Should You Dethatch Bermuda Lawns - Verticutting Lawns

hey guys so today i'm going to do a little experiment for you and of course i picked the windiest day of the year and the year day that both of my neighbors are cutting grass why do i do this to myself i was at the farm all morning i came back i cut the grunt front grass yesterday and i'm running into seed heads people had questions about seed heads i'll show you that they're just a pain in the butt so i actually cut the grass again this morning out there i backlap my reel mower and i cut it in the other diagonal direction with the catcher on it those seat heads are just a pain in the butt they'll go away don't worry about it but today what i'm going to do is i'm going to show you a couple guys have asked about um virta cutting or scarifying or de-thatching a warm season grass it's usually not done but there are instances when you start to get short and thick that you may want to do it and i'll show you why hold on [Music] hey guys i cover a lot of this in the bermuda lawn guide so make sure you get the guides cool season guides there's always your guides they're all up just get them it covers everything it has calendars product links everything uh i'm tired as you can tell i was over at the farm this morning i was doing a whole bunch of stuff had to water the fields came back yesterday i came back and i cut the front lawn seed heads came out this morning seed heads and it's not that they're growing it's just that they won't cut seed heads generally come from when you get a lot of seed heads you usually have some kind of soil condition um my front yard for years has suffered from different types of funguses it's had all kinds of problems ever since we bought the house and it gets seed heads for about 30 days so cut it yesterday i came back out cut it today i'll walk you out front real quick and show it to you so this is my issue with seed heads out here out front let me explain what they look like so these little stalks right here see these little stalks right here this white stalk this is from a seed head it does not want to cut it just sort of shaves so you got to make sure your reel mower blade is real sharp because they bend over they don't want to stand up and they don't cut and you get this sort of white haze you see it there's sort of a white haze across the line that's those stupid seed heads all right so the seed head issue is not a huge issue although people just get pissed off about it they usually show up about this time of year i usually see them in may and all you do is just keep cutting and keep cutting and keep cutting and eventually they're going to go away but this front lawn has always suffered from some sort of fungus disease has just been weak in general so i came out here i put down some pgf complete i put down some dirt booster i hit it with a lot of water and it should be fine but it's not a big issue they're just obnoxious that's all on my back now what's kind of funny is on the backyard i have almost no seat heads whatsoever we have not had any fungus issues on the backyard zero fungus issues and i have zero seed heads so look at this look at this big yard back here i don't have any seed heads back here on this whole thing i got a lot of leaves from all this wind but no seed heads so understand that seed heads generally show up when the lawn just feels like it's weak it's like a signal it says i need to grow i need to spread i need to regenerate i need to multiply so it's going to send up seed heads when you get that just work through it again try and improve your soil try i put down pgf complete and i throw it on dirt booster and then hit it with water and pretty soon within a couple of weeks they'll go away but again my front is loaded with seat heads because of the poor soil the back looks perfect no seed head it's crazy let's talk about virta cutting there's a difference between dethatching verticating and scarifying scarifying and verticating sometimes can be done by the same machine but this is a true story you know we're not doing anything with our garden beds this year and this this is sad so there's our home gardens right there i'm like dude i don't have time for this i got 40 acre farm but i want to show you something we haven't cleaned up over here in a while but look where i took this piece of equipment and i threw it this was last season okay see this swear to god that's where it's been you can see they're rusted this is what you're going to use on a cool season lawn okay these little prongs here you do not use those on a warm season grass so this is the unit that i like i actually this is my second unit the second one of these um the other one i have i actually took down to the beach house and i did all my seedings with the one down at the beach house make sure that the unit that you get comes with both this prongy thing the d thatcher and let me show you the blades all right see these blades that's what you want right there these blades are often called scarifying blades but i've learned on the sun joe for some reason on sunjo their blade design will allow you to vertical not all these machines will do that and i did a video last year on it i bought another machine that was just it will not it will not perform it will not give you a nice cut it still tears up the lawn too bad so if you can find these they're hard to come by they always go out of stock i'll put a link in the description below i'll link to everything i'm talking about the dirt booster the sun joe all this stuff um the sweeper that i use everyone asks about that but this is the unit that i'm using today and again if you have a warm season grass if you have zoysia or if you have bermuda take this and throw it away matter of fact that's the unit that's the prong thing to my old son joe and when i got this in i didn't even keep it i threw it the trash that's literally you just don't want that it's just going to pull up all those rhizomes and those runners it'll just pull up the lawn versus giving you a nice cut now this is not a problem for everybody obviously but there comes a point if you're cutting your lawn really short and you've been using stuff like pgf complete and dirt booster and humid char you're going to have a super thick lawn like i have it gets to the point that a real mower will struggle to cut a lawn at half an inch what i'm going to do today is i'm just going to show you i'm going to run this and show you what it looks like because i'm not going to do the whole lawn i don't want to do the lawn until i'm going to use this to seed my daughter's lawn so i don't want to blow this thing up by any chance so let me just run it and show it to you this is not something every uh warm season grass owner is going to do but when you are cutting your grass really short it starts to get super thick this will actually help it look better it'll be ugly for a couple of weeks but trust me it'll get better all right let's see what happens push the button we'll do a deeper cut on this one one more down on this line button and now we'll go to the deepest setting [Music] so now i've got three rows here that you can see row number one was on the middle of range i went one more down and one more down so what i want to do now is i'm going to come by and i'm going to use my sweeper i'm going to sweep this up and then i'm going to cut it and let's see what it looks like i'm not really pulling a bunch of thatch i'm actually cutting this green grass so you can see it's green quite a bit more there i'm going to grab my reel mower and i'm going to cut it and i'm going to let you see what it looks like after you do a virta cutting so hold on all sore sort of relative i'm going to cut and then i'm going to bring the mower back i'm going to cut and bring the mower back i'm going to cut and i'm going to bring the mower back so i cut them all the same way the shade is starting to hit these three lines but i can you can definitely see if you look at this is what i was trying to do here this thin down area versus this area right here which has not been done so this patch versus this right here this is going to be really really thick all in here looks great but at some point during the year this is going to be too thick and so what we'll do to the whole lawn is we'll actually come in and we'll do a virta cutting on it and you can see the spaces in here so we've opened up this really really tight bermuda in here giving it some room to breathe so verticating is a good thing to do when you get really tight now um a good example is in europe they do this to almost all the soccer pitches over there so why is that that's because they don't want a thick grass over there they actually want a thin grass where the ball rolls they want it really short and really thin they don't want this thick grass that slows the ball down and that's why they do it but you'll get to a point where you may get to a point where you start to say man my real mower is almost struggling to cut this because it's so thick and when you get to that point that's when you want to consider a vertical i wouldn't recommend it for the average person never dethatch a bermuda or zoe jalon don't dethatch it just leave it you shouldn't have any problems with thatch if you're starting to have a problem with thatch then bag your clippings for a while or put down some dirt booster and get those microbes going it's not a problem but um that dethatching tool just is just a horrible way to do it so i hope this has answered some questions we cover a lot of this in the guide again the dethatching is for cool season guys you cool season guys are going to be dethatching a lot and you're going to use those little prongs because you don't have a lot of runners going through your you don't have a lot of sideway growth that's when that's who's going to use a dethatch anyways hope this has helped a lot more videos coming hit subscribe and i'll talk to you later [Music] you

Channel: How To with Doc

Views: 146,701

Keywords: dethatch lawn, verticut lawn, dethatching bermuda, dethatching zoysia, dethatching lawn, dethatcher, dethatching and aerating lawn, dethatching, dethatcher sun joe, dethatching zoysia grass, dethatching machine, lawn care, bermuda lawn care, bermuda grass, lawn care tips, how to dethatch a lawn

Id: xRPITXHjYzI

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Sun May 08 2022