When Is It Too Late To Put Grass Seed Down? Sowing Seed In October?

it's one of the last really nice looking days of the Fall kind of feels like summer out here but it's not this is fall it's October 20th right now if you're watching this video you might be wondering is it too late to sew grass seed is it too late to put grass seed down on the ground when is it too late to put grass seed down on the ground well the answers to these questions are a little bit variable and uh I'd like to explain it to you this is my big kid although he's not the oldest kid but this is my big kid Jake this is my littlest one Esther I spend most of my days with them love these guys I got two other kids inside the house so some of my videos have all of my kids in them what I do want to tell you about grass seed is that outside in the lawn I say the dirt the soil yeah yeah cold season grass germinates some where in the 45 to 50° range at the minimum but that's not outside air temperature that's soil temperature usually questions like this have to do with early spring seeding lots of people want to put down seed in the spring going into the year even though it's not the optimal time of the year to put seed down um in the spring uh it might be 55 60° outside like on a nice warm spring day but the ground might still be 40° might even be less in the fall time is the more optimal time to plant grass seed because the soil temperatures stay warmer a lot longer than the air temperatures so as I said in the introduction to this video our outside air temperature right now is about 69° that's warm enough for her to be outside a long sleeve shirt just fine the ground temperature is what matters when it comes to grass seed now I live at 4200 FT elevation in southern Oregon we get pretty cold typically in late October we are very cold right now usually the high temperatures are somewhere in the mid-50s and we've had a nice warm fall so far everything is feeling like late summer our soil temperatures are really warm now is it too late to plant grass seed probably for us but the thing is most people around the country have warmer Falls than we do and it is possible to plant seed this late into October it's unlikely that in all places you'll be able to get good sea germination and it will survive through the winter but it certainly is possible the reason for that is the soil temperature and that's that's what I'm getting at right here so here is my lawn now I don't need to put any seed down here early last month I put seed up on the hill up there and that was fine oh there's my older daughter say hi hi what you doing I'm trying to make a nest so so birds can come to me nice all right so back in early September I put some grass seed up on that Hill trying to fill in some of the little gaps on the actual slope and that to me at the time I felt was a little bit dangerous because we usually get frosts very early in the year usually in September certainly by the 1 of October we have not had a frost yet and finally later this month we're talking in about four or five days my weather forecast is finally forecasting our first Frost now grass seed is not going to germinate uh in a frost condition um and a tiny sprout a Little Seedling is probably not going to survive a light frost certainly not a heavy Frost uh grass seed that is put down before it germinates if it gets frozen it will do dormant seating and it will sit on the ground there's lady right there and it will sit on the ground until spring assuming it is not uh compromised by you know foraging animals birds eating it mold of any kind that's called dormant seating so that's where the seed comes up in the spring when you put it down in the fall and it comes up in the spring but if you want that seed to germinate in the fall the ground temperature has to be warm enough for the seed to germinate and the air temperature can't be freezing the baby seedlings too early as you can see right now I am sitting in the shade of a small apple tree this shade right here if I were to pull a thermometer out and measure about 2 2 to 3 in deep into the soil you would find it to be about literally 10° cooler than it is over there in the Sun so that little area of the yard that soil temperature is 10° warmer around the side of my house over here that is the West face of our house that side of the house does not get sun until very late into the morning in the middle of the Fall so during the daylight hours is always shaded on the east side of our house over there that side of the house is shaded Early in the Morning by the big trees and every really part of the day from the midafternoon on because the sun is way over here now there it is way over there somewhere over there it's always shaded over there those parts of the of the yard are consistently cooler like the soil temperatures are are cooler than they are here where I'm sitting and all through this area now this tree over here is a plum tree and it is shaded under the p uh Under The Plum Tree depending on the time of day it comes in the morning the shade is about there and then around noon time it's kind of in the middle and then at this time of the day later in the afternoon it has almost completely gone off the grass these partial Shady parts of my lawn are warmer than the sides of my house that get consistent shade for significant chunks of the day but they are cooler than parts of the lawn like you see underneath that Jungle Gym there that are pretty much full sun all the time way up the hill up there where my daughter is at the fire pit the whole section up there is largely sand that area up there warms up significantly because it's in full sun not only is it full sun but there's no grass up there it's all sand it absorbs the heat from the Sun and warms up much more than any other part of my yard about 3 days ago I stuck a soil thermometer up there into that sand and recorded temperatures in the upper 70s what I want to do for you for this video I've done a lot of talking I always do a lot of talking um thank you for watching if you're still watching um if you are new to this channel I you just got to use get used to it I'm a rambling kind of guy um hit the Subscribe button and just hopefully deal with it um but anyway what I want to do for you in this video is push the soil thermometer into the ground throughout the day and show you how things change because it makes a big difference now I've got some videos that I posted not that long ago about grass seed and planting grass and when to mow it and how when to stop watering it um I've never really done a lawn renovation video and I don't plan on doing that anytime soon um I'm kind of piece meing little Parts together what I have published however is some videos where I've been planting a lot of grass seed in pots and showing you their growth patterns now there's a lot of cold seasoned grasses now I haven't really gotten into pot planting of warm seasoned grasses although that is in the books for the future but some of these cold season grass grass types in fact many of them can be germinated in less than a week I've germinated uh a number of varieties of grass seed in less than a week and even Kentucky Blue Grass which is a little bit slower than some of the other grasses can still germinate in a week or less under ideal conditions yes you tell them all about the kbg I wouldn't really recommend growing or sewing Kentucky Bluegrass SE this late into the season um you know late October is pretty hard I mean unless you're just really I don't know in this microclimate where you just know that you're not going to get extremely cold weather for another month another five six weeks until December it's probably not going to happen but quite honestly fescues and uh your perennial rise those things will germinate very fast if you prepare the soil well if you till up the soil and amend it with things like coconut core or Pete Moss and you spray uh I mean you heavily water the ground before you put the seed down and then start your light germination process shoot uh this is a this is an Oddball technique but it works um if it's a little bit cooler outside temperatures or if you've got some wind you can even cover the seated area depending on its size uh with plastic greenhouse plastic is what we use around here because we do a lot of gardening over there um it will keep everything warmer and it'll keep uh it'll basically make a um microclimate under the plastic and you don't have to use the plastic but point is this late in the season if you want to put grass seed down you have to do everything under the sun possible to get that seed to germinate as quickly as possible and many cool seed and grasses can germinate in 5 to 7 days so you've got to take those steps to get that done if that's what you want to do now I would also recommend after doing that if you decide to attempt to plant some grass seed this time of year um use a liquid starter fertilizer and buy a liquid starter fertilizer because you would do that because once the grass seed starts germinating you want to get that starter fur on there right away and you don't want to go walking over the baby grass with a spreader you want to be able to spray it on from afar so um whether you use a hose in sprayer um I've got some videos about that on this channel um or you use a ready to use product that's just attaches to your hose or maybe you already have a backpack sprayer uh depending on the sprayer you want it to be able to go a long way so that you don't walk on uh the baby grass seed so hose and sprayers tend to be pretty good options for this unless you're seeding like a 10,000 square you know some Ultra large plot of land if you can get some liquid starter fertilizer on there early yeah that's right you tell them all about it yeah if you can get some liquid starter fertilizer on there early and then keep it warm I mean you can't control the weather but the thing is if you've got a frost coming in the garden what we do is if a frost is coming we cover the crops um there are there are products that will go right over the top of it and it will protect it from frost you can do the exact same thing with your lawn um if you want to go that far um there's nothing to say that you can't these are not normal things that people do but you can do them um keep it warm protect it from frost and then if you can manage to go about 3 weeks you might be able to get another dose of fertilizer down some people would call it a winterizer fertilizer for established grass but it's basically another dose of starter fur for uh babyg grass get it down and it is entirely possible I'm going to be doing some more soil probes and by that I mean like soil thermometer probes uh to kind of show you what the temperature is of my soil right now we've been getting up up to about 70 during the day for daytime temperatures and we've been getting down to about 3738 at night for the past week week and a half so it seems cold and certainly we've got some cold weather on the horizon it's supposed to have um a few days down in the upper 20s later than week but for the most part if precautions are taken you can get seed to germinate quickly it is possible to get seed to keep going and the baby grass to keep growing through those conditions into November it's not going to happen every time there's no guarantee but it certainly is possible so I'm not telling you to go seed right now uh most of the people watching in this video are either curious it's just curiosity kind of a thing or you're actually looking to you know decide whether you want to go through the trouble of it if you're going to seed I would advise you to go over the top do everything you possibly can uh to get it to germinate because even if you get it to germinate it still needs uh to establish a strong enough root structure to get through the winter um I've got a number of videos on this channel where I have recommended um adding potassium to the lawn this is not uh a recommendation that is common I mean lots of people lots of lawn professionals understand what potassium does but nobody really talks about it a lot to the regular lawn um the regular homeowner who's looking to tend to their lawn by themselves it uh it's the immune system for the grass it helps the grass fend off disease and stresses a lot of those stresses are fungal problems some of them are heat stress in the in the summer and some of them are cold stresses in the winter snow compaction uh heavy traffic all of those things um take a look at the video it's to my upper left up there um I'm going to link it down in the description as well um about pottassium um those aren't always included in starter starter fertilizers but um if you're going to seed get some uh because anything that you can get to germinate will do better over the winter if you can get some potassium into the system in addition to the nitrogen and in addition to the or the uh the phosphorus I'm going to call it quits right there that's a good enough video for this particular query um I also have a blog post on my website which I've linked down below i' point to it but I'm holding a baby I'm sure you've seen her by now um take a look at that blog post it's got more information about seating in the fall and getting grass to establish even in cold weather um thank you very much for watching I really do appreciate your time because I do talk I know I know that I talk and I appreciate those of you who have been watching this and appreciate what I have to say I'll see you in the next video say bye say bye say bye

Channel: Turf Mechanic

Views: 18,297

Keywords: grass, lawncare, gardening, lawnmower, lawn mower, lawn care, thatch

Id: uLyGaxc4nA4

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020