It’s EASIER than you think! NTEP + Water + Nitrogen. No annual soil test. No humic acid. No PGR’s.

10 things I do and don't do in the lawn over here it looks much better for some reason yep all right so here's the list just kind of I'll go through it so quality genetics you're not going to get color like this without quality genetics so spend some time on inp so National turf grass evaluation program and select grass seed that's appropriate for your area I'll probably do a video on that later and I'm a cool season guy I don't know warm season grasses at all so one thing I don't do humic acid so Matt Martin the grass Factor did a video on it he goes over every study my take away from it was at least for my grass type it does slightly more harm than good it causes um a little bit of stunted growth lower root weight and you just don't need it it's a waste of time waste of money in my opinion all right Ura I do spray Ura that's it that's the only thing I spray for fertilizer at all um in my area I don't need it in almost I would say 90% of the country you don't need any phosphorus even when seeding you don't need any potassium you even if you're in a cold area or hot area actually potassium will do more harm than good A lot of the time so check out Turfgrass epistemology so do Travis shadex he does a lot on potassium he he's a soil scientist uh so fertilizer expert and just a plant health expert I would say he doesn't know a lot of topics well but fertilizer he really knows very well so one thing I don't do phosphorus and pottassium one thing I do Uria so mowing I do actually try to mow but I'm not real strict about it I just adhere to the 1/3 Rule and that's about it I mow if I feel like mowing I'm not out mowing every day I probably mow every 5 days roughly and uh one thing I don't do low cut so a lot of YouTubers will do trendy half inch cut qu inch cut 38 whatever oh man mine's at .1 n or whatever this is cut as high as I can do it so this is real Mo real mode hence the nice pretty Stripes so you're not going to get Stripes like this without having Ry grass Kentucky Blue Grass Stripes okay but Rye is like half of the blade I picked up a nasty blade half of the blade is shiny and the other side isn't so you get these nice light stripe dark stripe light stripe so what's going on is that's pointing up reflecting up at the sun and the other stripe is pointing at you and that's what makes it uh dark like that so I do Mo I don't do a low cut all right so another thing I do that I think is important for anybody sharp blades if your grass if the tip of it looks shredded at all that's going to show a yellow it's going to encourage disease it's going to lose water it's just not a good thing so sharpen your blades regularly if you have any like mole Hills or something you're going to need to sharpen them a lot more often if you are cutting high and you just have grass you don't need to sharpen as often if you have abrasive grasses like Fescue yeah you might need to sharpen a little more often if you have blue grass probably less often so just keep that in mind nice and sharp if if I was you know had a moderate amount of land my backyard I try to sharpen them once a month roughly when I'm mowing regularly every other month I'm not that strict about it and this is real cut so I do try to I backlap this and keep it sharp so sharp blades one thing I don't do lowquality soil tests anything you mail in water is total garbage um there was a my soil test I was just on Facebook in a group and the guy he's like okay here's my soil test what should I do I said round file it said what do you mean I said it's worthless what area are you in he said Portland his soil test was showing low in copper iron and there was one more copper iron and sulfur I pulled up soil maps of his area he has the highest in the country of copper iron and sulfur um there was one of those he wasn't like bright red it was like depends on where you are in Portland but basically he had plenty like way way way more than enough of all three of those and soil test was showing low on all of those and of course it was showing low on Boron which it always is I've seen maybe one out of 200 my soil tests or yard Mastery same thing uh soil tests that did not show low on Boron just one and I don't know how that happened but every other one that I've ever seen has been low on Boron all right so water per evapor transpiration so in the summer when everyone else is watering I'm paying attention to how much water is being lost so transpiration is water lost through the grass displ so the higher cut the more transpiration you're going to get but the less evaporation you're going to get so evaporation is drying on the dirt so evapo transporation is just a combination of all water loss so there is a I'll probably put a link down to it at the bottom of the screen or not you know down in the link somewhere for evapo transporation map you can zoom into that map then uh below the map on the left it'll say create a bookmarkable URL you can do it daily you can do it weekly I like weekly but if you don't like math you can do daily and what works for almost anyone if water every 3 days and about at about 75% of evapo transpiration and not your round just when you when you have to water so during drought so watering important just during the summer so you don't want your whole lawn to go dormant and half dead and I'm I'm talking to cool season people here uh and then have to come back from that you want it to just be healthy and not go through that struggle or that at least that's what I uh believe in M does go through winter dormy there's nothing you can do about that one thing I don't do and this is going to be kind of controversial but it just hasn't worked for me it's pre-emergent this has never it has seen pre-emergent once but um I don't think it did anything except maybe harm the grass a little bit pre-emergence are root pruners so just keep that in mind you don't want to go oh I just dumped a whole bunch of pre-emergent down these weeds are never going to come up well say goodbye to your roots so uh that's one thing I don't do this right here I actually don't even use post emergent on it I just Ed pocket knife on this and this is only 2400 F feet so it's not that bad uh today I walked it for Po and found zero POA plants last time I walked it is when they were kind of coming out I probably found 20 or 30 so you do it they're gone so not that big of a deal and typically it might be you know four or five six POA plants in the whole yard no big deal and what I do is I just look for seed heads or that color and that's it yeah PO is a big deal in my area it'll yeah just light green patches all over your lawn so I do spot weed and I do not uh spoon feed so spraying fertilizer it's real trendy on YouTube to maybe spray every week I don't do that and I also don't dump you know a whole pound or pound and a half of nitrogen in an application I kind of believe right in the middle cuz I don't want to be mowing more than I have to I don't want to be applying more than I have to I want to do as little as possible I out here as little as possible I don't mow that often I fertilize once a month and when I'm out here mowing I also weed at the same time so that's about it and I'll Water watering is one thing that does take me some time cuz I do not have irrigation but I have a ton of water pressure so it actually doesn't take that long but still kind of annoying one thing that I do believe in grub control one application once a year a celin 11.83 g per th000 sare ft done done all year so in warmer areas so going south in the United States I would say apply that in May it has a really long soil halflife so getting it down early is better but you don't want to go too early basically what you're trying to do is interrupt the grub life cycle so when they're having babies that's when you want the preventative in the ground it basically prevents their jaw their bones from developing and they can't eat so that is how you do that easy bin is over 100 times more toxic than Chlor androl which is the active ingredient in GrubEx it's the active ingredient in aelin so if you prefer granulars do GrubEx at roughly double bag rate I like to do high rate once a year call it good it's not that big of a deal and then it's just insurance that you don't have random dead spots if something happens you know it's not grubs so I do believe in doing an annual grub control it's not that expensive it's not that difficult once a year all right one thing I don't believe in that's kind of an optional thing is pgrs um yes they can benefit uh but they take time to do and they also come with risks they also cost money and I just feel like I got chemicals on me I don't know you know spraying hormones I know it's like a plant hormone but I just uh yeah I would rather not so also don't do kelp another pgr technically it's just doing the opposite thing making it grow more so I don't do either of those no kelp no pgr but I'm going to count that as one thing so one thing I do uh this one I don't really believe in this all that much but in my area PH does run very low I think my backyard on I did one soil test um Quality soil test but uh my pH was roughly five in the backyard it might have been a little lower than that even so I do believe in a little bit of pH adjustment I like pelletized lime out of a solo chest Mount spreader uh really like my solo spreader for anything granular but mostly I'm liquid fertilizer just Ura melt it in water apply it and uh just rinse it off the blades or apply it right before it rains or you can do sufficient carrier volume which is about 2 gallons per pound of Ura micronutrients I don't do them at all I'm going to let that speak for itself but yeah there are lots of micros in my area there's lots of micros almost everywhere if you're on the Southeast Coastline so Florida and then the bordering states on the coastline yes there's some depleted areas you're going to need some stuff uh even including potassium every once in a while or phosphorus but yeah when I seed I don't put phosphorus down I don't put starter for down I don't put potassium down year round it's just going to be Ura so no micronutrients no macronutrients even really except for nitrogen and I and I would say that is going to get you the nicest lawn in probably 80 to 90% of the country it's going to be nitrogen only is going to be the best fertilizer you can get and you can get your Ria at uh co-ops at like Coastal Tractor Supply uh like farming supplies and it's like 20 bucks for 50 50 lb so you got 23 lbs of nitrogen for 20 bucks so less than a dollar a pound and uh if you look at like a Sunday brand little bag a fertilizer I've got one in my area that's $58 a pound just at lows for nitrogen $58 a pound versus less than a dollar a pound and then the other Sunday products are like 30 bucks a pound for the nitrogen all right so fertilizer I do believe there's a difference in quality if you're going granular I want small small pill size that's going to give you more even color so the more pills per foot the more even your color is so that is definitely something I believe in uh Scots is a great brand if you have high pH uh propit I know it's expensive but prop Pete it's got nice prills and it's ammonium sulfate based so it's going to bring your pH down and it really does a good job ammonium sulfate does a very good job of bringing PH down so that would be my recommendation and I do also recommend this isn't on my list but I do my own soil testing because the only thing I care about is pH and I don't even care that much about that small pills and the counter to that is past your grade prills we're talking about Stay Green we're talking about Lily Miller uh Perfect Blend and you know half a dozen fertilizers at Lowe's or whatever you feel the bag just put your hand on the bag you can feel if there's big old if it feels like gravel that's not suitable for a lawn that is for a pasture if you're growing hay sure why not but if you're growing lawn get a quality fertilizer and Scots yeah it doesn't have pottassium it doesn't have phosphorus half the time I don't care that's a that's a a Advantage I think that's a better fertilizer so the lower the salt index one thing I noticed in my yard when I was spraying the first time I sprayed Ura only it was last summer and I noticed I was like what is going on with my Law lawn it likes this so I kept doing it it kept liking it so I figure it probably has something to do with salt index there's plenty of potassium there there's plenty of phosphorus there so the more excess is not better when it comes to nutrition it just it's going to interrupt Mass flow and just not get the nutrient into the plant where it needs to be so power scissors uh that's kind of down at the bottom here so this is kind of more important at the top less important at the bottom or more lower confidence or whatever but this one I am very confident in actually power scissors do such a good job edging you can't get that this quality of an edge with an edger a stick edger professional edger anything it just doesn't look like this so when it comes to edging definitely power scissors and then yeah what I don't use I would use a string trimmer if I really can't get to a spot sorry there's a shadow here so you can't really see quality of that but here you go yeah Power scissors are just worth it so here is my lawn from over here doesn't look nearly as good from over here in my opinion but whatever so in general and this is not even at all not level at all I need to throw some sand I haven't leveled this once I haven't sprayed a post-emergent on this once that's what I do copy me if you want I don't care if you subscribe I'm not trying to be monetized I'm not posting any links uh nothing that I make money on so see you next time thanks

Channel: LAWN CARE MINIMALIST

Views: 18,861

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Id: UGyAwyP0Yuc

Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 15 2024