When To Stop Watering New Grass Seed?

hey guys this is brian mounts i run turf mechanic.com in this channel and today i want to answer a question two questions that's kind of worded the same way i get it all the time over on the website and here in the comments on my grass seed videos how long do you water grass seed now there's two ways to look at this question how long do you water grass seed on the ground per watering session every single time you put the sprinkler on or use the hose on it how long do you do it the second way of interpreting this question is how many days or weeks do you water grass seed like its grass seed when do you start switching over to a more regular watering pattern now i'm going to answer both of those questions right here in this video i have lots of resources linked down in the in the description below articles over on my website where i go into a variety of deep dives into different aspects of seeding a lawn i've grown lots of grass from seed here in the property i've put a lot of videos out on this channel about it and i have a lot of material on the website so i hope you'll trust my opinion here what you see behind me is a very light green patch of grass and then what i'm sitting on is a bit darker now both of these grasses are exactly the same they're just different ages this grass that i'm sitting on right here was perennial rye seeded in may of 2021 almost six months ago it was overseeded in august with kentucky bluegrass the exact same grass seed was planted back here but that is approximately five weeks old it's very young grass and you can tell by the color now this entire patch is not very big but this entire patch did used to look like the brown hillside up above i prepared this area this seed bed for the purpose of extending our yard through the flat area i don't irrigate up the hill so i don't attempt to grow seed up there now when it comes to watering per session watering time per session it doesn't matter what grass seed you're talking about or what variety you're talking about you don't want to water grass seed for very long on any one particular session now depending on how you water it is going to make a difference if you're watering it with a hose you're actually putting a quite a bit of water down on a very localized area quickly so if you're watering just a small patch let's say you're doing patch repair you're not going to want to put the hose sprinkler nozzle on it for more than probably 5 to 10 seconds it really doesn't take very much to moisten the upper level and moisten the seeds sitting on top of the soil now if you've got a sprinkler set out here and it's watering the whole area this is about 100 square foot then that's going to be a little bit longer because the same volume of water is traveling through the hose but it's being dispersed on a bigger area so you're going to be wanting to water that for a few minutes per session and then of course you're going to be doing multiple sessions per day until you have proper seed germination now if you're using a full in-ground sprinkler system you might be watering it even longer per session because not only do you have one sprinkler head that your water pressure is delivering water to but it might be 10 sprinkler heads for one of my zones here on the property i think there's 10 to 12 sprinkler heads on it so if i'm watering an entire lawn through an underground sprinkler i might be forced to run the sprinkler per zone for roughly 10 to 15 minutes per zone to get really good coverage now of course the longer it takes the less likely we are to wash seed away or start experiencing pooling of water we don't want to put water down faster than it can absorb into the ground if you're putting water onto grass seed on the ground and you see that the water is starting to pool in certain areas of the ground then that means the grass seed is slowly starting to float up and it's moving so every single time you water the lawn or water your grass seed it moves around it's not going to germinate well if at all under a scenario like that you want to do it as slow as possible now the other way to look at this question how long do we water grass seed has to do with the duration of days and weeks that we do how long do we do this program of lots of little spritzes onto the seed to get them to germinate well that depends on the grass type now southern grass types are not usually grown by seed and by southern i'm talking about warm season grass types your bermudas your saint augustine st augustine you can't even buy seed for it bahaya grass centipede grass zoysia grass all of these things can be grown for seed but they aren't normally grown from seed so if you are going to attempt to grow them from seed you have to give it a good long time and honestly the amount of time really makes it likely that you're not going to get very good coverage simply because of the elements over the course of three to four weeks if you've got grass seeds sitting on the ground it is very likely that it is going to move because of wind because of rain or because of animals for the cold season grass types your kentucky 31s your turf type called fescues your kentucky bluegrasses your fine fescues your perennial rice these grass types germinate much faster now kentucky bluegrass is the slowest of them all to germinate but under good soil conditions and good seed bed preparation i would expect perennial rye to germinate in about seven days i would expect any of the fescues really to germinate around day nine and i would expect kentucky bluegrass to germinate around day 12. however those are the earliest dates of germination so by the time that you get solid coverage over over the course of your seed bed it's going to be a bit longer than that so for perennial rye when i planted this i watered this grass seed as if nothing had germinated at all until day 14 even though i had good germination on day six the kentucky bluegrass started germinating somewhere around day nine or so and it slowly continued germinating every day until around day 1617 i continued to water it as if nothing had germinated whatsoever until around day 22 to day 23 at that point i switched over into deeper watering sessions far less frequently for baby grass that's what i would still call this i am not watering this every day but i am watering it every other day by the time it gets even more mature like this grass six months old i'll easily be able to revert into a two times a week watering schedule during the summer and a one time a week watering schedule during the spring and the fall now i could go on and on and on about how to deal with grass seed but that's why i have other resources linked in the description below if you are attempting to grow grass seed then there are a number of questions that i've already addressed in videos on this channel and in articles over on the website please go down in the description below and take a look at them and for those of you that have pretty good germination already this video right up here in the corner is about when to start mowing the lawn after that seed has germinated and started growing make sure to watch it it's got expanded information on that next step to growing grass from seed thanks for watching and i hope to see you in the comments down below

Channel: Turf Mechanic

Views: 175,761

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

Id: 33aB8Exc7TM

Length: 7min 22sec (442 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 16 2021