I seeded 100% Kentucky Bluegrass and got what I deserved

are you thinking about seating kentucky bluegrass well i want you to know it sucks it's a cesspool filled with disease it sucks in the shade and it takes forever to get established but despite all those shortcomings it's my favorite type of grass and today i'm going to tell you what [Music] so for those of you guys that are new to my channel last fall i ended up doing a complete lawn renovation let's just say i went through a early midlife crisis and i completely torched my whole front lawn there was absolutely nothing wrong with it but i wanted to see it a complete pure cultivar so i ended up going on the ntep website if you guys want to know how to choose the best grass seed i'll link a video up there and based on recommendations and studies that have been done i ended up choosing midnight kentucky bluegrass and i'd be lying to you if i said seeding one type of grass doesn't present its own set of problems which brings me to my first issue with it see most people say that it takes forever for kentucky bluegrass to start germinating but with me it actually germinated in five days but i got lucky because there was a few 90 degree days that came right after i seeded and that helped like accelerate the process and yeah by the way it's the end of april and it's snowing here in chicago in case you guys were wondering see my problem didn't come with slow germination kentucky bluegrass goes through this phase called sprout and pout which means it'll germinate from the seed and the leaf blade will be sticking up but it won't be growing it'll just stay there and it'll stay the same length for like a month this went off for like 30 days or so and then finally i started getting some growth and by that time the temperatures were getting a lot cooler and like winter was right around the corner see me personally i'm used to seeing perennial rye grass which will start to sprout like within three to five days and then you'll be mowing it within a week after seeding it so i definitely had to get used to how slow the kentucky bluegrass was and i could definitely say that i missed the fast-growing effects of the perennial rye grass it usually takes a couple seasons for kentucky bluegrass to fully establish and start to spread out so now that i'm in the spring following my renovation i'm going to push some nitrogen in it hopefully get it spread out more by the springtime and we'll have that nice full kbg lung you know another thing that's like super annoying about the kvg is that it's not even awoken yet i remember when i had my old perennial rye grass lawn it pretty much stayed green all winter time and by now i would have been on like my third or fourth mowing but now with this kvg i haven't even mowed it once yet it's still dormant it's not growing yet so it's just a slow grass to wake up in the springtime so if you're thinking about getting it just know that going in the thing about kvg is it really likes the sunlight and the warmer temperatures so you know it being 50 degrees right now and slightly breezy i mean this is not enough to get it to wake up just yet but the good news is this week we got 70s and sunny all week so i can't wait for this thing to finally start waking up if you saw my last video you saw me throw down some of that flagship fertilizer hopefully that's going to give it a good nitrogen boost push some growth so we can get out here start mowing so it gets spread out finally so one thing they don't tell you when you plant a monostand is that other grasses are going to stick out like a sore thumb for example if you take a look over here i have all this light-colored grass that's over here that's invading my lawn now i'm not 100 sure if it's poa annual or not i know that pola has a very shallow root system and i went to go pull that grass and it didn't come out easily so that makes me think that it's most likely some type of grass from my neighbor's yard that's creeping in but just know if you just have 100 kentucky bluegrass that kind of grass that creeps in is really going to stick out and it doesn't look great so if that grass is poa i'm going to end up spraying some tenacity on my lawn i do have some weeds over here so not only is that going to kill the weeds but it can also cause injury to poa now tenacity is not listed to kill paul annual but it could definitely do damage to it and it'll start changing to like a whitish color so if your neighbors are next to you allow their grass to start growing seed heads then just be warned that it's definitely going to start going into your lawn also just know if you're thinking about getting some kbg it has some excessive watering requirements usually it takes about an inch to two inches of water per week depending on what your weather is out of all the cool season grasses it's definitely the most thirsty say compared to like a fescue see kvg has one of the most shallow root systems out of all the cool season grasses so not only is it going to need more water in the summertime but it's also going to end up going dormant much faster than all the other cool season grasses another common issue with kvg is that it's highly susceptible to disease specifically fungus disease now i can't say going into this i didn't know that it was susceptible because i did do my due diligence and take a look at the ntep trials if you guys don't know what that is those are specific studies that are done by university extension offices across the whole united states and they plant these plots of grass seeds and they monitor them over the years and they pretty much record a score for them on how good they are how bad they are in a bunch of different categories and during these trials my specific strain of kvg midnight and kbg as a whole doesn't have the best disease resistance a few of the different types of fungus that like to attack kvg are summer patch leaf spot rust mildew and right now i'm experiencing one of those and this is actually the first time i've ever experienced any type of fungus in my lawn so let's take a look at it when i first saw this on my lawn i thought like my grass was just like dormant and that's what the discoloration was but now that i'm taking an up close look i could see that it's more white than brown and it has like this powdery finish on it almost like somebody sprinkled powder on my lawn and that's when i knew that i had a problem so after doing some research i found out that there's a few things that you could do to try to prevent it so watering is a big thing you don't want to water at night time where the water is just going to sit on it all the time you want to make sure the water in the day so that the leaf plates completely dry out before the sun goes down and that'll help prevent any of the mold or mildew that happens typically this pottery mildew is not really that big of a deal and it'll heal on its own but if you see it taking over your whole lawn you got to keep an eye on it and if that's the case you got to start using some fungicides to take care of it but in my case i'm not going to use anything just yet i'm going to keep an eye on it and if i see it start to spread out and get worse then i'll make my first application of fungicide another thing that i found interesting is that shade tolerant kbgs tend to be more disease resistant such as like mazama which historically performs better in the shade although it's not shade tolerant it performs better in the shade than say my midnight that would be more disease resistant than say midnight or any other grasses in the midnight family like blue bank but it's not all doom and gloom when it comes to the kvg see one of the biggest reasons that people like planting it is its ability to repair itself i could already see over here in this bare spot that it's slowly starting to creep in see kvg spreads by rhizomes which means that it's going to spread underground and fill in any bare spots that you have and this is the reason why i ended up sewing kbg because i always had a lot of bare spots on my lawn and i was sick of throwing perennial rye grass down all the time so hopefully once this establishes i'm not going to have to worry about that anymore and there's a reason why all the professional sports companies in my city like to use kentucky bluegrass and this is exactly why i got a special guest here with me today what's up jason how's it going man if you guys don't know jason actually has his own youtube lawn care channel where he takes care of a putting green and if you guys want to see a bunch of awesome content related to cool season grass and mowing low and kentucky bluegrass and all sorts of things he definitely has that but the reason jason's here today is because he's actually buying this toro greens master off of me uh he's local you drove from milwaukee right yep yeah i'm just a little south of milwaukee so drove down here um basically with the putting green project i have i have a fairway section and the green and i've grown weary of one only having a jacobsen because pretty much everyone now including myself wouldn't recommend you buy one of those um but also it's just really irritating to change the height back and forth so i've been uh talking with george here and he said he was looking to sell it and it just fit perfectly so and that's the awesome thing about youtube you know i mean we get to connect with each other you know jason doesn't live that far away he's able to come here and you know we have like like-minded people so you're going to be using this along with the jacobsen right that's the plan yes the uh the jacobson is currently getting some surgery completed uh so once that's done um it'll come back and it'll probably be the primary fairway mower and then because you have 11 blade versus that one is an 8 blade so a little more geared towards mowing shorter this will be the primary greens mower yeah the name and then the jacobson will be the the fairway one and you're keeping your your green right now at 0.2 inches yup the last cot was at 2 10 of an inch i'm hoping to get down to an eight wow that's impressive you know i brought mine down to under a half an inch one time and this guy's doing 0.2 inches so i mean that's like totally awesome man i'm gonna be keeping an eye out on your channel for that everybody else if you guys love real real low kbg and uh you know just cool season lawns make sure you go check out jason he's going to be carrying the torch with this 89 greens master and i can't wait for it for sure i really appreciate it all right jason [Music]

Channel: Princess Cut Lawn Care

Views: 117,850

Rating: 4.8406482 out of 5

Keywords: Kentucky bluegrass, Lawn renovation, Kentucky bluegrass lawn, kentucky bluegrass vs tall fescue, Tall fescue, Ryegrass, Perennial ryegrass, when to plant Kentucky bluegrass, kentucky bluegrass strain, Sod, Scotts turf builder grass seed, sowing grass seed, Types of grass for lawn, How to reseed an existing lawn, Kentucky bluegrass seed, Broadcast spreader, Ryegrass vs bluegrass, Cool season grass, Grasses, Best grass seed, Growing grass from seed, Best overseeding grass seed

Id: ZK8JkD0oi6Y

Length: 10min 15sec (615 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021