How to Reseed a Lawn | This Old House

now kevin the key is to expose and loosen the soil in a small yard with small patches of dead grass you could use this dethatching rake you simply work it through pull out all the dead grass and loosen up the soil so now the soil is exposed so the seed will take it leaves behind the live grass and we're ready to seed right but that's quite a bit of work i'd say so so in a big area we'd use this machine i've seen this before you've used it with us it's a power rake right right and it has these steel tines underneath that spin around and they'll go through the lawn ripping out all the dead grass we'll set it low so it goes through the dead grass and down into the soil now the drawback is you're ripping up all that dead grass you have to rake that all off then you put down your seed then you rake it in quite a bit of work you've got a solution i do take a look over here you love your toys look at this monster this is a sliced seed if you help me lift it up the business end is down here these steel knives physically cut a groove down into the soil now up top here we have a bin where we'll dump in all our seeds there's an agitator in the bottom pushes the seeds out and down through this tube where they land on a disc now the disc turns and pushes the seeds down into the groove cut by the knives so the machine ensures that our seed gets into the soil that's right and when you're done no cleanup no raking all right i'll finish filling this fill it all the way to the top cap now there's a chart here to tell us how to drop the appropriate amount of seed down that's good now what you're gonna do is we're gonna start the machine the first thing you'll do is go to full throttle okay then you're gonna drop the dead switch come on over here pull that one now you're gonna drop the machine down low and you're gonna engage it but you gotta hold that to make the seed come out okay all right nice straight line okay now stop make your corner that's the hardest part of this whole thing is turning that big heavy buddy around when making a turn it's impossible to seed all the way out to the outside edge so once the interior is done we're going to make a pass all the way around the outside perimeter to cover those spots all right let me check see how you're doing for seed well we got to fill it up so what are we laying down here roger well we have a couple different conditions here with sun and a little bit of shade so we're using a blend there's a little bit of blue grass rye and fescue in there okay now we want to put this down at four pounds per thousand square feet the bag told us that right that's right you look over here on the chart and we have 4.1 pounds per thousand square feet 65. that's the setting on our gauge on the machine no it's not because we're going over it twice so we have to divide that in half so 32 and a half is a gauge setting and that's what i have it at right now all right i'll get back to it for our second pass we're going to run the machine at a perpendicular line to our original one over the whole yard to ensure complete coverage well kevin looks good yeah it's getting there now it's time to put down a starter fertilizer now this starter fertilizer has phosphorus in it and that's going to promote root growth in our new seedlings all right so that's what we have in here that's right and it also has crabgrass preventer in it right because we're getting full sun here and that's going to cause crabgrass to grow if we don't take care of it yeah but this one's special it'll stop the crabgrass from growing but it won't stop our new seedlings from growing okay so how long until we see new grass oh i would say about 10 days with good watering

Channel: This Old House

Views: 324,667

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, Seed (Food), grass seed, seeding, Landscaping (Industry), Landscape (Industry), Gardening (Interest), Lawn, yard, Do It Yourself (Hobby), Repair (Website Category), roger cook, kevin o'connor (TV Program), Hobby (Interest)

Id: DfJ_u490z0M

Length: 4min 0sec (240 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 25 2015