How to Properly Seed Your Lawn, Addressing Tree Roots, Making a Patch Mix: The Cheapest Way!

welcome to the wrested garden this episode is actually all about reseeding year long something I have not talked about before most of us have lawns I've been here almost 15 years and the trees have sent roots across the surface sucking out all the nutrients in my lawn the shade has come in the lawn is really really beat-up so I want to show you how you can do this the cheapest way possible and for it to be really really effective we're gonna use 10 bags of topsoil just your low end topsoil that was a dollar sixty four bag three cubic feet of peat moss that was about twelve dollars a bag pick out the grass seed that you need I need about seven pounds and you can kind of measure it to kind of the size of this long to get some idea and pick the mix that works if you're in shade you want to shade mix if you're in a mix of an area like I am shade and Sun and if you're into Sun you want full Sun you also want to get some sort of feed with at least a twenty nitrogen there's not a lot of nutrients left in here there's not a lot of organic matter to hold water for the lawn it's just really really beat up and about two years ago two and a half years ago that's when it started getting in trouble and I never really addressed it you can see we're gonna work in this area this is a big patch area so this is what its gonna look like at the end of the video so we're gonna take the lawn how you just saw it turn it into this make sure you water it every day for ten days in about seven to ten days your grass seed will be sprouting and your lawn will be back to where you want it to be sun is dried out cracking the soil and I'm just gonna give you a quick look around of what we're gonna repair all the way around there back through there I also have a lot of moss coming in we're not going to worry about that right now if you want to use a weed and fee to get rid of some of your weeds go ahead and do that but I do caution you don't save the grass clippings if you use a weed and feed for at least six to eight weeks after you put it down because those chemicals do stay with the clippings and you don't want to be putting them on your garden so the first thing that we're going to do is cut the grass gonna do that and then we're going to water this for about thirty minutes to an hour to really soak the soil and then we're going to put down the peat moss in the patches that are really missing the grass seed that's going to be a layer to hold moisture then we'll get a seed on top of the peat moss wet that down and then we're gonna put the topsoil on top of that alright so the grass is cut you want to use the mulching setting and just chop everything up put it right onto the surface of your lawn I'm going to go over the problem areas right here it's going to get a lot of seed topsoil peat moss I'll use this area specifically to show you how to do the root system of the trees over 15 years have just gotten really big and they take all the life and moisture soil not soil life but all the moisture all the nutrients out of the lawn and then yet in the shade the grass just doesn't do well and again you can see the roots right through here so we're going to put more topsoil over here to kind of build it up a little bit along with the peat moss you can also see the different ant hills if you have that sometimes these might be bees to some sort of bee either way if you have the insects you want to treat them now with whatever product you want to use because if they're here they're gonna probably make their way over to your garden I will also list the steps in the description so we've cut the grass and now I'm actually going to spray my have set it out of order I'm gonna spray the fertilizer down now it's a 2000 and just cover it over the whole area i'm also using something to kill off the weeds don't get this near your garden and again I want to stress don't use grass clippings if you've used a weed and feed product so we're gonna put that down now and then we're gonna water so that it gets into the soil the nitrogen gets into the soil the chemicals to take out the weeds gets into the soil and then I'll come back and show you the next step so when you're putting down your nitrogen spray I just want to show you how to do it just follow the instruction but you're not soaking the soil down you're not doing the watering you're just getting the nitrogen down or the weed and feed if you're using that and they meet by the time you get to the bottom of the lawn if it's a hot day the upper areas good to be dry but you're just getting a nice even coating of nitrogen throughout the lawn and then once this is done I'm going to use a sprinkler maybe 45 minutes of water 60 minutes it's a hot day I want this to be soaked and then we'll get to the peat moss topsoil and seeds okay so everything's been watered for about an hour and you want to get to the point where it's soft when you walk on it or put your finger down it'll leave a dent that means we got the moisture down there and this is also the area that was all cracked so if your soils cracked because it's clay you want at least water until the cracks go away that means that the clay is absorbing water the soil is absorbing the water we're gonna do this whole area and before we get to putting down the peat moss again you want to be really soaked down peat moss is dry coming out of this three cubic foot bag so we just want to put some puddling in the areas that we're gonna throw the peat moss down that will absorb the water and you can do it however you want throw down some shovel fulls do it by hand whatever you'd like to do and I'm gonna go and cover the whole area with about a quarter inch of the peat moss then we're gonna put the seed down and rake over that but let me get this set up and show you what that looks like so about a quarter inch of the peat moss is down and everybody's coming out cutting their grass so I apologize for the extra noise but this is the main area that I really wanted to put the peat moss down first and you might say why can't you just use peat moss a little way it's very light and you can see after I soaked it down you want to put it down that's soaked it again the water will really run it away so you can't just put peat moss down because if you get a hard rain it's all gonna wash away so the next thing is is really taking the seed and putting a hefty amount of seed all around and then we're going to put the topsoil on there and that will wait down the peat moss that will be on top of the seed in this area I'm not going to put a lot of it because the soil level is pretty high already and it's not so much the tree roots over here it's just that it got beat up so I'm gonna seat everything show you what that looks like get the topsoil on there then we're getting over to the one one more of it yeah so one more area that's the problem area with the roots coming through okay so this area's done that was two bags of the topsoil the 40-pound topsoil and it covered this whole area so let's go ahead and walk on over to where the root is and for this one we're going to be doing it a little bit differently we're going to rake the topsoil in first that is 344 pound bags see if I can do this with one hand but you're just going to take a rake and really try and even this out over the whole space maybe like a quarter of an inch to a half an inch and then once that's done we're going to put peat moss on top of here and the reason we're doing that is because we're really creating a brand new growing space for these seeds we're trying to cover up the wood and we're just going to go ahead and even it out there and it'd probably be this whole general area will be done like that put down the peat moss put down the seed and then I'm gonna rake it together and I'll show you the progress from there so use peat moss because it's gonna wash away you don't want to just use this topsoil because it's inexpensive and it's gonna dry out really quickly so the combination of soaking the ground putting the peat moss down putting the seeds on top of there and then dropping the topsoil on there presses the seeds down and everything's good to germinate nicely now of course this is the cheapest way to do it but you could buy premium topsoil that already has the peat moss mixed in there in it if you want to spend more money you could get garden soil or even you know a better soil and that's just up to you but I wanted to show you how you can just make it out of forty pound bags of topsoil and peat moss and kind of take care of a whole lawn about this size all right let me get to finishing up and then we will wrap up so here's the area pretty much finished out I'll show you how I make it patch mix to right at the end but I've covered the lawn in two basic ways you know peat moss seed topsoil over here and then a deeper area where while I needed to go deeper with the soil because of the roots it was top soil peat moss and then the sea down and I'll just go through and rake it around until everything mixes together nicely and then I'm gonna water everything in now for the rest of the lawn two parts peat moss one part topsoil just mix it all together that's probably like eight handfuls of seed but you want the seed mix to be just like that and I will just take this and drop it down in areas that I want to patch up that weren't as severe as the one that's behind me or the area over there so this was ten pounds I'm sorry ten bags a basic cheap topsoil that was 40 pounds of bag three cubic feet of the peat moss seven to ten pounds of seed and it's enough to really take care of this area so if you subscribe the second part of the video will really show you how the grass came in and then we'll talk about feeding and taking care of it for the long term rather than just giving it the nitrogen to get it going and get it growing after you're done make sure you water it for about an hour every day for ten days and your lawn should come back and you look pretty good thanks for watching please check out my seed shop and garden shop at WWDC garden com thanks

Channel: Gary Pilarchik (The Rusted Garden)

Views: 246,218

Rating: 4.788969 out of 5

Keywords: Vegetable, Gardening, lawn

Id: Ph1kWhcUhk8

Length: 9min 37sec (577 seconds)

Published: Sat May 12 2018