How to Revitalize a Lawn | Ask This Old House

[Music] eli you sent me an email about having a problem with the grass growing in your backyard but i gotta tell you this is a really nice backyard thank you we moved in a little less than a year ago and we um when we moved in we found that the previous owner had put in a new septic which is great but the grass really wasn't growing in on top of that it was it was muddy rocky and what time of year was that well it was probably in july july you had to pick just the worst time to try to get a lawn to grow competing with high temperatures drought and crabgrass and other weeds getting in the lawn in fact you see all this brown in here eli this is crab grass it's an annual that grows set seeds and those seeds come back the next year and it is aggressive it'll smother out any seeding we do during the summer over here got a little bit of broadleaf weed which is crowding out the space a little bit the good news is it's fall and it's the perfect time to get a lawn in that'll come up and be strong and get even stronger in the spring and resist all of these weeds but it's going to involve some work to get it to that point you ready yes let's go excellent [Music] all right eli this is the first tool we're going to use this is a core aerator in the front if you look here it has a gas engine and below that is a weighted barrel in the front to hold it down because what we're doing is driving these tines down into the ground and pull out a plug and that's going to open up the soil for the compost seed and fertilizer we're going to be putting in to help get established lawn very good so we're ready to start it up and put the tines down first thing we do is start the engine make sure you have your hearing protection on all right now back here we have two things we have the bar which lowers the aerators and we're just gonna take and drop it down like that then we engage right here and that's the drive that's going to push this machine across [Music] okay now we've gone a long way we want to turn and go perpendicular to those lines to make sure we get plenty of cores out of the whole line all righty like take a look at a couple of these these are the plugs we took out of the soil and they're a little bit heavy a little bit clay so i want to break that up and to do that we're going to use compost this is just the greatest thing in the world the plants love it the grass loves it so we're going to incorporate this into our lawn and it's really going to make our lawn jump sounds great you want to get like a half an inch to an inch so to level off the compost we're just going to use the back side of the rake working back and forth and let it spread right down into those holes in the roots of the grass all right whenever we do a new lawn we want to put down a fertilizer that's high in phosphorus that'll make the roots grow that's what we want this time of year let those roots grow and spread out and get tough for next year you're going to spread it according to the directions sounds good now we're ready to put down seed here in the northeast we use a blend of seed we like to have rye fescue and bluegrass in that blend because when you go around your yard you have different conditions you have shade or sun so we have to adapt a little bit to it like ryan fescue they'll tolerate a little shade bluegrass wants full sun excellent roger why is the grassy blue i told you we're gonna use bluegrass i know pretty bad huh actually this is a coating put on the seed by the manufacturer to help hold moisture to the seed so it'll germinate better we're gonna take the seed and we're gonna spread it down on the lawn using the spreaders you go one way i'll go the other way and then we just gotta rake it in what you're doing now is the most important step of the whole day if we don't keep that seed moist it won't germinate so i want you to water it lightly probably once a day and keep it moist and that'll germinate in a week or ten days once it germinates you'll want to give it a little more water again just keeping it damp after it reaches a height of three inches i want you to cut it back to two inches but bag it i don't want those clippings to smother on new seedlings okay we'll do and thank you so much for all of your advice it's great and in the spring yolan's going to jump up and be way ahead of anyone else in the neighborhood pretty good for a first time lawn owner excellent i look forward to it thank you you're welcome i love a guy who loves his lawn yeah so you can't say it enough roger i mean we've told the story before but the timing of when we seed is so critical fall great someone not so great i mean in the summer right i mean we're just fighting too many things right the crabgrass wants to come up the lawn wants to dry out not good seeding the little seedlings come up and they're tiny fragile little things and then you take and dry out for one day gone you gotta start over again so if you do have to plant in the spring and sometimes you just have to yeah what's the formula everything we did plus a pre-emergent crabgrass control crabgrass is insidious it just comes up and smothers everything right so you want to stop that we use a chemical called two percent and it actually physically stops the crab grass from growing up through the soil yeah and not all pre-emergents are equal because some of them will stop the grass seed right you want to make sure you have one labeled for new seeding okay and then um in the past when you've done seeding i've usually seen two pieces of heavy equipment um the aerator but also a dethatcher although no dethatching here no brand new lawn no thatch yet right two or three years down the road we'll come in and run the d theatre over it okay and then in terms of the fertilizer i mean there's bags for spring summer fall what's the difference well when you look at the bag there's three numbers on the back of it the first one's nitrogen the second one's phosphorous and the third one is potassium phosphorus promotes roots that's what we want to grow if the nitrogen number is really high it's going to produce all top growth that's not going to be good for the plant you'll be cutting it twice a week it's going to look beautiful but with new seeds we're really concerned about getting the roots down exactly all right happy planting

Channel: This Old House

Views: 965,923

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, Episode, TV Show, lawn, grass, Roger Cook, Diy Smarts, revitalize a lawn, revitalizing a lawn, this old house episode, this old house all new, all new this old house, all new episode this old house, home renovation ideas on a budget

Id: 94msufYZzaQ

Length: 7min 13sec (433 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2018