As my readers know, I moved into a new house last winter, and this past spring began the process of Planting a New Lawn. I have tried to document my progress on this blog (see previous posts), so I thought I should continue by posting a fall update.

During the spring, I had a decent amount of seed wash away from heavy rains, which also created some lovely ruts in the yard. The summer saw a bumper crop of foxtail and other weeds sprouting up. I pretty much gave up on the yard work in July and decided to wait until fall to work on it more.

My goal this fall was to get more grass out there so that when the annual weeds started to die off the grass could take over. If you read recommendations on overseeding a yard, you will generally see that the "experts" recommend killing all vegetation and starting from scratch if you have more than 50% weeds in your yard. I wasn't exactly sure of my grass-to-weed ratio, but there were a LOT of weeds. The recommendation to start from scratch has some merit, especially if you are doing a small area, but everyone I talked to thought it was crazy to kill what I already had. Based on this, and my personal sentiment of not wanting to purposely destroy my hard work from the spring, I decided that I would try to renovate rather than restart.

The best time for fall renovation for cool season grasses is the last two weeks in August through the first two weeks in September. I started a little later than I would have liked, but still had my seed down by Sept 17th. Here's the process I used:


1. Purchase a Tractor
The first thing I did was to purchase a lawn tractor. I had been planning to do this, but just hadn't gotten to it. Mowing the 1 acre yard with a push mower was getting tiresome, and I knew the tractor would be handy during renovation. I ended up with a 23 HP Husqvarna with 48" Mower Deck:


2. Fill Ruts
The next step in my plan was to get some dirt and fill the ruts that were created this past spring. I found a place with reasonable prices and had a dump truck load of top soil delivered to my house. This stuff was much blacker dirt compared to the clay my yard is made up of.

I also purchased an Agri-Fab 8 cu ft Poly Dump Cart to help me haul the dirt around to my various ruts:


This part of the process was not difficult, just labor intensive. Fill the cart, unload the cart, smooth, and repeat. Unfortunately, a few days of rain interrupted my plans, and in order for me to get my seed down by mid-September, I had to cut my rut-filling short. So I have some left over dirt and some left over ruts for next spring.

3. Cut The Grass Short
I was able to use my new tractor to cut the current grass pretty short. Some places I even hit dirt which didn't make me feel too good about using the new tractor.

4. Core Aerate
In order for grass seed to grow, they have to be in contact with dirt. If you were overseeding a small area, you might just be able to rake the top of the soil to loosen it up. With a large area of clay, that wasn't happening. Instead, I decided to core aerate. This is the process of pulling plugs of dirt up out of your yard. It's supposedly one of the best things you can do for your grass as it relieves compressed soil (especially clay) and allows air, nutrients, and water to reach the roots. For overseeding, it helps because it creates holes of exposed dirt and deposits dirt cores on top thus creating pretty good soil contact for the seeds.

To do this large area, I purchased a Brinly 40" Pull Behind Core Aerator:


I also purchased 4 cinder blocks to place in the weight tray. I attempted aerating 2 days after a decent rain shower and the thing worked flawlessly. It pulled 2-3" plugs out of the dirt. The only problem was that some of the plugs were slightly muddy and stuck to the tractor wheels on subsequent passes. I tried to make about 3-4 passes in different directions, but in some areas, it was only possible to go one direction and the additional passes seemed to just be hitting the already existing holes.

5. Seed and Fertilize
I purchased another 100lb of Kentucky Bluegrass and 50lb of Perennial Ryegrass. This is higher than the suggested overseeding rate, but I wanted to lay it on kind of thick. I also purchased four 32lb bags of starter fertilizer and three 32lb bags of standard fertilizer (high N content). I used my broadcast spreader to spread all these materials over the lawn in several passes. I ended up only using 6 bags of fertilizer, and saved some seed to fill in bare areas later on.

6. Work the Seed In
To get even better seed-to-soil contact, I used a piece of chain link fence. I got a piece about 4' x 6' for free from someone throwing some away. I hooked it up behind the tractor with a couple chains, put my cinder blocks on top of it to weight it down, and pulled it over the yard several times. It had been a day since I had done my aerating so the cores I had pulled out were all dried by then. The chain link was pretty effective in pulverizing the cores. This helped cover the seed with a layer of loose dirt. The dragging also helped knock some of the seed down into the aerator holes where they seed got excellent soil contact.

7. Water
So far, I have found watering to be the worst part of yard work. For one, I feel like a heel for using all the water. Secondly, it is darn near impossible to cover an acre of ground. I did my best to get most areas of my yard wet at least once a day. Other than that, I had to hope for some light rains.

The Results
After about 10 days I was seeing sprouts, especially in the aerator holes. What's more, the sprouts were KBG sprouts not rye (based on the seed hull still attached). Also during this time, the water and fertilizer helped the existing grass start to grow and fill in. After a couple weeks, the existing grass had grown enough that I had to mow again. I tried not to damage any seedlings and think I did a pretty good job. The cool weather put the annual weeds into retreat so they didn't look nearly as bad. However, I did have clover start to pop up throughout the yard. At any rate, I think things started looking pretty good. Here are the pics from 10/05/2008, about 3 weeks after my overseeding.

Front yard:


Back yard:


Front yard closeup (this is one of the best spots in the yard):



So I'm pretty much done with my yard work for this year. Next spring, I'll be focusing on weed killing. I'll be putting down a pre-emergent to help prevent the annual weeds, and might spray for any broadleafs and clover that come up in the spring. Because of the pre-emergent, I won't be doing any overseeding in the spring. I will however, aerate and fertilize to keep the ground from compacting and help the existing grass spread. I'll make sure to post an update next spring.

Comments welcome!