Overseeding Series - Step 2 - Seeding the Area

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[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk7yi75U56c[/embedyt]

Okay, so here's the area that we sprayed with our non selective herbicide after a couple of weeks, you can see pretty defined line there where it's died off. So the next thing we're going to want to do is all that dead material, we're going to want to cut this, as short as we can remove as much that dead material as possible. And we'll show you what that looks like. All right, so we set them our mower down to the lowest setting, which is about one inch, and just cut off as much as this dead grass and plant material that we as we could. This would be the point in the process where if you had any leveling grading that you wanted done, obviously, this is just the side of our shop here, we're not gonna worry about leveling and grading. But if you did have some low areas or areas that drain poorly that you wanted to try to address with some grading, now's the time, you'd want to bring in that your topsoil and graded out in level. So next step is going to be getting the verdict cutter in the air Raider. Like I said, I'm going to do two different sides here. So we can see the different results with the two different services. So that'll be the next step here. Okay, guys, so time for the next part in my overseeding series, we've got the my last video, I showed you how to get this all prepped, we've already sprayed around up killed the grass in the areas that we're going to receive. And now we've cut it down as short as we can cut it to get as much that dead grass out of there. And now we're going to take our vertical cut machine here and turn this on its side. And I can explain to you. What, oh boy. All right. So how this machine works is it's got all these blades here, you can see they're they're short, they're just a couple inches long and really only about an inch to an inch and a half of this blade is going to cut down into the soil. But what it does is it cuts little slits in the soil for that grass seed to fall down into. Because the grass seed really needs a good soil contact, you can't just throw grass on the surface and expect it to germinate. It needs to be sewn down into the ground about an inch to an inch and a half deep. That's how you get your really good germination. So I'm going to go ahead and verta cut this area that we've prepped here. And I'll come back and show you what it looks like after it's been vertical. Okay, so I verted cut the area and spread some seed, I'm gonna show you here, you can see how there's little slits cut into the ground here. So all those little slits or words the grass seed is really going to germinate. Well, a lot of that stuff sit on the surface, unfortunately, not going to germinate real well. But the stuff that the gates down in the slits are, are gonna germinate real well, they're about an inch apart. This is one of the things that we think sets our service apart. So a lot of companies will verta cut once in one direction, spread the seed and call it good. With our full service overseeding program, we have found that we get much better results. So I'll come back now. And verta cut this again, 90 degrees. So the first one I'm going up and down this way, I'm going to go 90 degrees to the original verta cutting, and verta cut it again. So right now I've only we recommend about 10 pounds per 1000 for bare ground like this of grass seed. So I've spread about five pounds per 1000 square foot over this area. So I've put half my seed down a vertical cut in this direction, up and down the hill, put half my seed down now I'm going to vertical across the hill and put the other half of the seed down. And we've found doing it this way gets us much, much better results. And one thing to be careful of if you're doing this yourself is there is a tendency to over apply the scene because you want to everybody wanted to look lush and green as soon as it comes in. The thing is if you apply too much seed, and I've actually done this myself and my own lawn I got a little over zealous with putting my seed down when I did my yard a couple years ago. The problem is the grass will look great when it first comes in but then when it starts to mature, it's going to crowd you're not going to get good airflow and you most likely like I had happened to me are going to develop a fungus problem. So with this get grass seed more is not necessarily better. It's gonna look sparse when it first comes in. You want that because it will as it matures. Each single little chute of grass that comes from the seed will mature into 30 to 40 individual grass blades per plant so that one thing is going to bloom out into a much larger a cover much larger area. And once it does that, like I said, you don't want it crowded because then you don't get good airflow, and then you get fungus. So, alright, I'm going to do the second vertacut, cut and seed, and we'll take a look at that. Okay, so we've done our second pass with the verta cutter and spread the second half of the seed so that we've got an average of 10,000 pounds per square foot, covering this area. Now, one thing I want to point out, I'm not sure if this will come through in the video, so well, but I'll see here. So you can see we've got these lines going down this way from when I cut, but we've got a section here that the lines aren't really appearing. That's because again, we're only cutting about an inch to an inch and a half deep. So if there's any kind of uneven area in the lawn, you know, depressions or what have you, like we had right here, there's kind of a little trench right here, those blades are as they're moving the sheet machine across it, they're not touching the ground there. So this, inevitably, when you do a seeding, there's gonna be some little spots here and there, where the vertical machine just didn't reach it, the seed will germinate a little bit here, but not as well as it's going to germinate in these areas that we really got to cut real well. So this is the kind of situation Don't worry about this. Generally, unless there's whole large areas where the very cut didn't really do a good job. If it's just little spots here and there. That grass that's germinating around that spot will fill in that spot. But so the last thing I want to mention here, and stick with me, this is an important part, I want to show you the label on the grass seed that we're using here. So as you can see, this is basically a certification that they run it through a lab, they certify all these numbers here. And then that's their sort of certification tickets. Sorry, not showing us what the camera. But as you can see here, there's three different types of fescue in this blend of different percentages, you get this other label out of the way. So we've got a 20 38% one type of fescue 33%, another type and 26% of a third type. What this does, and by the way, there's the germination rates here. So lab confirmed that these seeds 90% of these seeds will germinate under the proper conditions. And then again, one thing you want to look for at the bottom, I know I'm jumping around in my topics here, other crop seeds, and then weed seeds 0% and lab certified 0%, weed seed 0% other types of weed seed, and then there's 1.55% inert matter that's just seed husks and parts of the the seed plant from harvesting the seed. But that's not going to affect your, you're not going to get weeds or anything that's just dead plant matter that got a little bit mixed in. So use a good quality seed. Use a blend like this because if you put one type of seed in your lawn, and then you're you get a fungus that really likes that variety of grass, it'll wipe out the whole lawn. A lot of times different blights and funguses that can affect your grass, they'll tart they'll generally target one type of seed or one type of grass rather. So you might lose some some of your lawn to this one variety to fungus or something. But these other two are going to not be susceptible. So your your lawn will still recover from that from that, you know blight or fungus that it got. So anyway, Okay, next thing I'm going to do here is this. I haven't mentioned anything with this right side yet. That's because we've got another service that's more intended for generally healthy lawns where we air rate, and we put about four pounds of seed down per 1000. And this just helps keep lawns that are generally healthy, rejuvenated and get some fresh grass growing in there, that it stays healthy. So now what I'm going to do with that service, we only air rate with the full service overseeding we we double cut it with the vert cutter, and then we airways air rate. So I'm going to air rate, this whole section, and then I'll see just this side as well. And then when this starts to come in, we'll see the difference between the full service overseeding and how it really fills in and then over here you'll notice it'll just kind of fill in in plugs where we did the air rating, which is great because in a lawn that's generally healthy, you don't want to really overcrowded again with too much seed. He just want to interject a little bit of fresh grass all around the area. So we'll get to that. We'll see how that looks. Okay guys, so We're done, I'm going to explain what we've done to the each side here, you'll notice I've got a line kind of marking one side from the other, because these are examples of our two different services. So on this side, we've done the full service overseeding, which is doing two passes with the verdict cutter in you know, perpendicular to one another, with spreading seed in between each pass, and then we've also aerated it. So you can see how there's plugs. The aeration helps to loosen the soil, especially the clay soils in our area, the ground gets compacted, and then you don't get oxygen and nutrients down to the roots. So this helps to loosen the soil. And then finally, we've spread our starter fertilizer, which is got a good bit of nitrogen, you see the numbers right here 1424. So this is your nitrogen, your phosphorus and potassium, the phosphorus is the part that really helps to stimulate root growth. So you can see that's, that's why it's got that 20 there, it's a higher number higher ratio than the other numbers. And then the nitrogen nitrogen is kind of high in this one too, because that actually promotes the the top growth once the the part that we see the the green blades, and it will help them get a deeper green color. So now on this side, this is just our error rate, and seed service. So we haven't taken the vertical cutter like over this area like we did on the left hand side here. This has just been aerated. Again, you can see the little plugs, holes in the ground. And then we spread seed and this does get the starter for fertilizer as well. Alright, so now I'll set up our sprinklers, I'll get this water. And we'll check back in after seven days and see what it looks like. And we'll follow along each week with the progress as it grows in and just see how the two different sides compare for the two different services. So that's it. Hope you're enjoying this so far. Thanks. Okay, guys, so we're done with the seating, I've got the irrigation setup. So now this is the most important part. It doesn't matter what type of sprinkler system you use. Right here, I don't have an irrigation systems. So I went to Lowe's, and bought a $50 Timer that's got multiple zones give you a little shot of that right here. So if you don't have an irrigation system, and you're trying to seed your lawn, you're gonna get one to get some sort of timer like this. Because essentially, once you've seated, you want this area to stay damp, not not completely saturated, and not dry to the touch either. But it needs to stay damp for the first two to three weeks until the grass is about an inch to an inch and a half tall. You want to make sure that this soil is never dried to the touch. If your grass seed germinates and sprouts, and then you forget to water it for a couple of days, and it dries out. That stuff's gonna die. Our motto when it comes to seating is if it dries out, it dies out. So this is the most critical thing to get right. When you've overseeded your yard is to make sure you've got the watering down. What I've got this set up for is about 10 minutes, three times a day. And again, we're not trying to soak it to where it's just drenched. Because if the water is sitting, if there's seeds sitting and standing water, it'll rot and it won't it won't sprout the same time. Like I said, if it dries out, then it's not going to germinate. So if if you've watered in the morning, and you come and check it right before the next cycle is set to run again, and it's dry, then you need to increase your your watering times, you wanted to make sure that when the next cycle comes on that surface is still damp to the touch. So I know I'm kind of going on and on about this, but I can't stress enough how important this part is in the process. To get a successful overseeding job done, you really need to make sure it's watered thoroughly every day. So all right, I'm gonna check back in a week. We'll see if anything's sprout a week from now, and that'll be the next step in the series here. Thanks

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