How to Pre-Germinate Grass Seed

I just need a more efficient way to germinate my grass seed so in this video we're going to show you just that what's going on everybody this is Chaz with homegrown how to welcome back to the channel if this is your first time thanks for stopping by in this video I'm going to be showing you how to pre-germinate your grass seed pre-germinating your grass seed speeds up that process by about 50 percent my lawn is currently a Kentucky Bluegrass and perennial rye grass mix I'm going to be over seeding with Kentucky Bluegrass the Kentucky Bluegrass is my favorite grass type just because it is so resilient it does really well with foot traffic Kentucky Bluegrass also does really well self-repairing itself so if you have any spots that die out get damaged the Kentucky Bluegrass overtime will self-repair itself the brand of grass seed I'm using is a Turf science genetics grass seed this specifically is a Kentucky Bluegrass variety and whenever you're buying grass seed make sure you read the label every label has either this sewn on if it's like a burlap bag it will have this information sewn onto the bag or if yours is plastic like this it will have a sticker that has the ingredients that you've got here so I've got a 98 pure seed 25 other crop seed 1.5 percent inner matter and 20 and 0.25 weed seeds now ideally you'd want zero weed seeds but in my case I am okay with that because I do a pretty good job of upkeeping my weeds so those I shouldn't have any issues with that especially if you're buying from a big box store make sure you read the seed label because a lot of times they have just a lot of inner matter in them and there's really not very many seeds so be sure to check your labels before you purchase your product so what I'll be doing here is I'll be taking a paint strainer bag I bought these on Amazon I'll link these into the description below they have an elastic top and they just go right over a five gallon bucket so then you'll just take that seed and just dump it right into the paint strainer bucket here [Music] so in my instance using this Kentucky Bluegrass you want to let that soak for at least five days I'm probably gonna allow that to soak a little bit longer than that probably about seven days based off of everything I've read and researched this has a much higher percentage of working than just traditionally spreading your seed out on your lawn and allowing that to germinate and again that cuts that time in half some people have said that their Kentucky Bluegrass has germinated in about seven days after spreading that which is insane and you want to make sure you're prepping that lawn as well prepping that lawn fur germination you can see my color is starting to fade a little bit here just because I'm slowly bringing my height of cut down all right guys it has been about 12 hours since I last filled that up so we're going to go ahead and switch out the water because again every 12 hours we want to recycle that water just so that there's no toxicity to the seed or allowing that seed to kind of rot out so I'm going to drain it kind of let the seed completely strain and then put it back in the bucket so you can actually see how dark that water has gotten I'm actually going to keep that water and I'm going to add that back into the lawn I think after the first session it's not going to be quite as dark but I'm going to add this batch back into the lawn after I overseed just to give some more nutrients to that and then I think what I'm going to do from here on out take the excess water and apply that to some of my trees give some of my trees some good nutrients throughout the back there for the pre-germination thing is a good experiment for me I've never tried this before everything I've read everybody's had great success so I'm pretty excited about trying this out check out that Kentucky Bluegrass tea I've got here man that stuff looks awesome now you can do this pre-germination process with any type of grass seed you just want to be considerate of what type of grass seed you are using Kentucky Bluegrass for instance takes a lot longer to germinate than most other grass seeds it can take anywhere from 20 to 30 days to germinate also if you notice any white Puffs coming off of your seeds you're going to want to go ahead and spread that out on a lawn because it's getting really close to germinating so if you want to attempt to do this take the seed type and the average days of germination and multiply that by 1 3 and that'll give you how long you need to soak your seed been seven days since I started soaking this so we're gonna let that drain out as much as we can and so while I've got that draining if you look closely it's still kind of draining some water a little bit I've got some peat moss I'm going to be spreading that on top of the seed in some of those bare areas that I've got and then I'm going to mix the seed along with some some granular humic this stuff is amazing this is a really good biostimulant it has a lot of good properties to help build up your soil as well so it also helps with retaining moisture as well so pretty awesome product I put this on my lawn about two to three times per year and usually in the spring and in the fall but I'm going to be adding it here because it has a low salt content and what I'm really using that mostly for is yeah the nutrients are great but also what it's going to be used for is basically an adhesive allow the wet seed to stick to this dry humic and I'm going to mix that together inside of this bin and then throw it in the hopper of my spreader so I actually ended up making a mistake when I was mixing the humic with the seed I ended up actually needing two bags I only planned on one when I originally started this and the Sea just ended up being way too wet to spread throughout the spreader it would not go through as you can see right there seat is super wet so with that seed being too wet I ended up waiting another day to spread that out on the lawn I had to go buy another bag of the granular Humane mix that together again and then it was able to spread much easier you can see here after mixing that the seed does look much more dry this is the case for sure and it definitely was much easier to spread [Music] foreign [Music] spots I went ahead and did a heavier application by using my hands just to drop the seed in the area foreign guys we've got all of that seed spread out finally it's all spread out adding more of that granular humic acid was really awesome it helped a lot I kind of let that seed sit overnight and what I had and it still was just super wet and would not spread at all and the drop spreader or the broadcast spreader with what I did I mixed more of that humic in it was still unable to spread with the drop spreader which is what I was hoping to use but the broadcast spreader worked wonders so now that we've got all the seed mixed I'm going to go ahead and pour some of this in some of the bare spots so like in this area here I'm gonna go ahead and pour that in the bare spots rake it in nice and even that way it gives it some protection and the peat moss holds a lot more moisture so those bare spots will be able to retain more moisture as I irrigate that in now I'm just going to set a sprinkler timer I'm going to do probably I'm gonna start with three sessions of about eight minutes or so to really keep this seed moist during today I'll just kind of monitor that make sure the seed and the soil is staying moist if it doesn't seem like it's staying wet enough I will go ahead and add a fourth cycle to that the key to successful seeding and over seeding is is keeping the seed moist I know a lot of you love that word moist so that is it for the pre-germinating the seed and spreading that hopefully this does really well subscribe to the channel and you'll see kind of the results of that I'll be giving some updates over on Instagram as well as here on YouTube so subscribe to YouTube go subscribe to my Instagram at homegrown howto if you guys have any questions about this process drop it in the comment section below if you like this video give me a thumbs up we'll see in the next one

Channel: Homegrown How To

Views: 216,242

Keywords: grass seed, grass seeding a lawn, how to grow grass seed, how to plant grass, how to plant grass seed, lawn care, lawn care tips, planting grass seed, pre germinate seed, the lawn care nut

Id: YGHyoyjaiAY

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2022