How to Grow Grass Like the Pros – Part 4

How to Grow Grass Like the Pros – Part 4

Quite a difference since the last been here. So my cousin’s husband, Tom, he really, really busted his butt on this. He graded everything by hand.

See now, because they got straw right here when it rains and you can see it’s been raining, there’s shingle gravel off the roof. It didn’t wash it out.

Now they have been watering because we got a week of about 80 degrees. And I said, hey man, like that sets grass off. It just pops. And so I said, go ahead and water. Look at all this grass, look at it, look at that. Look at that little, it’s fine because it’s so young. Two weeks, two weeks, two weeks. You can just move the straw. and this is full.

Like this, as this turf matures, you can see the grass just pushing where the straw was really heavy. Look at that. Just pushing it. Look at that. Two weeks. There are so many grass plants, young and thin, but, and this is going to be a great turf.

Now let’s remember all the golden rules. One. If you do it in the fall, you’re competing with fewer weeds. If you do it in the summer, you’re competing with the weeds period, and you will lose. You want to spray it twice, spray it once and then go over whatever you think you missed. Man, I can’t wait to come back in a week. This place is going to be just one solid, beautiful blanket. Now it looks really good. Really, really good. It’s coming along very, very well.

So they put down the seed and then they took a rake, flipped it upside down and kind of worked it in the topsoil a little bit. Then they went ahead and put seed over it again, and then they just went ahead and put this shredded straw over it. So it doesn’t matter if it’s shredded straw. I like, I prefer the shredded straw. It doesn’t blow away. Everything’s going off. I mean, there’s this young plants everywhere. They’re like threads. Here’s a Chia Pet. Look at that. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. So this turf is well on its way.

Now when you buy topsoil, here’s the bad news. Here you just sprayed it two times in a row and you killed off all the weeds and wild the grasses. Whatever seeds come in that topsoil you bought, you just inherited. So keep that in mind. You know, it’s probably not a bad idea to kill everything with vege kill, you know, good vegetation killer and then go ahead and put your topsoil down a few weeks ahead of time and see what grows out of that and then spray it and kill it. So that’s not, that’s not bad advice.

So two weeks and it looks great. The straw is every bit as important as the grass seed itself. I always tell people that I wish I would have learned it at a much younger age as a contractor. Man, look at that.

So now here’s, you know, just more helpful hints. This lawn will not need an irrigation system. When you buy sod at the sod farm, this is, you know, the one next door here, sod when you have grass that has been cut off from some side farm. Once they cut those roots off, it never ever roots the same again. Fact, sod is a living rug. Fact, it needs twice the water, maybe three times the water as a seeded lawn. This lawn will also handle drought stress, go dormant and then just come right back when the rain turns back on. Where sod doesn’t come back. If you don’t have a sprinkler system, it just dries up and dies.

So there are so many advantages to seed, saves you money for the life of the home and your water bill. You can opt-out of dealing with all these sprinkler systems that got to be started up, blown out, repaired after every winter. And it’s just another expense. Another headache. If you want to run a sprinkler in July, August because you love your grass really, really green and it’s not a big deal to do so. And if you still want to go ahead and put a sprinkler system in, well it comes down to, you know, if, if the funds are there, the allowances there, and if you know you want to keep up with the Joneses and you want to have one of the nicest lushest lawns on the block, so we will check back in another week.

But the straw, the straw is so important, otherwise, the seed just would’ve blown away. The birds would have got at it when it rained or watered. It would have just washed and some low areas, there’d be a few little Chia Pet looking things and everything else would be bald. When a young seed germinates it just dries up. When there’s no cloud cover, like today we got cloud cover, but when the sun is shining, you got direct UV rays and a little seed germinates. Guess what? It’s not a big enough plant. It just dies. It dries up and dies. This straw holds the moisture, keeps it damp, protects the grass seed when it germinates makes sure all your germinated grass seed survives. I mean, just plus plus plus.

All right guys, until the next video, be sure to give us a thumbs up if you want me to keep doing these videos.