New Life for an Old Lawn
Gardening by the Yard : Episode GBY-615 -- More Projects »
Foot traffic, floods, drought and heat can downgrade the look of your lawn. Master gardener Paul James, host of HGTV's Gardening by the Yard, shows you how to revitalize your thin, brown lawn without taking the complicated steps of starting over:
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Figure A
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Figure B
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Figure C
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Figure D
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Figure E
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Figure F
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First, tidy up your lawn; pick up sticks and other debris; blow or rake any fallen leaves and put them in the compost pile. Do whatever grading work that's needed by filling small holes with dirt or knocking off any high spots with a shovel (figure A). Mark each buried sprinkler head with landscape flags (figure B). Aeration is the most important technique of all; in fact, it's the one step James says you shouldn't miss. You can do it yourself by renting a lawn aerator or you can hire a professional. Gas-powered core aerators (figure C) are great machines and have the muscle to pull out three-inch-long plugs of soil and sod as they ramble through your lawn. Holes left in the lawn by aeration open it up and allow water (figure D), nutrients and oxygen to penetrate into the root zone where they can do the most good; the plugs left on the ground will disappear in no time. James uses a mix containing 33.8 percent Trailblazer II, 32.8 percent Bravo, and 32.5 percent Lancer to re-seed (figure E). He's partial to mixes because they offer the best from each type of seed. This particular mixture does the job for James' lawn (he lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma) and will probably do as well in other areas where tall fescue thrives. To sow grass seed, a broadcast spreader with a hopper that holds approximately 80 pounds of seed (figure F) is just what you want if you have a large lawn. Using such a large spreader means you will make fewer stops and won't have to refill as often. Cover the entire yard: work north to south, then sow from east to west. Sowing at the rate of about 10 pounds of seed per 1,000 square feet results in a pretty thick carpet of seed. Many people use a roller to make sure they get good seed to soil contact; if you aerate first, rolling isn't necessary. James recommends a slow-release, all-natural fertilizer that's safe to apply at seeding time. If you do choose a synthetic fertilizer, read the label carefully; some fertilizers are best applied after seeds germinate and begin to grow. Fall is the best time for feeding a lawn, regardless of the type of turf. With a newly-seeded lawn, how often you water is probably more important than how much you water. Make sure that the soil surface remains moist until the seeds germinate. James sets his sprinkler system to water for only 15 minutes, but he runs it twice a day (once in the morning and once in the afternoon).As soon as seeds begin to germinate, switch to watering in the morning, running the sprinklers for 30 to 45 minutes one or two days a week. Be diligent about keeping leaves off the lawn; they can shade the seeds or mat them down so much that they won't grow. Within a couple of weeks your newly-seeded lawn will be lush and green, and you can proudly show it off.
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