How to Plant Grass Like the Pros – Part 3

How to Plant Grass Like the Pros – Part 3

Alright, DIYers. I want you to know just how important straw is. That’s what this whole video is going to be about. I’m going to take you out on many sites, multiple sites. I’m going to show you jobs with straw, jobs without straw, just to show you how important it is to put down the straw. It’s as important as the grass seed itself. If you don’t put down straw, you are honestly just wasting all that time, all your sweat equity, all the money that you spent in the seed because it’s just going to blow around. Birds are going to eat. If it germinated it’s just going to dry out.

Now see where there are some patches of topsoil? I want to point this out. This is my cousin’s house and we’re using it for this series and her husband Tom is doing a great job. This guy has worked his tail off. We actually went back and got some more straw and they’d put it over those areas where you just see topsoils. The results are fabulous. We’ll get to that. Don’t put any fertilizer down at that point. Wait until you start to see sprouts. So I’ll help you with that as well. So let me take you into just some different job locations. Results with straw and results without straw.

Alright. Grass seed was put down on this yard and I just wanted to show you guys, let’s see. It’s a brand new house, your beautiful house but and, and they slit seed. There are spots where you can see some grass plants, a few, a few grass plants and spots. But for the most part, because there was no straw here, it didn’t take. They got a couple of grass plants, not much going on. See the weeds actually came in, but look at the grass where there was a straw netting. Look at that.

You can see the difference that the straw makes. There’s a lot of grass seed coming in here. I mean it’s just, it’s just amazing. Remember the straw holds moisture and it keeps the seed in place so that it doesn’t wash into the little low areas. Then the birds can’t get at it. So the straw is doing many, many things. And then when it biodegrades it feeds it like a fertilizer.

I want to show you what happens when you don’t use a straw. So straw wasn’t used here. You can see there’s a couple of little… But look, when you water it there’s always going to be like little low areas, little potholes. I mean, no matter how perfect you grade this, the water is gonna run and lay somewhere. Now, right in here you can see there’s a lot of seed that germinated cause it all washed into that, that pothole,

Now the crabgrass is no threat. And this is crabgrass cause you can get that with your pre-emergent in the spring. And then this is nutsedge is pretty popular in the North here. So you know what? Don’t even worry about that. Winter is going to kill that off so, but you can see with no straw down to protect the seed from washing away and birds and the wind blowing it away. You just have these areas that are low lying. You can see every low lying area. There’s a little Chia Pet.

You want to put your grass seed down, you want to rake it in really good and you want to cover it with a really good layer of straw. That’s going to hold the seed down. It’s going to hold it in place. When it germinates it’s also going to allow it to stay moist. You don’t want a new seedling that’s just germinated to have the direct sun hit it. It’ll just dry out. It’ll just kill it. You can just see all seed that’s washed down here. They’ve got some popping now, but this has to be done again and this needs to be done with straw. This was a lot of hard work to get nowhere.

You definitely want to be generous when it comes to the straw. It is such an important part. You don’t want to see any of the dirt. You don’t want to see any topsoil, you know you want it all covered. See the grass is going to grow right up through the straw, no problem. And over time this straw is going to biodegrade. It’s going to feed all of the grass plants

Everything that is germinating, this straw, like today it got to 85 for September weather that’s on the hot side. So if a grass plant germinates and we go into that kind of heat without the straw to protect it, it’s such a tiny small grass plant that the sun will actually just cook it, kill it. That one hot day as all takes.

So this was done a few weeks ago, this section here, so it’s much further along, but you can see a lot of the straw has biodegraded. Now in another week, this is going to be really lush. It’s going to start filling in nice.

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