each section sectioned off and you can see i have an example here 10 200 that's my total but i don't really care so much about that because what i want you to do as a beginner with the product that i'm about to show you is i only want you to pick one small area as a test area and that's the only thing we're going to apply to start and so i'm going to use section 4 and you can see section 4 is about 2 500 square feet and that is an excellent size to start with so if you have a 2 or 2 500 square foot area that's where i would recommend you start and this is your test area the reason i want you to pick just a small test area is because this is going to take all the fear out of it what you're going to do is i recommend you get one of these spreaders right here they're not sponsored nothing in this video is sponsored by the way but this is a scott's edge guard dlx i think it's like 30 40 bucks you can get this at every single box store in america just get one of these because every single product that you buy at a local store is gonna have the spreader settings for this spreader that's why i recommend you get this it's just a standard that's been set whether we like it or not whether we think this is a garbage cheap spreader or not it doesn't matter which actually i think for the money you pay for it it works just fine but get this spreader and we're only going to be doing one area one small area so that way if you do mess up which you're not and i don't want you to worry about messing up because i'm going to show you how not to mess up but if you do the fear is that you're only you know going to mess up in one small area but what's really going to happen and i know this from experience because i've worked with so many thousands of you over the years is you're going to do this one area and you're going to be like huh that was really easy and then all of a sudden you're going to have confidence and bing bang boom you're going to do all the rest of your sections and it'll be all done before you know it and not only will it be all done it'll be all done right because i'm going to show you exactly how to know that you did it right so for purposes of this video and for purposes of your first time applying the product i'm about to show you pick one small area of your lawn around 2000 or 2500 square feet for me in our example it's 2500 square feet okay and this is the product now it's going to be a little bit different depending where you live i got this at lowe's and this is going to be available in the south i don't care about the brand name though and that's not what i want you guys to focus on i want you to focus on this three in one this is a new marketing thing that's coming up are these three in one products and i will give you examples of ones that will work up north too if you're somewhere up north in the midwest or the northeast you're probably going to find scott's turf builder triple action or this preen one product if you go to your local box store they're going to have a three in one that's going to be safe for your grass type doesn't matter what state you live in that they know what to carry otherwise they'd all be worried about burning everyone's lawns the box stores are smart and they know what grass types are in your area so go to the store home depot lowe's ace true value whatever it is and get one of these three in ones now this is a three in one whedon feed and again don't focus on the fact that it says southern lawns unless you're in the south and you could get this exact one i got it at lowe's okay so now let me pause right here for a second because again my regular subscribers are like screaming at the screen i do not typically recommend weed and feed products there's a whole bunch of reasons for that however this video is aimed at those of you that are beginners that you stepped out your front door this morning and your lawn is pale it's not growing you have dandelions and weeds everywhere it's patchy it's for you guys it's for those of you who have done nothing maybe you even think you're a little bit late which you might be in some cases but it's never too late to start remember any relationship it's never too late to start cleaning up any relationship especially a lawn care relationship and yes i do mean that but what i'm getting out of here there is a purpose for these products and it's for those of you that are wanting to push like a reset button because that's what these products do it's going to feed the lawn it's going to prevent some future weeds and it's going to kill a lot of weeds that are there all three of those are going to happen with one application that's a good product you could call it even a miracle product now these weren't available a few years ago these are pretty new this type of a three-in-one product but i do recommend them for those of you that this is your first application you've had some fear you haven't done anything this is a great place to start now i always like to give you as much information as i can without losing you so let me tell you the three things that are in this product the first thing is as you see it says kills that means it has a post-emergent weed control in it and the post-emergent weed control we have here is called dicamba you guys up north you're also going to probably have dicamba and or 24d in yours and that's the post-emergent weed killer what that means is post-emergent it's going to kill weeds that are already up after they've come up it kills them that's the first part of the three in one is the post-emergent weed control and it's going to kill weeds that are existing especially if you have a dandelion problem dicamba and 24d which you're going to find in these products is exactly what you need the second thing it does is it feeds now the feed that's the fertilizer part and when you come down on any bag of fertilizer you look for these three numbers right here this is nitrogen phosphorus potassium this is very high nitrogen i've got all kinds of blog posts that explain these numbers and what they mean and why we use them and all that i'll link those in the description below for you but 35 is a very high number and that's good because this is what's going to turn the lawn green this is nitrogen nitrogen drives the bus nitrogen drives the green and nitrogen drives the growth which drives the thickness and then the third piece of sorry i don't even know what glasses have on the third piece the third piece the third piece of the three-in-one is the prevention that is called a pre-emergent we control and what that means is it's gonna stop weeds before they come up pre-emergent now the pre-emergent in this product is called endaza flam these are all active ingredients i got my glasses situation fixed now sorry if i've had like four sets of glasses on my head anyway endazoflam is actually been sold under a brand name called spectacle flow for a long time and it's a very good pre-emergent now you're not gonna probably find that up north now some of the other pre-emergent active ingredients that you might find in these products especially if you're further north might be pendimethalin probably that's what you're gonna find if you're using a scots product which is great the scots products three and one are available in a lot of places you might also see dithiopia or perdiamine all of these are good pre-emergent weed controls now just real quick of note when it comes to the pre-emergent portion usually we like pre-emergents to go down a little bit earlier than now in most of the country but that's okay just because some weeds have gotten away from you and the main one we're talking about here stopping is crabgrass just because some have gotten away from you there's still plenty more crab grass to come up and by putting this three in one down now with the pre-emergent in it you're gonna stop some of it and stopping some of the crab grass is better than stopping none of it so i don't want you to think this portion of your three in one is going to waste it's not even though it might be just a little bit late but remember this is your first application this is your first time you're going to be doing a lot of good here and with that let's now learn how to throw down with confidence now here's where things might seem to get a little complicated for some folks please just follow along this is not complicated and you only have to do this once what we need to know is how much of this product should go down on our 2500 square foot area because you got to know how much to put down because as you can see this bag covers up to 10 000 square feet and this is where we can do a little cocktail napkin math so you can see this is a 25 pound bag and it covers 10 000 square feet right remember everything we do is in increments of 1 000 square feet so if we take 25 divided by 10 that means the application rate is 2.5 pounds of this product for every 1 000 square feet does that make sense let's just review that one more time so there are 10 1000 square foot areas that this bag can cover right 10 000 square feet it's a 25 pound bag 25 divided by 10 means 2.5 pounds of product for every 1 000 square feet now the small area that i'm treating is 2500 square feet so i have a 2500 square foot area and i know that i need 2.5 pounds of product for each 1000. so if i have a 2500 square foot area that means i need 2.5 times 2.5 that's 6.25 so in order for me to cover section 4 which is 2500 square feet i need 6.25 pounds of product now if you don't want to do this math i show you this because i want you to understand the why behind everything but if you don't want to do this math the next important thing to do is read the label and you should do that anyway and when you come over here to the back you can see it says setting to deliver 2.5 pounds per 1000 square feet and this is why i told you to get a scott spreader because you'll see this is not a scott's product this is uh bio advanced but you'll see they got it right there scots deluxe edge guard see that setting four and three quarters what that's telling me is is that that four and three quarter setting should deliver 2.5 pounds of this product per 1000 square feet now some of you might be asking well alan why don't you just set the spreader dump the bag in and go and you could do that but here's the thing this is plastic and these are not all adjusted the same if you bump this it gets bumped around whatever it can get off but the other thing is i want you to be able to apply with confidence i don't want you to just be dumping and throwing because what happens is and i've seen this happen so many times is somebody just sets the spreader setting they put the whole bag in and all of a sudden they're only like halfway done with their lawn and this thing is totally empty and they're like what happened i don't want that to happen to you because that would be an over application and this is going to avoid that that's why we're only treating this one small area here we're still gonna use the spreader setting but now we know how many pounds to put in here to cover this area and we can make sure that our spreader is set and calibrated properly by doing it this way because i'm only gonna treat this one small 2500 square foot area i only need to risk 6.25 pounds of this product i'm okay risking that and i'm only risking this small section of the lawn again you're not going to burn anything anyway these products are made for diyers that are going to make mistakes so don't have fear but the idea is i'm only risking a small amount of the product to test and make sure my spreader is right now once you're done with this if you find that your spreader is calibrated right then you can go go to town and do what we call throw it down boys all over the rest of your lawn but until then let's calibrate on one section and let's also learn you're gonna learn so much by applying just to this one section so let's do that next okay now the next question people are going to ask well is alan is this is 25 pounds how do i get six and a quarter pounds out of it and actually i want you to take a little bit more than that one thing you're going to find with all spreaders really is they don't empty out of the bottom they just don't there's always some left in the bottom they're just not perfect precision equipment that way so i need 6.25 pounds of product but i'm actually going to put eight in here that way all the way down to the bottom i get consistent flow and we're going to measure or we're going to weigh out our fertilizer and again this is where it gets a little tedious but it's important it's important to understand the why behind what you're doing and to have the data behind it when you have good data about your applications well then you'll know if you get down the road a little bit further and something doesn't work right it fails you don't get the expected results if you can go back to the baseline data and know that you did put down the right amount then you can look to other causes for that problem and not a misapplication so that's why it's so important to weigh this out now i happen to have here a luggage scale these are cheap you can get them on amazon you can get a fish scale you can even take your bathroom scale and use that we just need to get really close so what i need here is eight pounds of product remember 6.25 is what needs to go out across the 2500 square foot area but i'm going to put eight pounds in just to make sure my flow is consistent all the way to the end first thing you do is get your what they call your tear weight which is just to get rid of the weight of the bucket [Applause] 8.4 that's good enough remember you need to get more than what you need so we're going to record that 8.4 pounds is what we're starting with now before i dump it in i like to look at my product you see i'm wearing my ppe personal protective equipment this is a chemical we have weed control in here so you do want to wear rubber gloves long pants long sleeves eye protection and you don't want to get this on your skin these are called prills and i like to look at the pearl size relative to the opening in the spreader again just to get a visual a lot of this is just about understanding the visuals so i take and put a little bit in there just like this just around the sides i just opened it up so see how the prills are the size of the prills as apparent to that opening you can just visualize that those are going to fall through they're pretty easy right because they're fine small prills and by the way small prills are good they get into the lawn a lot quicker they'll get down through the turf canopy and get into the soil when watered in a lot faster so i wrote it right there i got 8.4 pounds i'm gonna go ahead and load that in here in my hopper now the next thing we want to do is visualize so you can see this is how much is in the hopper right you can see how full it is relative to the size of the hopper and then you can see your area so i've done this section of lawn and tutorials before and i've actually started over there i'm going to start over here today just for something different i have a very logical line right here where my neighbor's lawn is this is a broadcast spreader and what that means is it's gonna broadcast the application out and around here and it's gonna go about two feet this way and about two feet this way it's got about a four foot what we call swath so i'm gonna go ahead and set my wheels just a couple feet in here and you'll be able to see the product will throw right to the line so that's just a visual that you use and i'm gonna go up and then when i come back on the second one the second one i'm gonna be using visuals and i'm gonna throw back to the wheel tracks of the first one and then i'm gonna go back up this way and i'm gonna throw back to the wheel tracks of the second pass and then i'm going to come back down this way and i'll be throwing every time i'm going to throw back to the wheel tracks of the previous pass that's the overlap that you do in addition to the overlap the other thing that matters is the walk speed it's actually three and a half miles per hour which we call a double fast walk or what i've termed over the years is putting some ass into it you want to feel like you're putting your ass into it when you're pushing it's a double fast walk and i'll show you what it looks like so you have the overlap and you have the double fast walk and you want to get six and a quarter pounds out on this section right here here we go [Music] okay let's see how we did [Music] okay so if this is right we should have somewhere around 2.15 pounds left that's if our spreader is calibrated right and we did a good application so 2.22 so that's plenty close should have had 2.15 pounds left over had 2.22 so that tells me that the setting coupled with my overlap and my walk speed is pretty darn close in fact very close close enough and you can do the same exact calibration now if yours came out and it was off maybe you were too light or too heavy then all you got to do is adjust the dial logically look at the drop hole and then go pick another section of the lawn and do it again until you get it dialed in the right way so there's just a couple last things to look at here real quick it talks about when to apply you don't want to apply when temperatures are over 90 degrees which were fine here and you are in most of the country and it does say to apply to a dry or do wetted lawn however you do not want to water it in for at least 24 hours so you want to let this sit for 24 hours and then you can water it in do not water for at least 24 hours after application so that's what you want to make sure you do so there you go guys step by step how to apply your first lawn application using a three weed and feed that should get you set on the right path to a healthy weed-free thick lawn now if you want more information please subscribe to the channel here hit that bell for notifications because i give all kinds of tips like this and even more advanced tips all throughout the year and also don't forget sign up for my free email newsletter where i give real-time tips and email every single tuesday with that i'm alan hayne the lawn care nut thanks so much for watching and i'll see you in the lawn [Music] do [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: The Lawn Care Nut

Views: 3,268,580

Rating: 4.7850261 out of 5

Keywords: ugly lawn, weed and feed, fix lawn weed feed, fix ugly lawn, weed and feed for lawns, best weed and feed, lawn weed and feed, weed and feed ugly lawn, how to fix an ugly lawn, how to apply weed and feed, lawn weed feed, lawn before and after, fix an ugly lawn, fix a bad lawn, diy lawn, reviving lawn, lawn full of weeds, weed and feed before and after, weed and feed lawn, weed and feed lawn care, lawn renovation diy, lawn renovation spring, allyn hane, lawn care nut, lawns

Id: RUU_fNlP5UA

Length: 27min 31sec (1651 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020