How to Remove Crabgrass | This Old House

this is what a clump of crab grass looks like in the fall it spreads out and smothers the existing grass and this clump came from a single seed the best thing the combat crab grass is a good strong lawn if you keep your lawn cut at two and a half to three inches tall in real thick next spring it creates a real shady condition down here the crabgrass seeds won't germinate crabgrass cannot take shade at all first thing i want to do is physically remove as much of this crabgrass as we can so i've set the mower on its lowest setting and we're going to take and lift up as much of that crab grass as we can at the same time we're going to vacuum up the seed into this bag and get rid of it you'd never do this with a mower that didn't have a bag on it because it would blow all the seed onto the lawn and cause you more problems now we've removed the crab grass and the seed from our strip but that's only half the battle we have to do something to keep that crabgrass from coming back next spring so what we're going to do is we are going to plant a new seeded lawn in here and to prepare this for the seed i'm going to use a power rail a power rake has a motor that drives a series of steel teeth and they're going to cut a groove down into that soil so that the new seedling roots can go right down into the ground now jim what i'm going to do is lay out some of this compost my black gold what i want you to do is take and rake it out in about a half an inch thick layer now this is one of the few times i'll let you use the back of the rake make a nice level seed bed with it jim i'm going to fill this drop spreader with a starter fertilizer now this is a special fertilizer that'll help get our grass seedlings off to a good start i'm just going to make one pass and we'll be ready to seed okay this is a seed blended for our sunny situation it has a little blue grass and a rye and a fescue in there now just take that spreader line it up with a strip all right one nice uniform pass all the way down okay now i'm just gonna come behind you with a plastic rake turned upside down and move that compost on so it just covers up that new seed now jim i want you to water this at least once a day maybe twice if it's dry but very lightly i don't want to see all our beautiful seed washing down the road here's what i want you to do next spring i want you to put down a pre-emergent crab grass control it's a dry product you put down with a spreader make sure you water it in with a half an inch to an inch of water that's going to get it down in the soil and it'll stop the crab grass from germinating now sometimes we get a little bit of crab grass show up during the summer no matter what we do and that's a situation where you can either go around and by hand reach down into the root system pull it out and dispose of it off the property so none of those seeds get in the grass if you have a large yard you may want to use a post-emergent crabgrass control now you mix this up in a small sprayer and go around and hit all the young crabgrass plants it's more effective on the young ones than it is on older ones

Channel: This Old House

Views: 1,056,354

Keywords: This Old House, Ask This Old House, DIY, Home Improvement, DIY Ideas, Renovation, Renovation Ideas, How To Fix, How To Install, How To Build, crabgrass, grass, Do It Yourself, Home Repair, Garden, Landscaping, Landscape, Digitaria, roger cook, lawn, yard, Green, Flowers, landscaping ideas, landscaping for beginners, how to landscape around house, landscaping how to guide

Id: V8HH4rdacew

Length: 3min 24sec (204 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 24 2014