How to Treat Dry Spots in the Lawn

unfortunately for us it's still very toasty super dry doesn't really look like there's an end in sight drought stress and dry spots are just a fact of life right now so in today's video I'm going to go over some steps and options on how to diagnose and treat dry spots in your lawn what's up guys I'm Rhett welcome back to lawn Insider I'm still trying to fight the good fight here guys and you can see I'm still holding on to some color haven't put any products other than water and some of the products I'm going to talk about later in this video on the lawn in the last nearly two months now just because I don't want to really push any growth under this period of extreme stress but I'm definitely not immune to some of the problems that come along with extreme heat and extreme drought and specifically I'm talking about dry spots luckily I'm mainly dealing with just dry spots in my yard and not widespread drought stress but here's a look at at some of the houses around my neighborhood and you can see that not everybody is quite as lucky as me let me go ahead and show you the other side of the house as well and basically all you're going to notice is that the Lawns are struggling right now so this has not been an ideal weather pattern it's just been nothing but a hundred plus degree highs no rain at this point for almost two months and The Lawns are struggling and if you don't have an irrigation system and if you don't have your watering schedule dialed in your lawn is definitely going to be on The Struggle Bus the first thing that I'm thinking whenever I see a dry spot in the lawn is is that area getting enough water and the way I'm going to check that is I'm going to go run that zone with my irrigation system so this is assuming you have an irrigation system and I'm going to scatter either tuna cans or I have these measuring cups that I picked up off of Amazon throughout that zone and then run it for about 15 to 20 minutes then when it's finished running go check the measuring cups if they all have about the same amount of water then you know that just water isn't the only issue then we can move on to diagnosing the problem as being something else and that isn't to say that more water isn't going to be the solution it's just telling you that that area is at least getting the same amount of water as all the surrounding areas so the next thing that I'm going to do whenever I see a dry spot is just look at my surroundings and see if there's anything around that dry spot that could be causing the dry spot so for instance I have a dry spot in my lawn right here I'm not sure how great you can see it on video but that is most likely caused by the sun beating down on this window right here and then it reflecting in this grass and just baking that grass and drying it out at a faster rate than this grass around it so each dry spot is going to have its own individual reason on why it looks the way that it does so here's is another good example this area is more yellow right here and it's right next to the sidewalk so areas that are next to the sidewalk driveways roads those areas are going to get hotter and they're going to be more prone to drying out than areas that are further away from the sidewalk and then we've got a spot like right here where it's right on the path from my wife's car to the door and foot traffic can also be an added stressor to your dry spots and here we have yet another area that's just getting toasted by the heat that's coming off of the sidewalk but not every dry spot is going to be so easy to diagnose and even the ones we just looked at could have other underlying problems underneath the soil so that's when we would go to these next steps one thing that I like to do is pour a little water onto the dry spot see if I can get my shadow out of the way here and see if it soaks directly into the soil in that area or if it just kind of sits on top so in this case you can see that a lot of it is sitting on the top so for whatever reason this area has become hydrophobic meaning that it's not letting water soak in to its soil very easily and it's more prone to get lost to evaporation and then runoff especially if you're on a slope Okay so we've identified a dry spot we don't know exactly what's causing it we've poured some water on there we notice there is some pooling so that's when we can grab a screwdriver and kind of probe around a little bit and you're just going to check around in the area and you can see I cannot push this screwdriver down all the way into the ground so sometimes you might even find big rocks or debris you know very obvious causes of these dry spots but in most cases it's just going to be that that area has become very compact and hydrophobic and let me show you in comparison one of these Greener areas just so you can see how easy that screwdriver pushes in in those spots so in order for those areas to thrive we have to somehow break up that compaction and we can do that a couple of ways we can either aerate whether that's manually aerating or with a machine where we're pulling plugs getting rid of the plugs that's going to cause that ground to be less compact it does have some potential negative side effects though in this current weather pattern because it's so hot the days are so long we're getting so little water that having those holes exposed to the air can actually cause the ground to dry out more quickly and kind of work against what we're trying to do here so your other option is to apply some sort of product and we're going to talk about a few of those right now here are a few products that are going to help you in your fight against dry spots these three over are actually going to work pretty similarly even though they are marketed very differently this one is a surfactant from Southern AG this is actually the pellet for the wetting agent that I showed you in my last video video and then this is baby shampoo but all of these are non-ionic surfactants and they are all going to reduce the surface tension of water and it's going to make it easier for that water to make it into the soil so that's the idea on all three of these products they're not going to work the exact same and they're going to have the exact same ingredients but that is going to be the general idea behind all three of these hydrotain on the other hand is going to work a little bit differently hydrotain is not a surfactant hydrotain is actually going to make available water vapor into water droplets that can then be used by the roots of the plant so hydrotain is actually the unique one out of these four products it's going to work a little bit differently but all four of them have the same common goal of helping you fight your dry spots if you do choose to go the economic route and you go with the baby shampoo just make sure that you're not using a shampoo that is antibacterial it can't be antimicrobial and you want it to be non-scented so just regular mild baby shampoo now as far as what you're going to actually use to apply these products the hydrotain comes in its own hose in sprayer bottle so it can hook up directly to the hose the wetting agent pellet is going to go into this pellet Pro wading agent application gun right here and you're going to connect this to the hose as well and then the other two products there the surfactant and the baby shampoo if you wanted to go that route you need something like this this is just an ortho dialing spray you can pick it up from any of your local big box stores or obviously you can get it online as well for this video since I actually have babies they're going to use that baby shampoo and it's going to mix the same way I'm going to go ahead and use this surfactant and apply some of that to a couple of my dry spots out here and then for the other products I'm going to see if I can find some of my older footage just so you can see me using those products as well but all four of those are good options and I've used all four of them in my lawn heck I'm throwing the kitchen sink at this dry yard just to try to keep it looking its best and eventually hopefully we'll get some rain so I've already got my dialing spray taken apart unfortunately my hose is a little leaky right now it's neither here nor there for the sake of this example I'm going to go ahead and just use maybe an ounce or two of this surfactant you do not have to be real precise with how much you're using so right there that is two ounces and then I'm actually going to fill it up the rest of the way with water and you can just use your Ortho for that okay like that and then we're going to screw on the top now as far as what we're going to have the dial at again it doesn't really matter it's just kind of personal preference there because we don't have to be real specific with this product but I'm going to go ahead and crank it up a little higher because I know I'm treating fairly small areas so now we are ready to go it's just a matter of point and shoot okay so my Ortho down spray is ready to go I'm just going to pick a dry spot right here for instance and I would just work around to all my dry spots in the yard and make sure I'm hitting them and that's really all there is to it all right I think I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up right there hope you enjoyed it hope you found something in that video helpful if you did please leave it a like if you're enjoying the content you want to continue to see more of it hit that like subscribe button below the video and if you have any questions comments concerns leave those in the comment section below I'll see you all again soon lawn Insider out

Channel: Lawn Insider

Views: 9,831

Keywords: how to fix dry spots in your lawn, how to treat dry lawn, dry spots in lawn, drought stressed lawn, heat stressed lawn, how to revive a dry lawn, how to fix a dry lawn, how to repair dry lawn, treating dead grass, summer dormancy, summer lawn maintenance, texas lawn care, surfactant, wetting agent, hydretain, H2O Maximizer, Underhill, fixing an ugly lawn, texas lawn maintenance, lawn tips, lawn care nut, bermuda grass maintenance, ortho dial n spray

Id: cXT6x8a0YXA

Length: 10min 24sec (624 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 30 2023