How To OVERSEED Your Lawn in SPRING // Complete Step by Step Guide

the overwhelming amount of questions that I've been receiving lately about over seating means I think it's time for an over seating video so today I want to talk about how you would actually over seed in the spring if you would like to and some of the reasons why it's challenged but some of the reasons why it might also work so I seated this area last fall but I had a lot of challenges with it there was some washouts that happened and it was getting later into the season it was Kentucky bluegrass it didn't get super thick because it takes Kentucky bluegrass a while to actually thicken up so that allowed some weeds to come in and it allowed some bare spots to still be there coming out of the winter season so this would be an example where you have some bare spots or maybe I would think about seating them or with Kentucky bluegrass I have the luxury of deciding to let that go and just feed it properly and let it spread on its own but if you have tall fescue or you have perennial ryegrass or a mix of those things and there's some bare spots like that it's not going to spread very far into those spots so you will need to intervene at that point now you can decide to wait until fall if you're ok with that that's fine or you can go through this method in the spring there's a few things though that you need to be concerned about in the spring [Music] the first thing you need to realize is that soil temperatures need to be up or higher in order for seed to germinate let's get a temperature reading here so cool season grass seeds should germinate between 50 and 65 degrees I'm at 50 right there but the higher end of the spectrum is obviously going to make things move a lot quicker and that's why follows better because your soil temperatures can be 70 maybe even more than that when at the time of seeding it just pushes the germination along a little quicker the second challenge would be these weeds now I'm also think I can just use a regular weed killer from the store get rid of these and then put my seed down but there's a reason why that's probably not going to work this is what I would consider a traditional just cheap ortho we begun that you can get at any store so most people would love to just go out and spray their weeds I'm going to show you why that can't be done when you're seeding so there's one key part in here that you're going to need to pay attention to and that's going to say bear spots may be reseeded four weeks after application so you'd have to wait four weeks after applying this product to be safe to put new seed down four weeks from now is getting already too late to be seeding or for most people it's not going to go well because you're getting too close to summer so there's one product right now that if you really got on it you can reseed in two weeks and this is that product right here it's an ester base so it should be better in cooler weather as well and it does say you can reseed in two weeks so if you're looking for something this could be an option but even so you really need to get on this right now because the faster you can get that grassy down and growing before we get to summertime the better next concern will the grass seeds survive the summer and the heat that's coming shallow root system has a hard time with that so some of it will likely survive some of it may die off keeping your watering up during the summer is very important on new grass heat that's just been planted in the spring and finally with the seeding method in the spring you're not going to be able to use the traditional pre-emergence so if you go to a store and you see something that says crabgrass preventer you cannot put that down unless there's one specific kind which I'll show you right here it's called Scotts with weed preventer you need to make sure the bag says it has an active ingredient of Meza try own that one can be used and I'm going to be using a sprayable version today to spray over top of these weeds that we have and then put the seed on top that is okay putting down the granular version is only going to prevent new weeds it doesn't last a long long time it doesn't last months like regular crabgrass preventer would so you need to be aware of that so if you've had a crabgrass problem in the past the spring seeding and the frequent watering and all of that happening during the time frame when crabgrass is actually emerging and coming out it will love those conditions and you may struggle with it in the summer there are some things you can do at that point I don't want you to come back to me later during the summer and say you didn't tell me about any of these problems or what could happen so make sure you understand the risks and I use the word risk but honestly I think that's too strong of a word with growing grass and everything involved in lawn care it all takes time it all takes patience so if you're willing to just accept some of those things and you succeed a little bit the spring and then you go at it again in the fall and that's your plan for this year perfect you haven't failed at anything if you get some weeds that come in or anything like that patience this isn't going to happen all overnight plan for the fall as well now I happen to understand that some of you out there going to look at those cons of doing the spring seeding and you don't care about that anyway you're gonna go for it in the interest of showing you all that today I'm going to go through the process of over seeding that area that I just showed you out by my street go through all of the steps here we go [Music] first thing you're going to need grass seed this is my grass seed that I planted on my side yard and the same mix that's going over there so for me I'd like to everything to sort of match I did play in Kentucky bluegrass in that area last year but if I add in a small amount of rye right here it's gonna match the rest of my yard everything's perfect there I don't mind if you're looking for something that's going to come up quick perennial rye grass and tall fescue will be faster I probably would not suggest bluegrass right now because with the cooler soil temperatures and the long germination time just know that bluegrass is going to take the longest right now and you may not want to wait that long it's up to you leaving that up to you I personally want to contain the weeds that are there I have this product right here called tenacity has that same active ingredient I was talking about in the starter fertilizer this is message I own but what this will allow me to do with spraying is actually spray the weeds that are there right now those should start dying and then also prevent whatever weeds might want to come up in this growing period so that's why I'm using a spray it's more advanced I understand some of you are just beginners and you don't understand spraying so I'll quickly talk about that this is a backpack sprayer I used it's sprayers plus definitely an investment but if you're going to be doing renovations or you think you're going to be getting quite into this lawn care thing I recommend looking into investing in something like this this is a battery-powered so you get consistent spray out of it if you want a cheaper option to go with for beginners you could get a pump version this one has a battery in it and it sprays consistently this is obviously more expensive because of that if you want to get a cheaper one you can get one that has a hand pump on it so you do all the work of pumping okay first thing I'm going to spray on the area is some of this liquid starter fertilizer the reason I'm showing this today is that it's a good option for smaller areas and smaller lawns people who don't want to buy like a 50-pound bag of granular starter fertilizer because they won't need it something like this that's what I'm going to use on this section if you do have a larger area go to your store or go online and pick up some starter fertilizer this Lesko product that i've used in the past sometimes you can find it home depot I've had good luck with that or there's some other options available online as well also one more thing reason this is blue is because I put some of this marker dye in there and the only reason I did that is just so I can see when it's spraying out this is a clear liquid product so when it's mixing with water it's harder to see so I just put some blue marker dye in there [Music] and I'm going to let that sit on there just a little bit dry out before I try to spray any of the weeds so I don't want to be spraying weeds that are all wet to make sure my weed killer works as best as possible now I like to use a regular spreader to put out my seed you have a drop spreader that's perfect but a lot of people don't the other option that you can use is one of these hand spreaders which I definitely have used for seed quite a bit as well now usually the bag of seed or wherever you bought the bag of seed that you're getting something online like here at seed superstore it will have the information on over seating rates or seeding rates in general so definitely you can go ahead and do it very technically if you'd like to you can measure it out by the pound and usually it will tell you four pounds per thousand square feet seven pounds per thousand square feet it just depends on the grass type but Kentucky bluegrass is usually only two to three pounds for a new yard and this is a Kentucky blue ride mix so I'm going to target that around five ish pounds per thousand and I only have 500 square feet today so basically what I'm telling you is don't overthink this too much set your spreader out of really low setting pour in some seed start spreading it and see what kind of coverage you're going to get [Music] okay so now for the fun part I've put on my spring shirt which I will have long sleeves on here and then got my protective gloves you know have long pants on as well and I'll put on some boots here in a second those are all precautions you want to use when you're spraying so what's nice about this product here when you get this is that it comes with this little thing so you can measure it out and this is just the general rate but this what I'm going to use so it'll be half a teaspoon for one gallon of water and I'm going to mix up one gallon of solution in my sprayer [Music] [Music] I'm going to fill the rest of this up with water to the one gallon mark there's two more things I'm going to add them and add some of this marking guy that way I'll be able to see where I'm spraying and I'm going to add some surfactant this will help this stick through the actual weeds that are there helps the effectiveness their rate is supposed to be one to two teaspoons so I've got a little measuring cup here [Music] [Music] [Music] so actually one of my subscribers last year contacted me and said I'll see you doing all these renovations with your peat moss and putting it down by hand have you ever thought about getting one of those peat moss spreaders I said sure I've thought about it but just haven't been able to really find one easily and he's like well I actually made one and I'll send it to you to use in a renovation coming up if you'd liked you today is the first time I'm trying it so thank you so much for sending this for me to give it a whirl here this thing works out well it's going to change my renovation game a lot because spreading peat moss at the end is a messy dirty process and it's not much fun so what we should have to do is open this up it's got these nice little sort of spring-loaded clip [Music] [Music] that is awesome so what happens here is all that loose stuff gets put down you still need to break up some of the chunks these are able to be used we're just really dry so break those up before you put it in but what it does prevent from putting down there's all these twigs stuff like that and then it just leaves a perfectly even nice layer on there that is amazing all right I've pretty much got it loaded up full now let's get another shot [Music] [Music] all right so that's done I'm seriously impressed it was much harder to get the peat moss out of the bag and into the actual peat moss spreader than it was to spread this out it's very easy to do I would suggest maybe trying to get that peat moss out of the bag and into something like a wheelbarrow or something where you can grab at it easier and sort of break it up and get the moisture out of it then just throw it right in the spreader and it goes very quickly look at this I got nothing on me no dirt no dust first time I've ever spread peat moss and had not been filthy afterwards so that is a wind [Music]

Channel: Ryan Knorr Lawn Care

Views: 1,397,603

Rating: 4.8742943 out of 5

Keywords: lawn, spring lawn care, overseeding, fix ugly lawn, overseeding in spring, how to overseed lawn, how to overseed in spring, how to fix my lawn, spring seeding, when to seed lawn in spring, spring lawn care steps, lawn renovation, lawn tips, lawn guide, overseeding steps, lawn seeding steps

Id: 3Q527KlFxQA

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 05 2020