Kentucky Bluegrass WARNING | Three Lessons Learned

i feel like that painter guy what's his name bob ross oh yeah happy trees this is happening happy trees happy ground happy soil look at that technique right there boys no you didn't know about that oh that's the new one right there what's up y'all i'm alan hayne the lawn care nut thanks for coming back for yet another week so this is going to be an update video i'm not sure if you guys remember or not but last year exactly one year ago i traveled to alexandria minnesota known as alec to the locals and i actually did a collaboration with zach johnson he's called the millennial farmer here on youtube and his dad nathan we actually used scott's pro vista kentucky bluegrass seed to seed his brand new construction home i've actually been working with scots pro vista for a few years now but i actually have the saint augustine version down here in florida last year they actually released the kentucky bluegrass version so if you see the name pro vista on grass right now you'll see st augustine and bluegrass that means that that grass has been bred to be number one glyphosate tolerant so you can use glyphosate as your weed control number two it's supposed to have a deeper darker blue-green color and number three it's a slower grower and should bring about half the mowing so that's the pro vista brand that's what they put into their grasses and when the kentucky bluegrass was available i saw this opportunity to go seed this lawn and that's what we did so they have irrigation comes right out of the lake behind so that was not an issue we did put down starter fertilizer green county fertilizer supplied all of that at the beginning as well as we put down mesotrion for weed control and those seating mats and everything was good to go i'll link up there so you can see the video of everything we did however from there until the end of the season until their winter which i don't remember when their winter came this year october maybe but until then it didn't get any more fertilizer that's because nathan's a farmer he's got to be out you know tending to his fields he also had some some challenges with knee surgery things like that so the the lawn didn't get fertilized and then when we came into the spring of this year 2021 uh he was texting me saying oh this grass is it doesn't look so great it's a little bit slow he was telling me that his neighbor next door seated last year behind a shed and had a lawn within like five or ten days it started bringing back a lot of those thoughts that i used to have when i used to have customers and i worked for trugreen and and i didn't always communicate things well so i i had to work with him and say nathan i get it man i'm coming back we're coming back because there was more than just the lawn not growing in the way we wanted there was also some other challenges that we had to deal with so in may of this year i got together with my crew and another crew and went back up to alec to assess the situation and get things back under control so the three different things that we faced were number one the areas that did grow in they just need nitrogen so it's kind of thin it doesn't look like it's moving very fast and it's not because it needs nitrogen it really needs to be fed the second thing you're seeing which needs to be addressed are washouts from big rains that they had in the fall and in the spring whenever you change the grate on a place when you have new construction you never know where the water is going to go but it's going to go where it wants to go and it showed us and it washed a few areas out and then the third thing you're seeing are quite a few weeds now you can't spray glyphosate on it for at least six or eight months after it's established so that was looking really bad so the first thing i did actually to make everyone feel better is i gave it a fresh cut because a fresh cut will make the lawn look better even when it doesn't look that good okay so there it is after a cut looks much better now there's some more dirt work going on here so tractor ruts but that's that's not on me there so it is what it is but you'll see much better now and that's part of the psychological thing here when you're seating just cut the lawn even if you don't think it needs it and by the way this is for any of you with any lawn anywhere just cut the lawn every lawn no matter if it's full of weeds or not or if it like this one it's just trying to grow in it's gonna look better if you get a cut now i cut it at two and a half inches which cut off as you'll see the poa annula right here but then also it makes it more even with the kentucky bluegrass that's coming in now we're in minnesota here so it's still coming out of winter dormancy that's what this brown is it is just now starting to green up i don't think it really got any fertilizer last fall so it just got fertilizer for the first time here about a week and a half ago we can still see some of it on the ground as well as the irrigation was just turned on about two weeks ago so as of two weeks ago it actually looked like this so it's come a long way just from water and some of the warmer temperatures that they're finally getting here which is what we've needed which is what this grass is needed so as far as fixing the areas that washed out i was very fortunate there's a team that came up they're also based in minnesota they're called voigt smith innovations or vsi they actually make small hydro seeding units when i say small i mean ones that can be mounted in the back of a truck or on a small trailer or even on a gator and they said we're going to come up with our crew and we're going to help you fix the areas that just washed out and didn't grow at all and they actually got there a day before i did nate had gotten some fresh dirt in they were driving the tractor all around the property filling in any low spots compacting those down and then hydro seeding over top so those guys did all of that heavy lifting i didn't have to touch any of that when i got there the next day all that was really left for us to do was some of the edges because the erosion mats we didn't get them all the way to the edge all the way around every landscape bed so all the edges needed to be reseeded and grown in plus all the weeds that had come in there so we did some of that but i just wanted to say void smith thank you guys you guys did an awesome job coming in you bailed me out you saved me because i would have had no way to fix all this stuff so thank you so much to you guys now there's two things i want to say to you guys the audience about voigt smith vsi and also about these small hydro seating units the first one is that a lot of you guys have side hustles you mow lawns on the side right from whatever your day job is and a lot of you also do aeration and overseeding but what if you actually did hydro seeding from one of these small units you do bare spots for people or as that you'll see later they actually showed me how you can make the mix a lot thinner still get your starter fur you need to try on in there your seed everything but make the mix a little bit thinner and you can actually use hydro seeding as over seeding but everything sticks in because what's the biggest challenge we have when we're overseeding is being concerned about the seed washing away this solves that so that's something that's approachable for you guys these smaller units um are able to well they're just approachable for for guys that might want to do this as side hustles that was the first thing the second thing is the guys at vsr are giving one away so if you link below or click the link below there's actually a landing page they made they're going to give away one of their small units to you guys now obviously if you're somebody that lives in the big city you don't need any side hustle and you have 500 square feet you know don't enter this contest let somebody win it that actually needs it and if you're somebody that's going to look to do this entrepreneurial on the side i definitely recommend that you enter this contest but either way that's pretty cool that not only did they come bail me out they did all this work saved us with all of this but they also are giving one away to you guys so make sure you check them out below and again thank you voigt smith and your team thank you guys so much for coming out and helping me out on this so the third thing we had to address we went back there in may had to do with the areas that had grown in but weren't growing in quite as fast as we would like and we used the hydro seeder at that half mix rate to help there so they put in their liquid starter fur put in mesotrione put in more seed but the mix was lower so all the areas that had germinated that weren't quite growing we went ahead and sprayed over the top of all of those as far as fertilizer goes nathan had actually put some fertilizer down about a week before i got there some sort of i think it was a triple 16 or something he got at a farm store but we weren't sure where it was we could see it in some spots and not in others that's how it is to film in my garage so we could see the fertilizer in some spots and not others he'd actually used a giant three-point hitch fertilizer spreader that went on the back of his compact tractor there or small tractor so it was just flinging everywhere so we we talked about getting that part uh set too and in the future i mean i recommended he get a homeowner type spreader something that maybe would pull behind his john deere lawn tractor which i'm pretty sure he did i also left him some flagship which he did apply two applications after i left he applied one in july and another one in august so he's getting on that track now and here is what the lawn looks like when i just went back last week so mid-august to take a look at it now after all of that fix and repair work in june [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so this one came out as a success obviously if i was there thrown down i would have that thing looking a lot deeper darker blue green but again we have to realize this is what most homeowners do they throw fertilizer down a couple two three times a year and they mow it when they need to and that's how it is he got he'll use glyphosate now you can see he's already using some glyphosate on the weeds because it is mature enough for that now but that's pretty much how things are gonna roll for him the top three things that i learned with this is number one this is why i do not like seating on bare ground this was new construction we had no choice but i do not like it but new construction is even worse when you change grade again because of the water issues but again so many more challenges seeding on bare ground so that was one thing i learned the second thing i learned is is that the erosion mats work fine but hydro seeding would be much better so i would definitely go with that in the future it just seems to make everything stick better plus it all can get rolled into that that one mix and spray down and good and then the third thing i use and this is for all of you kentucky bluegrass is slow you have to be patient with it it's not rye grass i can get a ryegrass lawn literally in 10 days it'll be beautiful kentucky bluegrass isn't like that even though it does have rhizomes they're not like the rhizomes that we experience here with warm season grass it takes a while for it to get going and on top of that the pro vista that's got a bread in a built-in growth regulator is even slower and as i've found with my pro vista if you let it go into a season like winter or come out of a season like winter without bombing it with nitrogen it is going to be even slower so while all the gr wands are greening up around you yours will not that happens with the saint augustine grass and now we see it can happen with the kentucky bluegrass so you have got to keep it fed what happens is i think the tendency is well we don't have to mow it as much so we don't think we have to feed it as much but that's not the case it needs to eat you gotta let that big dog eat i know everybody thinks that low nitrogen is some sort of cool thing but these lawns they need to eat if you want them to be high performing and you want them to look good and you want them to stand out amongst the rest so that's the whole thing there is patience with that i'm alan hayne the lawn care nut hope you've enjoyed this series hope you've learned a little something and i'll see you in the lawn

Channel: The Lawn Care Nut

Views: 112,140

Keywords: kentucky bluegrass, kentucky bluegrass lawn, kentucky bluegrass from seed, plant kentucky bluegrass, kentucky bluegrass germination, mn millennial farmer, mn millennial farmer harvest, allyn hane, lawn care nut

Id: DDfZa3g-PF0

Length: 12min 45sec (765 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 29 2021