Spring Lawn Tips : COOL SEASON // Tall Fescue, Ryegrass, Kentucky Bluegrass - Nitro Boost!

hey guys Allen hain here the lawn care nut with another lawn tip what's up y'all I'm Allen hain the lawn care nut thanks for coming back for yet another week so hopefully you're coming off the main video in the series which was a video that talks about what to do first thing in the spring no matter what your grass type is north south east or west this is what you do to get started for the season and we talked mainly about three emergence if you do want to get your pre-emergent we do have four diamine in stock you can click the link in the description below and pick it up today it does come with a full guide that will give you step-by-step instructions on what to apply how to apply it when to apply all of those things that'll back up all the information from that video now this video is gonna go a little bit deeper and talk about a lot more things but before we do that I want to kind of set the tone here so if you watched any of the warm season grass type videos which I recommend you do because you can learn and a lot of you guys that end up retiring down here in Florida you're totally lost when you get down here so watching those videos will help you for 20 years from now and you retire or maybe some of your retire in two or three years but the reason I bring that up is because you're gonna find that your strategy is very very different and I think it's important to understand how the warm season folks are approaching their strategy so you can see some of the advantages in approaching yours but I wanted you to see what's going on I'm also gonna do the first cutting of the year and so here I am doing the first lawn cutting here and nothing too spectacular here so the first thing is they're grass types they spread by taking ground aggressively through two different modes rhizomes and stolens these are basically creeping stems that move across the ground and they get very large and they take a lot of ground and because of that it takes a lot of energy for those ships to get moving in the springtime and you have to start them out a little bit slower you have to be methodical about it you have to control the strength as the season comes in and you can see that here in the warm season growth curve see how it starts out slow and it's a ramp and it's a ramp and then it Peaks in the summer and then heads back down in the fall it's a very long season as well because they don't have the threat of snow frost and freeze for the most part now let's compare that to the cool season growth curve and that's you guys with Kentucky bluegrass perennial rye and turf type tall fescue you guys have a really different growth curve you can see you have two up x and two down times the up times are the spring in the fall and the down times are the winter in the summer and the up times will run and run and running and we don't have that much time to actually run because one of the down times is going to hit us at any minute the down time in the summer is caused from a lot of heat and lack of rain cool season turf just wants to chill it wants to rest and even wants to go dormant if it doesn't get enough water that's why it goes Brown in the summer the down time in the winter is essentially the same thing it's just cold outside to you and me but the grass doesn't care it just says hey this is not an optimal growth time for me to keep going however just of note you can keep your grass green during both of these downtime a lot of people don't think you can keep your cool season grass green in the winter but that's just cuz you don't see it under snow if you talk to most people that are on my program their grass is much much greener than everyone else's that is crispy Brown and dormant around them every winter and by the way it's the same thing in the summer if you want to keep your cool season lawn green in the summer when everybody else is going summer dormant start out with these tips that we're gonna go over today and Master your growth curve [Music] so this video is gonna answer the questions when can I start fertilizing how much fertilizer should I use what fertilizer should I use when can I start mowing should i Scout my lawn or mow it low or when I do should I detach should I aerate and should I seed that's everything we're going to go over and I'll give you the time stamps [Music] so from the first video you're all set with pre-emergent you're gonna apply that when soil temperatures are approaching 55 degrees in the soil I'm going to go ahead and run a quick scenario here for Crown Point Indiana which is where I live for 20 years I'm gonna go ahead and run that scenario there for you and we'll just use this as our baseline going forward [Music] [Music] so you can see right around April 15th that's when Crown Point is passing that 50 degree mark heading straight into 55 so April 15th right around tax day for Crown Point Indiana that should go time for your first application of pur diamine and if you're really wanting to get your lawn thicker if you're somebody that's coming here and you're saying I've got an overall sparse lawn by the way if your lawn is at least 30% good turf grass you can go ahead and work on rehabbing it from there it will thicken up if it's anything less than that you're probably gonna have to go a little bit more drastic and look at seating and sodding but if you have at least 30% good turf grass throughout you can bomb it really hard with mostly nitrogen in the growth phases and it will thicken up and so that's the key with cool season turf we want to come out of the gate strong so on the very same day that you apply that first pre-emergent that's also when you can apply your first application of fertilizer whichever one you choose I do recommend though that you get something that is nitrogen Folie wanted to review here real quick the numbers on the bag of fertilizer and every time I do this somebody talks about how nasty my garage floor is well it's a working garage this is not just a studio but anyway and I've covered the names on these products because these are not really what we're talking about here I'm just don't really care what the name brand is it's just about the analysis here so that's the first thing that's what this is this is called the analysis 2006 stands for 20 percent nitrogen means that everything in this bag 20 percent of everything in this bag is nitrogen 0% foss that's why it says phosphorus free and that's what this number stands for and this number stands for potassium so this is 20 percent nitrogen 6 percent potassium this product here is 16 percent nitrogen 8 percent potassium so you can see a little more potash and a little less nitrogen so when it comes to cool-season turf when you're shooting out of the gates look for the highest number that you can find right here for nitrogen and get that down that's a nice way to shoot out of the gates so never forget nitrogen makes the grass grow and that's what you want to get going early on in the season push it with nitrogen now if you have a soil test that tells you you need other elements or you want to include something that's got some potash I think that's good because what potash does is it helps the lawn recover from stress and the lawn is coming out of a low period that's coming out of a downtime called winter and it's moving into summer and that's stressful to it and it's coming off of that stress so a little bit of potash in the mix would be very very good to support plant health overall as the grass starts running and waking up now as far as when can you start mowing with cool season turf you can really get out there and mow any time you want as long as there's no frost on the ground of the ground is it frozen because if there's frost on the grass it can be a little crunchy and you could crush the Crown's when you walk on it or take the mower on it so just wait till the middle of the day wait till it feels soft under your feet and then you can mow so you can pretty much move the cool season turf anytime you want if you got leaves out there you want to get out that's fine just clean it all up but as far as when you're gonna have to start mowing regularly that's probably gonna be sometime right after that fertilizer app because number one the fertilizer app is gonna push the grass but also right around that time is when soil temperatures are starting to reach 55 degrees and that is a sign to the cool season grass hey it's time to start kicking in now one thing I've been talking about a lot with the warm season turf is how much daylight day length they need it's really different with cool season turf because you have so much cloud cover in the north from range your rainy season is in the spring and it's kind of gray still in the early spring anyway so cloud cover really kind of plays havoc with the Sun you just have to hope for the best and hope you get some sunny days because it's so sunny days when the cool season turf is really gonna run and put in a lot more roots and a lot more top growth so one of the things that we really need to hope for and pray for when we when we want to thicken up cool season turf is less clouds and more Sun because the temperatures are already mild we're already getting plenty of rain in the spring we really just need more Sun and that is really the differentiator in the spring and how successful your spring is is it's the rain and the amount of sunlight and those two have to play nice together either way the one thing I do want to say about mowing is once you fire up your mowing the season please commit to mowing every three to four days I know I say that the more you mow the healthier it will grow but when it comes to Bunch type grass types is just what we have with cool season I understand that Kentucky bluegrass does spread by rhizome but it's very slow and it still keeps everything in a nice big fat Bunch and when you have those Bunch type grass types mowing becomes even more important because when you continue mowing and you continue mowing what that does is it tells the grass to push down more roots it wants to grow somewhere and if you're gonna continue cutting the often what its gonna do is it's gonna continue to set roots roots roots and that's exactly what you want so one of the things that frequent mowing does is it encourages the lawn to set deeper roots this is especially important with Kentucky bluegrass because it does spend some of its energy on rhizomes it can't spend as much energy on roots so if you keep mowing it off and keep mowing it off it's gonna encourage it to spread deeper and get those roots deeper and that brings me to the next point the one thing that you definitely want to kick in right around the same time that you kick in your first pre-emergent your first fertilizing and you start mowing is you want to go ahead and kick in the humic acid the aerate and the sea kelp all of those things are part of the biostimulant pack you got the RGS which has the fall Vick the humic and the sea kelp in it you got the humic 12 which is just very concentrated humic acid and you have the aerate which goes in and it causes literally a chemical reaction in the soil that caught that breaks bonds when those bonds are broken air is created just think of like air bubbles in the soda it's very similar to that it's a chemical reaction well that's a aeration that's exactly what that is and then it also has humic acid in the mix so that when those air holes open up it's packed with humic acid as a carbon source you want to start hammering those in in the spring three to six to nine ounces per thousand every single month follow the label on those products but start hammering those in that'll make the difference when you're trying to get those roots deeper so frequent mowing and get that humic acid hammered in there the RGS also with that seek help stimulating those roots to grow deep that's gonna really help you push into the next downtime which is the summer now for that first mowing people will ask should I scalp it no please do not scalp your Kentucky bluegrass perennial rye or your turf type tall fescue but you might want to mow one or a couple two tree notches lower just to go ahead and knock off the tips that may have been standing up there in the wind and gotten a little desiccated that's called desiccation when the wind whips across in the wintertime and it sucks the moisture out of the plant that's called desiccation and that those areas are not going to come back so go ahead and mow down a little bit lower now you will have you know areas of the lawn that just don't recover for some reason or another grass blades died here and there just get out with a rake and lightly rake those areas throughout the spring don't go in too heavy don't nail them don't whack them just rake them lightly I'll link in the description below I've got plenty of videos where I raked my turf type tall fescue in Northwest Indiana like every other you and showed you guys and you can see the progression coming along it's not like you have to take it all the dead stuff out in one point you kind of do it slow as you mow it sucks stuff up kill stuff it mulches it back in so just realize that areas of your lawn will kind of recover a little slower than others and just keep mowing just keep throwing and make sure that you keep things moving and it'll be fine it'll come along again look at those videos you'll see of my fescue and how it came along with no problem now the next question those people I should I detach so thatch is a layer of dead grass and leaves and other organic material that sits right above the soil line thatch is good and bad if it's in the proper amounts and you need about a half inch of thatch there you really do you need that thatch does a couple things number one is it shades the root system from direct sunlight in the summer we talked about those down times and in the down time you know your your cool season turf doesn't really like it much above 80 degrees Kentucky bluegrass and rive for sure fescue can handle temperatures a little bit hotter but once you get over 85 those grasses really want to check out and go back into downtime and so when you have about a half-inch layer there of thatch that beating Sun it will help to keep the root system cooler and shaded during those hot times the other thing that half inch if thatch will do is it helps to keep moisture in the soil so the Sun can't suck it all out so having some fetch is very good however when it starts to get too thick and it starts to get above that then what happens is water can't penetrate it and when water can't penetrate it then the roots of the grass will turn and grow up towards the thatch because that's where the water is and they need to get it and now you have a completely shallow rooted lawn and that's when it starts to get super spongy and that's when the thatch just blows up and you'll know when you have this problem because you walk on the lawn and it feels spongy if you can't feel the ground below the lawn when you walk on it and you know what I mean go walk on your grass you can feel the the hard clay ground below there if you can't feel that if it feels like you're walking on plant material just take your shoes off you'll know that means you have too much thatch when you cannot feel or sense the contact with the ground below your bare foot that's when you know you have too much that's now the first thing I do before I detach is I ask what caused it typically I've seen it's caused by poor watering practice and I've seen this a lot when I worked at TruGreen I worked over in Orland Park Illinois Tinley Park Illinois Frankfort Illinois alpha-beta and over there they had tons of new construction lots of new constructions through the early 2000s and all of those lawns were soldered on just bare construction clay and almost all of them ended up getting fast problems but it wasn't because of the bare construction clay it was because they also many of them had irrigation systems and for some reason I don't know why I don't know if there's some rulebook somewhere that tells installers this or not but they would set the zones to come on every single day for seven to ten minutes every zone every day seven to ten minutes some like five minutes I don't know why that's why that is I don't know who set that standard but that's what I would see in that shallow watering now again five to ten minutes is an arbitrary number because you have to do a tuna can challenge to really understand how much water is going down but even the most efficient system that's covering on a large expanse at ten minutes is not going to be enough water to cover several thousand square feet it's just not and so what would happen is these brand-new sodded lawns on this clay all the water would just sit right in the top and so they're sod right and so the sod doesn't have roots so when it rooted it didn't have to really root very deep it just kind of went home all the water's up here will just chill and it would just root in like a half-inch and these lawns within two years would just be just toasted with patch okay so make sure you get your watering right that's what that comes down to now do you want to be fat sure if you need to detach spring is the time to do that and you want to do that two to three weeks before you're ready to start your mowing in your pre-emergent because dethatching is very stressful on a lawn you're ripping a lot of stuff out you're gonna rip out a lot of good grass too and that's fine it's also gonna be a lot of cleanup be ready for that don't think you're gonna get everything in the back of your Ranger it's gonna be a very big cleanup but I think it's good for you it's good for you to go through that pain of dethatching so get rintah dethatcher or people buy the Green Works one I've seen I've never used it but I have definitely seen people cash in on I think like a hundred bucks or maybe you get them on Amazon Prime deal with something something's like a hundred bucks for this electric dethatcher when you're on a rent one in my cost you you know fifty dollars for four hours you might as well buy one for a hundred bucks in that way if you don't get the dethatching done all in one day cuz sometimes it can be a little bigger job than you think you're hedged there for the next weekend so something to think about but you definitely to dethatch two to three weeks before you plan to do your first mowing so sticking with our example of Crown Point Indiana here we would go out and detach sometime in the very beginning of April or even late March because I know some of you can't wait you get out there and do it early get out there get er cleaned up that'll open everything up and the other thing that's gonna do then it's gonna allow the Sun to start working its way down into the soil a little quicker which should wake the lawn up quicker and that's important to know because the other thing that will start waking up when you detach because you're disturbing things is a lot of seeds especially crabgrass seeds a lot of them also if you had a thick thatch problem and you had crabgrass on the lawn all the crabgrass seeds that job dropped weren't able to get very deep either they're all up on there in the top and you're disturbing them and spreading them around so it's very very important that very soon after you D thatch you get that pre-emergent down and go ahead and start with that fertilizer just tell that lawn okay I just cut your entire top of your head off and I know that I hurt you and I ripped all your guts out but now what I'm gonna do is bomb you with nitrogen so you can build back up its breaking somebody all the way down and building them all the way back up very very quickly the good news about that is cool season turf will respond very quickly I want you to think about something this analogy what is the first thing that regrows after a forest fire it's the grass the reason is is because the roots even though the grass is burned on the top from the fire the roots all still remain in a lot of cases and have enough energy and the crowns are there in enough capacity to push the grass back up and so no matter how bad it feels after that dethatch just know it's going to come back and you can help it by pushing it with nitrogen so the next question I get is should I seed in the spring and typically my answer is I do not recommend it remember if you have 30% good turf grass that's there I recommend you push that really hard I have lawn programs you can click the link description below and get one push that as hard as you can all the way through and then when you get to fall you'll be surprised at how much grass has actually thickened up there and then you can aerate an over seed as a final icing on the cake or to fill in any final thin spots that's typically what I recommend if for some reason though you feel like you have to seed in the spring for whatever reason let me tell you some of the things that you're gonna face the first thing that you're gonna face is you're gonna put the seed down as soil temperatures approach 55 so right about the same time that you would have put your pre-emergent down by the way if your seeding in the spring pre-emergent nope redeeming replace the per diamine and do your seating right about that same time so in Crown Point Indiana it'd be right around April 15th now one of the advantages though to seating in the spring is you do have plenty of rain and that can also be a disadvantage because it can wash some of the seat away but everybody faces those challenges so don't worry about that but the biggest challenge you face is that at April 15th in Crown Point Indiana and most of the country wherever you're at you're not through the threat of Frost Northwest Indiana doesn't get through the threat of Frost until sometime after Labor Day which is what like May 5th or something like that so if you seed on the 15th of April or a couple days before that you're gonna start getting germination 5 to 10 days later and then there's the possibility that you could get a hard frost or freeze and it will kill that brand-new grass seed that's one of the biggest challenges that you face the second biggest challenge you face is that right along growing right next to your brand-new grass seed that you planted as soil temperatures crossed 50 approaching 55 in the spring you're gonna have crabgrass seeds growing right along with it albeit they're growing from underground your grass seed will be on the top you'll see your good grass growing and those crabgrass are following it right up and they'll start showing in June and as soon as your good grass let's say you got through and you didn't get a freeze all that brand-new baby grass that you have that's coming through in May it's gonna be looking good gonna be mowett you're gonna be feeling good and then all of a sudden in June all this crabgrass is gonna come out and crab out right over top of it and just spread right on top of it because all of the water and all of the starter fertilizer and all of the things that you use to help that good grass grow in the spring also helps that crabgrass and you have no protection because the pre-emergent herbicide Pro diamine stops crabgrass and it'll also stop your good grass seed so that's the other thing you're gonna have to use so much chemical going forward to kill all that crabgrass to protect your good grass it may not be worth all the trouble of seeding in the spring now I know that a lot of people will say well Allen they make tenacity out there meza try own you can get Scotts starter fertilizer with Metatron and yes and I'm sure that would work fine but I just feel like there's a lot of other things that can be done in the spring to hedge your bets later on for the summer in the fall that's just my experience it's not a hard and fast rule I've just worked with many thousands of homeowners over the years when I worked at TruGreen and now online and I just know where mow of the challenges come in that that kind of discouraged people and that's why I'm so adamant about the seating thing I know that you can see it in the spring and I know that you can use different products to help stop crabgrass and other stuff from coming in and but I'm just telling you from my experience it's much smarter and much easier and your success rate is much higher when you don't see it in the spring and you see it in fall now for the final piece here I want to just give you a little bit of philosophy and I want to go back to that growth curve because it's so important what we need to do is realize how our turf grows and then use our strategy to accentuate that and to actually make it better to put it in another gear to push it even harder and so it goes back to that growth curve you see we have a big we have up time in the spring and up time in the fall down time in the summer and down time in the winter now let's talk about winter first winter is actually one of the greatest saving graces for you guys with cool season turf now you've had a mild winter this year and so the one thing that I'm gonna tell you is crabgrass is gonna be really bad this year so make sure your per diamond gets down you may even think about an extra app of death I appear on top of that because the i-5 here does not have the same label restrictions that per diamine does so you're gonna do your split a port for diamine in the spring one when soil temperatures are approaching 55 and the next one just as they're crossing 65 that's your split out three pounds per thousand of each on the per diamine if you want to come in sometime around that same time towards the end of spring basically at the same time you put the per diamine down and put down three or four pounds of the die thigh up here right on top to give that an extra blanket or an extra coating there that's not a bad idea if you're somebody that's had a really bad problem with crabgrass in the past but I don't think crabgrass is gonna be the only problem the mild strange winter that we had is also gonna make rubs a problem this year so you're gonna want to get out and get your grub application down sometime in the mid spring then the products that you're mostly gonna get for grubs they're the Scott's grub X I can't remember the name of the active ingredient now but it's a lot different than the Merritt that's a brand name that I used to use it's actually imidacloprid is the actual active ingredient that's the product I used to use when I work for triggering Kim lot a lot of people are going away from that now because there's because they think it hurts honeybees and I haven't really studied the science on it or whatever but if I have an alternative that works just as well I'm gonna go away from it so I've kind of gone away from imidacloprid even though that's pretty much what sell down here I don't know why but the long and the short of it is the active ingredient that's in the Scots it needs a much longer ramp time the old image copra that we used to use the Merritt you could get that watered in and it would be effective within a week or so whereas the newer stuff that Scott uses again I'll put the active ingredient up there on the screen it has like I think it takes like a month or six weeks even something it's got to be watered in really early in order for it to ramp up to be ready because grubs are gonna be a problem in June because remember they come from June bug so June July August and so what you want to do is get that down in the mid spring so go out now get your grub control wherever you want to get that and make sure you get that down in the mid spring the residual is fine on it they'll last you all the way through the season and you'll be just good so that's another little thing I wanted to give out there for cool season lawn grubs are gonna be bad this year but back to winter so one of the things about winter is that it's actually a saving grace because what ever happened to you last year the winter will reset a good portion of it now we had a mild winter this year so maybe it didn't reset everything actually I'm looking at like in Minnesota right now they're still I get minus 10 so they might had a regular winter but I'm talking about a lot of y'all across the lower Midwest and up into the east but the long and the short of it is winter kills a lot of things just as I always tell you that winter if you seed too late in the fall the winter can kill you an early winter can kill your seed it can do this you can do that all of these things well the winter also kills weeds it kills grubs as mentioned it kills other insects it slows down fungus it does a lot of things it almost acts like a reset button so that's a good downtime to have summer is also a good downtime to have because it gives you a break because you're gonna realize Moen every three or four days in the spring you're gonna love it at first but at certain times it can get to be a lot especially if you want to take a vacation over like spring break and your lawn is just grow and crazy that can be a challenge but summer is good because it gives you a chance to really pack in the micronutrients so that way the grass doesn't have to go dormant see that's the thing if the grass goes dormant in the summer we always tell you well that's fine this is normal it's natural and it is and it doesn't hurt but that grass is not going to be as strong as grass that didn't go dormant when it comes into fall we still have that second hump there we saw that second opportunity to put in a lot of good roots and growth in thickness and that's overall what we're going for is thickness but if you're Kentucky bluegrass is dormant in the summer again it's not necessarily bad for it but it certainly doesn't help it coming into that growth phase in the fall so by keeping your lawn slow and low in the summer I'm talking in the summer lots of good micronutrients very low nitrogen potash good amounts of potash because that helps to support during that stress it helps it retain water helps the roots to stay healthy potash is great in the summer for cool season turf just keep it slow and low keep it sustained but definitely keep it watered get that watering inline in the summer and you're gonna notice you're gonna get a lot better and a lot fuller results in the fall than you ever did before so the idea here is to take advantage of that summer downtime by allowing the lawn to not go to sleep but also not push it too hard let it rest let it slumber but let it still stay green so it can photosynthesize and still you know grab energy from that Sun so when you get to that final growth phase in the fall you get even double-punch action out of it than you would have in previous years well I'm not sure where I'm going to throw this in because I didn't put it in the intro but it's important people always ask me about weed control post emergent weed control you're gonna get that big onslaught of dandelions in Crown Point Indiana it's gonna be sometime in the last week of April - the very first week of May sometime right around Derby Day you can mark it down whatever that latitude is right there all the way across the dandelion bloom is always the last week of April or the first week of May and people want to know and you're gonna see the dandelions coming up in sparse prior to that because they don't all come up at the same time just like crabgrass and people are gonna want to know what can I spray by the way again clover coming in there and all kinds of other things if you want to know what you can spray early on in the season leading all the way into the dandelion season the very best weed control I found that you guys know I recommend trying over-the-counter stuff I've been saying that long enough so I think everybody knows that try that first but if you want something that's gonna work good in the spring and is cheap it's called speed zone now it's a 4-way herbicide I'll link in the description below but it's got the good stuff in it that I usually like you know die camba MC PP yeah you know me Carr Fincher zones in there which is nice it's also got 242 4 D as one of the primary weed controls and I camera that you're gonna want to use on full season turf works good but the 2 4 D in this product is in the Esther formulation basically without getting too into the weeds it works much better in cooler temperatures in that formulation so if you've had a really bad problem with clover dandelions all kinds of other stuff that can come into a cool season lawn in the spring speed zone is where you want to go it's gonna probably solve a good you know 80 to 90 percent of your problems especially if you tried the store-bought stuff this is really just like a better version of that because it adds in the carpenter zone and again it's got that extra formulation of the 240 so that's a good weed control to start with and you can pick that up right now so with that I want to thank you for watching I hope this video has been helpful to you please click the links in the description below if you need more information there's all kinds of stuff there as well as subscribe to the channel and hit the bell I've got plenty more content coming for all grass types this year with that I'm Alan hain the lawn care nut thanks for watching I'll see you in the lawn [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Lawn Care Nut

Views: 359,069

Keywords: spring lawn care tips, spring lawn care fescue, spring lawn care ryegrass, spring care perennial ryegrass, spring lawn tall fescue, kentucky bluegrass, tall fescue, cool season grass, diy lawn care, cool season grass types, spring lawn care, overseeding in spring, tall fescue grass, fescue grass, spring lawn seeding, spring lawn care steps, the lawn care nut, cool season lawn, tall fescue lawn, lawn care, lawn care nut, spring lawn tips, how to, tall fescue lawn care

Id: y41oANaokhs

Length: 28min 12sec (1692 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 14 2020