# Legz's Lawn Journal



## Legz (Feb 9, 2019)

Hello Everyone,

My name is Legz, I am new to TLF and I am being dominated 



My wife and I moved into our house last summer, first time homeowners and lawn caregivers so I have a lot to learn. I found LCN over the winter and have been studying his videos and was happy to recently find this forum/community to be able to dig into further detail as I learn. Do to my ignorance I unfortunately missed the window in the Fall to seed so I am having to begin my restoration plan with this Spring. In the Fall, the lawn was covered with crabgrass (I didn't even know what crabgrass was at that time)which spurred my desire for a healthier lawn. I sprayed some Post-Emergent late Fall but didn't make it any further than that. The hurricanes and heavy amounts of rain quickly began to fall and didn't seem to let up until only within the last few weeks. Much of the yard in the photo above has been completely saturated with water (poor drainage) until the warm spell we had last week.

Here is a walk around my house to show you what I am working with:



Lots of moss built up over the last few months, runs all the way down past the A/C unit:


More moss along the back of the house as well:




Front left side of house, more moss in front of the bushes by the front door. And more poor drainage in the top middle of the photo headed towards the side of the house:


Not much growing in the front:


Or along the left side:


Friendly neighbor tried to help with my weed problem with a non-chemical solution :evil: :


And then back to the back yard:


So there it is. I have no real gauge of how bad/salvageable the yard is so figured I would use this year as a learning year, do what I can to improve the lawn and see how things look next Spring and go from there. Here is what I have been up to so far in 2019:
- I have sprayed moss killer and raked up most of what I could around the house. There is definitely still spots of moss around but with there being so much it is difficult to get it all but will continue to work on it. 
-Sprayed Ortho weed-killer around the yard. Henbit started popping up everywhere so wanted to spray it before it began to flower along with the other weeds around the yard that I am working to identify. 
-Weather temps got very warm last week so that pushed my plans to put down pre-emergent a month earlier than I had originally planned. But thanks to g-man, I got it figured out and applied the first half of the split rate this afternoon. Rain expected the next few days to soak it in. 
-I pulled my soil samples on Friday and will take them in for testing on Monday, though there is currently a 6-week wait time for results.

Looking to the future, unless anyone anything to add, I think I'm on pause for anything major to my yard for a couple months. Current plan:
- Continue to stay on top of moss/weed removal
- Fill in tire tracks
- When weather warms back up begin work on improving the landscaping
- Wait for soil results and review for probable lime application
- Another user recommended reading up on Fungicides in my region, so going researching that. 
- I did find 2 grubs when raking up the moss, so research grub control further
- Put down an application of Milo in late April
- Apply the second half of PreM application in May
- Finish up plans for Summer goals

Looking forward to getting this lawn under control. Thanks for any input/advice anyone is willing to give!


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## Chris LI (Oct 26, 2018)

Legz said:


> Hello Everyone,
> 
> My name is Legz, I am new to TLF and I am being dominated


Not for long! Welcome to TLF! Give it a season, and you will see a big improvement.

FYI-If you want to take the domination line back, invest in a drop spreader. IMHO, it's better than an Edge Guard type spreader, since it drops from a lower height and less subject to wind. I run all my perimeters with one and like it for seed spreading, too. Good luck!


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## Legz (Feb 9, 2019)

Thanks, Chris! Good to know on the drop spreader. Not that I expected much, but I quickly realized how cheap my $35 Scott's spreader was. But hopefully it did a good enough job with the PreM.


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## Legz (Feb 9, 2019)

Soil samples arrived the other day, wasn't expecting them for a couple more weeks so it was nice for them to arrive before March. I created with a post to discuss the results here.

Not much activity on the lawn recently. Weather has cooled off staying around the 50s during the day and 40s at night. There has been ran nearly everyday for the last week which has resulted in nearly 4.5 inches of rain. Tomorrow will be nice but after that we have a bit of a cold spell ahead for the next 10 days with evening temps getting into the low 30s. Rain is expected to continue for the foreseeable future.


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## Legz (Feb 9, 2019)

Had some nice weather over the weekend so had a chance to fill in the tire tracks. Cleaned out the leaves and debris and the original plan was to scalp the high parts of the track marks along the side and mix them in a bucket with top soil and then fill it in with that mixture, but that proved to be more difficult than I anticipated. So I ended up just filling it most of the way with top soil, packing it in with a shovel and then just pulling the high parts from the tracks over to cover it up and then packing it again. Hopefully it holds up with the upcoming rainfall.


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## Legz (Feb 9, 2019)

I've decided to commit to a fall reno so I'm currently just in educate, plan and wait mode. Hoping to have my plan of attack ready soon. Since my last post I've put down my first application of lime at the beginning of April and will put down the 2nd and final application for the year per the bag rate soon. I'm planning to put down a little bit of starter fert soon as well to help get P & K up in preparation for the seeding since they were low in my soil test. After evading my traps for a few weeks I also managed to rid the lawn of a pesky mole that was wreaking havoc throughout the yard.

In the meantime I have moved my attention to landscaping. None of the mulch areas had any type of barrier from the lawn so there is quite a bit of mulch that washes into the lawn with heavy wind/rain. I prefer the look of natural edging, but given some of the areas I didn't think it would work well in some places so I opted to go with plastic edging. Here are some before and after photos of what I have been able to get to so far, looking forward to seeing it next to some healthy turf:


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## Legz (Feb 9, 2019)

Well, it's been a while since updating my lawn journal but a lot has happened...so here we go!

At the beginning of May I did end up putting down an application of 10-18-10 at bag rate to try and start working on improving the P & K in my soil

The renovation preparation began memorial weekend. I had a fair amount of soil that was fairly compact and looked similar to this:



Aeration and cover in compost was in order. Ran sprinklers around the yard 2 days before to try and soften the soil up for the the aerator.



10 yards of compost was delivered on friday and the weekend was spent throwing it down. I ended up trucking in 2 more yards on Saturday to make sure I had enough to make it through the weekend. Last thing I wanted was to end up short on the holiday weekend.











It was a long (hot) weekend, but by the end all that remained was an outline of what once was. And half the flies in North Carolina:



A week and a half later and the weeds were alive and well:








End of June and the weeds were primed and ready for round up:


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## Legz (Feb 9, 2019)

Initially my plan was to put seed down mid to late August so I began my rounds of Round Up the first week of July. There were some areas where bermuda had moved in and was making itself known so I knew it was going to take a few applications to make sure I got it all. In hindsight I probably started this step too early and my lawn laid bare longer than I would have liked, but it is what it is!

Due to getting a puppy in the near future, I decided to hold off on renovating the back yard and save it for an attempt at renovating in the Spring. This was about a week after the first application:












The bermuda and nutsedge definitely put up a fight, but by the end of it I felt pretty good about my weed eradication. Leading up to seed down, spurge was becoming more prevalent as well. I think I did 4 apps all together: Initial full lawn applicaiton, 2 spot sprays and then a final spot spray app the day before seed down.

While the weeds were dying I had to do something. I ended up going with GCI TTTF seed and I did two small test spots in the back yard. I did nothing more than put the seed down by hand and cover with some topsoil I had on hand and watered.





That was on a Monday. By Friday morning I had germination:





A month later, disease had began to destroy what I had built and the testing came to an end.





On the renovation portion of the yard, I did more soil prep:
8/11 - I applied Air 8 & RGS at the compaction cure rates and watered them in
8/22 - I applied humic 12 & 0-0-2 at label rate right before receiving about .5 in of rain
8/25 - I did some tree trimming to the trees in the front, side and back of the house to help allow some more sunlight in.


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## Legz (Feb 9, 2019)

Due to nothing but straight heat and potential for hurricane down pours I opted to hold off on my planned August seed down until there was a break in the weather. This gave me time to finalize my irrigation plans because there is no way I was watering the ~3,500 sqft reno by hand or moving sprinklers around. Due to the layout of my renovation and the fact that I had never done anything with irrigation before, it was going to take some tinkering. I ended up using poly pipe for my lines and MP rotators for my sprinklers. I am running the zones off the Melnor 4 spigot timers. I don't have too many photos of my irrigation set up at the moment but will get some before I take it down. My hope is I will be able to roll up the lines the best I can and store them so I can bring them out and re-use them in the Summers.

The final layout was similar to this, though some of the sprinkler heads changed once I saw them in action. Since it is just temporary I didn't get super technical with it to make sure I had perfect head to head coverage, I was just trying to minimize the amount of watering I had to due by hand as much as possible.



I initially tried using landscape stakes to hold down the lines/sprinkler bodies but ultimately landed on jerry rigging the bodies in place by zip tying them to tent stakes. (spoiler alert: there is grass in this photo :lol: )



On the spigot in the back of the house I have 200' of hose that I walk around the south side of the house to reach the areas on the orange zone where I ended up not being able to put sprinklers, the parkways on the East side of the house and hitting some spots on the North side where the coverage wasn't complete.


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## Legz (Feb 9, 2019)

September 15th: Still no signs of a break in the heat (basically 90s everyday), but there aren't any storms on the forecast that can wash my seed away either, so I decide it's time to just go for it.

Lawn status prior to beginning the work:













Here is what when down:
-Mowed as low as I could and raked up debris
-Did some minor leveling with top soil to areas that had some significant dips
-Used an overseeder to create a better seed bed 
-Put down GCI TTTF Seed
-I think I rolled next but it was getting late so my memory was hazy when I wrote down what I did the next day
-Applied tenacity at .5 teaspoon/M
-Applied RGS/Air-8 at compaction cure rate
-Applied starter fert of 10-18-10 at at rate of .25 lbs of N/M
-Covered seed in peat moss (this step was actually done over a couple of days due to available time and quantity on hand)
-Staked down irrigation. With running the overseeder I wanted the irrigation out of the way, so I had to put it back.

I had some prior obligations that took up more more of the day than I would have liked but I stayed up until 5:30am and got the job done. So far, the biggest mistake that I know that I made is on the North side of my house I put down the grass seed at twice the recommended rate ...after putting the seed down in that section I realized how quickly I was going to be burning through the seed and knew something had to be off. Sure enough...scale was kg  . So I guess I will be experimenting with an over seeded section! Due to it being 5:30 in the morning I didn't get an photos of the finished product. Nor did I take any in the days that followed. I was too busy trying to keep the seed moist in 90 degree days.


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## Legz (Feb 9, 2019)

September 20th, day 5 after seed down and I had my first signs of germination!




After that, the grass was racing out of the ground and I was trying to keep it from burning up.

September 21st:


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## Legz (Feb 9, 2019)

September 22 (day 2 post germ):



















September 23rd (day 3 post germ):

The parkway and some of the areas on the south side of my lawn are lagging noticeably behind the rest. I assume this is due to the fact that it has been getting direct heat all day everyday and it's been more difficult to keep water on it.

















September 26th (day 6 post germ):

On 9/24 I moved my watering to be deep and infrequent. Bascially just doing once in the mornings and then only the areas on the south side that get sun all day get a bit more in the afternoon. Trying to find that balance of enough water for the plant but not too much for disease.















Unfortunately, moles decided to join the party... :evil:


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## Legz (Feb 9, 2019)

October 5th (day 15 post germ):

Grass on the south side continues to lag behind the rest of the yard but does continue to fill in. October 3rd and 4th were back in the upper 90s after a period of being in the 80s.



















The section behind the AC unit isn't looking healthy. Not sure if it is due to lack of sun being on the north side of the house and the AC unit blocking the sun in the morning or if disease has gotten to it.


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## Legz (Feb 9, 2019)

October 6th (day 16 post germ):

First mow day! Grass on the north side is getting tall, pushing 6-7" so it is due. Though it is noticeably thinner than areas that get more sun so I was hesitant to mow it sooner, but at this point it needs a cut. Mowed it at the highest setting (4") and bagged the clippings since it is the section I over seeded. Trying to keep the area open as much as possible so it can dry out and keep disease away. I do see some pressure that I am keeping an eye on, weather is cooling significantly in the coming days. The rest of the yard I set the mower to 3.5".


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## Legz (Feb 9, 2019)

October 8th (day 18 post germ)

Seeing some brown tips in a couple of areas that I am keeping my eye on.



They didn't seem to get worse on the 9th so perhaps I'm in the clear. Weather has been highs in the 70s and lows in the 50s recently so maybe I'll be OK? It is probably time for my next application of fert and start getting some N down. I do have some Milo I purchased in the spring that I would like to use up at somepoint, but with it being slow release, it probably won't be too helpful at this point. Also, hoping to pick up some Carbon X this weekend that I can use instead.

So I may put down an application of fert and maybe give the lawn it's 2nd cut and bag the clippings to get rid of the diseased spots of grass.

With the cooler weather, the ground is staying wet longer, so today (10/9) was the first day since seed down that I didn't put any water on the lawn.


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