# New home owner, already having problems



## Ryknow48 (Jun 28, 2021)

Hello everyone. Just a little pre-face information, I just bought a new DR Horton construction home in Florida about 2-3 months ago. This is my first home purchase and first time Ive had a lawn of my own. Ever since I was a kid I dreamed of having that awesome green lawn that has people doing double-takes. I am very much a novice when it comes to pretty much everything. Ive spent a decent amount of time reading and watching videos and to be honest its a lot to take in all at once. That being said Im kind of in over my head here trying to figure out what I have going on in several spots and how to fix it. I have since hired Massey law/pest control to service my yard until I can finally get a good enough understanding to do it myself.

So into the issues: about a month or two into living here there were several spots that showed up seemingly out of nowhere that just got brown fast and just bad (will attach pictures via my phone as a reply). Called Massey out, they came up with a plan that the gist of it was my lawn needed serious help. Ive had problems getting a hold of them since they gave me the initial plan and have been out once already to service the lawn. I have no idea what they put down as I cant get a hold of anyone over there. I just hope they didnt drop kick my lawn in the face with Nitrogen. My wife told me the guy said he had to put double down of whatever he did because things were so poor looking.

I will attach pictures as well for where I am at today after once service, finally some rain over the last couple weeks, and mowing Sunday. Mainly Im curious if anyone can identify what the problems are. Of all the videos Ive watched I think Im looking at fungus, then the next video Im like no thats thatch, the next its like no thats just dead. Hoping someone here can at least help me identify what Im looking at. Second to that kind of trying to figure out the next steps to start pushing this rock back uphill. Pretty sure some of the spots are going to require re-sodding, but was curious if some of the other spots were savable?

I appreciate anyone who made it this far and can lend a hand!


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## Ryknow48 (Jun 28, 2021)

Current:


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## Ryknow48 (Jun 28, 2021)

Before calling Massey


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## ionicatoms (Mar 8, 2020)

Welcome to TLF.

Looks like you'll need to rake up the dead material, drop some peat moss if you like, and make sure it gets adequate water so that the grass fills into the dead spots. Plug or sod if you want to get it faster.

Hard to say what killed it at this point. Either too much moisture or not enough.

Make sure your lawn is on an insecticide regimen. Quarterly at a minimum.


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## Colonel K0rn (Jul 4, 2017)

Welcome to the forum, and congratulations on your new home!

Do you have in-ground irrigation? A lot of those pictures look like drought stress, which is easy to identify on the problem areas that look bad. Go to one of them that are pretty close to one of the green areas. Inspect the leaf tissue, and see if the leaves are folded up on each other or curled up like a v. If so, I'm willing to bet that lack of water is what is causing the grass to either die, or go dormant. Get some water on those areas, and see if you get some kind of response.

The easiest cultural practices that you can start with is getting a PreM schedule down (pre-emergent that you'll apply in Spring/Fall), correct mowing height for your turf type, and water. Those 3 things will put you ahead of a lot of regular homeowners.

The next thing do to is do some investigating in those dead areas with a long screwdriver. Builders love leaving construction garbage and material behind on the construction site, using cheap fill dirt, and tossing sod on top of it with no regard for the upkeep of the turf after the closing papers are signed. See if you have some buried junk in those dead areas like rocks or hunks of mortar/concrete.

Get a soil test done so you can see what kind of soil you're working with. Spectrum Analytic and Waypoint are labs that are well regarded with consistent results that you can post your test in the Soil Fertility threads. Armed with that information, we can help point you in the right direction of obtaining your lawn goals, with realistic expectations of your turf and time. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint.


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## Ryknow48 (Jun 28, 2021)

ionicatoms said:


> Welcome to TLF.
> 
> Looks like you'll need to rake up the dead material, drop some peat moss if you like, and make sure it gets adequate water so that the grass fills into the dead spots. Plug or sod if you want to get it faster.
> 
> ...


So when the Massey guy came out a lot of the browning he mentioned came from water not getting to those spots. Where I live it gets a kinda windy at times. I have since had a fence put up so the side of the house that had that long strip of brown is getting better watering now. The front yard has recovered pretty well aside from a couple of spots where it seemed to not fully recover yet.

Long story short on watering, where Im at is considered outside city limits, and there is no reclaim water yet so its all potable water. Those two things jump the price watering up significantly. When I was moving I didnt have time to adjust the water schedule and DR had it set to 1 hour per zone (3 zones) per day. About 4-5 days later from moving I went out and changed it to 3 days a week (technically only allowed 2 days) but left the time they set it to as they advised new sod will need the water. Well I got my first water bill of $400 for 16 days worth of water on that bill....was not pleased. Found a bubble left wide open later on, fighting DR about it now.

To be honest Ill have to read up on the peat moss thing, Ive not seen that mentioned before. I was curious if I should be putting down soil/sand mix in some of these spots, but as a stated before I dont know nearly enough to determine exactly what each spots problem is and how to address it outside of re-sodding which I dont have confidence in doing myself yet (need to research the correct way to do it for what I have). Side note Massey said "the PH level absolutely sucks, I would invite your friends, neighbors, co-workers, and their pets to come pee on your lawn."

Is plugging an alternate to sodding? Kind of confused as to what Ive read makes it sound like you need good soil base for plugging, and as stated above it sounds like my soil sucks to begin with.


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## Ryknow48 (Jun 28, 2021)

Colonel K0rn said:


> Welcome to the forum, and congratulations on your new home!
> 
> Do you have in-ground irrigation? A lot of those pictures look like drought stress, which is easy to identify on the problem areas that look bad. Go to one of them that are pretty close to one of the green areas. Inspect the leaf tissue, and see if the leaves are folded up on each other or curled up like a v. If so, I'm willing to bet that lack of water is what is causing the grass to either die, or go dormant. Get some water on those areas, and see if you get some kind of response.
> 
> ...


I do have in-ground irrigation. I have 3 zones. Zone 1 is front/side/left of the house and pretty much all stationary pop up sprayers, Zone 2 is the back yard and where all the rotary sprayers are, Zone 3 is just the opposite side of zone 1 on the right. I believe right now I have zone 1 set at 20 minutes (starting at 4 am), zone 2 is 25-30 minutes, and zone 3 is same as zone 1.

Im not sure if Massey put down PreM or if I missed out on that given the timing and how bad it was. Still trying to get a hold of them to find out what the treatment they did was. I mow at 4" as recommended everywhere I read. The confusing part for me is how my neighbors lawns havent taken this big of a hit. I see just weeds and some browning but nothing like what I experienced. Ive seen some of their irrigation run for an hour each zone every night, some houses never seem to water. I cant afford another $400 water bill as I explained in the other reply. Local water company told me that they have no idea when we will have reclaim water, they want to fill in the new community...could be a year or two they said.

Heard one of the neighbors found the metal straps they use on pallets to hold stuff down under theirs, so anything is possible. When I moved in, the amount of construction trash blowing around was unreal. Also we were in a drought for a few weeks that didnt help. We just got into the rainy season and between the first app from Massey (monthly visits) and the good amount of rain we got, it did help several areas, but some seem to be too far gone to help.


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## Ryknow48 (Jun 28, 2021)

Forgot to mention, I went out to Lowes and got some of the high efficiency fully adjustable rainbird mpr spray heads and put them in areas that were the most brown. They are supposed to have bigger water droplets to help make sure the wind dosent push the water away. I intend on changing out all the sprayer heads to these eventually. I need to move one of the sprayers thats now watering my fence because of where they installed it. I am still dealing with DR who came out and said they were going to help me with a few irrigation height problems and some sod when I complained to them. Still no ETA when that will be, but I certainly appreciate the responses and advise! It all seems overwhelming. In time I suppose.


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## Colonel K0rn (Jul 4, 2017)

Pick up a pack of irrigation cups, similar to these, and you'll want to set them out in the path of your irrigation heads. Run a zone for 30 minutes, and see how much water you collect in them, and multiply that by 2. That will let you know how much water you can expect your system to put out in one hour. While it's running, observe your system, to see if you're getting head-to-head coverage with your current heads, and if you need to make any adjustments to the patterns. Adjusting the heads is pretty easy, and you can adjust the patterns as well to make sure that you're not spraying into the driveway, on your house, or the neighbor's fence like you said.

Most lawns need at least 1" of water a week to look their best. I understand about the cost and city limitations with irrigations. We do what we can with what we have. It would cost me more to install a separate meter for my irrigation at my house than I could recoup by not paying for sewage fees with water coming out of my current spigots in 4 years. It's prohibitively expensive to get a separate meter here. I even got a written warning when I was irrigating my seedlings during my renovation. :evil:

Personally, I'm a fan of the Hunter MP Rotators, they look really cool, put out a nice consistent pattern of water across my lawn, and when it's windy, the water doesn't blow all over the place. Being near the coast, there's almost always a breeze, so I try to make sure that any water that comes out of the nozzle goes where I want it. Depending on the sprinkler heads you have, you may be able to pop those in directly, but if not, a new body is just a couple of bucks. Check out the video of them in action compared to other heads.


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## Ryknow48 (Jun 28, 2021)

Yea, the measurement cups are on my list of things to do. Ive got the heads set pretty good right now, I have one or two I need to adjust as it has a little too much of a radius, but nothing drastic. The bubbler they have installed on zone 3 I found to be wide open (almost 6 GPM) was causing a major run off. I had no idea it was doing this until Massey changed my water time from 5 am to 4. Usually zone 1 would be coming on or just about done when I would let the dog out in the morning before work. When they made the change zone 3 was on as I walked out the door. It wasnt until then I saw the lake running down my driveway. Absolutely flooded a shrub. This is the issue I found that the on-site builder, the irrigation install company, and water company all missed when they came out for my contesting of a $400 water bill (16 days of usage). They were looking for blown heads spraying water in the air, not for improperly adjusted bubblers. Im fighting DR horton over it now as they are trying to find excuses not to help on that bill. It was their install, and unfortunately I didnt know enough at the time to even know what I was lookin at.

Ill be honest, I stuck with rainbird because I liked their new tech. But those Hunter MP Rotators are very interesting. I may look in to those for a few spots in particular that they would do very well.

Thanks again for the advise and help!


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## Greendoc (Mar 24, 2018)

If you do MP Rotators it is the entire zone. Cannot mix and match with existing heads. But making the investment will help your water bill and most likely save the lawn.


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## Katodude (Apr 22, 2021)

Greendoc said:


> If you do MP Rotators it is the entire zone. Cannot mix and match with existing heads. But making the investment will help your water bill and most likely save the lawn.


Why not? I was hoping I could change them out one at a time as I had time to do it.

Also you might want to consider getting a well dug for irrigation. I had the same problem down here with only a single water meter. Had a well done for $3000 all in and hooked up to the irrigation system. Never looked back.


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## Ryknow48 (Jun 28, 2021)

Katodude said:


> Greendoc said:
> 
> 
> > If you do MP Rotators it is the entire zone. Cannot mix and match with existing heads. But making the investment will help your water bill and most likely save the lawn.
> ...


The house was actually built with 2 meters, one for house, one for irrigation. Even the builder didn't know that we didn't have reclaimed water because it was set up for it. Even the builder called the water company to tell them there's no way they are using potable water because the houses were built with two separate meters and set ups. After more investigation and talking to the water company, we found out they were controlling the water from outside the community (not sure what the site would be called?) and supplying potable water to both sides. I don't know how in depth it is to hook up potable or if they just flip a switch or open/close valves, but the water company said they will switch it to potable sometime in the future when the community is more full, could be a year or two.

Thankfully it's the rainy season so that's helping some. Curious, does anyone know, should I not water early am if it's going to rain that day? Weather report isn't always accurate so I wouldn't want to miss a watering day in the off chance we don't get rain when they say to expect it. Also should I kick the water down to two days a week now that it's the rainy season?


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## ionicatoms (Mar 8, 2020)

Ryknow48 said:


> Curious, does anyone know, should I not water early am if it's going to rain that day? Weather report isn't always accurate so I wouldn't want to miss a watering day in the off chance we don't get rain when they say to expect it. Also should I kick the water down to two days a week now that it's the rainy season?


During the rainy season in Florida, you really shouldn't need to run irrigation on a schedule. Most of us water "as needed" to compensate for any periods of drought. I have an alarm set on my phone for the night before my watering days to check if I need to run it.

New irrigation systems should have a sensor allowing any scheduled irrigation events to be automatically skipped when the sensor detects that irrigation is not necessary. That's probably what would work best.


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## Katodude (Apr 22, 2021)

I got a Rachio irrigation controller. They are not that expensive and just make life easier. It checks the weather and skips a cycle if it has rained or rain is predicated. Sometimes it gets those predictions wrong (the weatherman wrong, go figure?). But with the push of a button on the phone, I can get it to run a cycle. Or if I just need to run a zone after putting down some fertilizer its the same thing.


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## Ryknow48 (Jun 28, 2021)

ionicatoms said:


> Ryknow48 said:
> 
> 
> > Curious, does anyone know, should I not water early am if it's going to rain that day? Weather report isn't always accurate so I wouldn't want to miss a watering day in the off chance we don't get rain when they say to expect it. Also should I kick the water down to two days a week now that it's the rainy season?
> ...


Thats one of the things Im waiting on the builder for, a rain sensor. They said they would install one for me....havent heard back from them in a week. I just dont want to shut it down and then find out I should have left it and that happens to be the week it doesnt rain like its supposed to. However we have that Tropical storm looking like its going to be coming through so I probably should shut it down here pretty soon.


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## Greendoc (Mar 24, 2018)

Katodude said:


> Greendoc said:
> 
> 
> > If you do MP Rotators it is the entire zone. Cannot mix and match with existing heads. But making the investment will help your water bill and most likely save the lawn.
> ...


MP Rotators deposit about 0.4" of water if spaced n a relatively symmetrical square pattern. Your normal fan spray nozzle deposits about 1.5" per hour. When scheduling an irrigation system to totally supply the water needs of a lawn using MP Rotators I plan on at least 2 hours of run time per week. If I am working with the fan sprays on pop ups, I plan on no more than 30-35 minutes of run time.


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## Ryknow48 (Jun 28, 2021)

Katodude said:


> I got a Rachio irrigation controller. They are not that expensive and just make life easier. It checks the weather and skips a cycle if it has rained or rain is predicated. Sometimes it gets those predictions wrong (the weatherman wrong, go figure?). But with the push of a button on the phone, I can get it to run a cycle. Or if I just need to run a zone after putting down some fertilizer its the same thing.


So of all the things that didn't come with the "smart home", was a controller that could be controlled via a phone….go figure. Was curious if you knew, could I change out the controller in the future for one that had that technology? Elvis mine is a hunter controller.


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## UncleFoolio (May 14, 2021)

Yes- you can change out the controller. I swapped my Rainbird controller out for a Rachio a few years back. Just a matter of plugging in 5-8 wires, depending on how many stations you have. I can't remember how many the Rachio controller supports. I think 8-10. I could look it up, but...I'm too lazy after mowing the lawn


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## SCGrassMan (Dec 17, 2017)

UncleFoolio said:


> Yes- you can change out the controller. I swapped my Rainbird controller out for a Rachio a few years back. Just a matter of plugging in 5-8 wires, depending on how many stations you have. I can't remember how many the Rachio controller supports. I think 8-10. I could look it up, but...I'm too lazy after mowing the lawn


Base level Rachio supports 8 zones


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## Katodude (Apr 22, 2021)

So yes the Rachio upgrade is simple and easy and cheap. If you have a spare $200 just do it.

Also look into a well. I dont know what part of Florida you are in, but call around. I put one in about 7 years ago and it has paid for itself several times over. I got it dug deep, about 130 feet. The water stinks, is high in calcium, and alkalinity, but hey I am not drinking it, my lawn is. Low iron, dont want my driveway and sidewalk stained.


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## Ryknow48 (Jun 28, 2021)

So a little update after one Massey service, some much needed rain, and a couple weeks. Someone had suggested using peat moss for the bare area where as others have suggested a mix of black cow and leveling sand to help fill in these areas. I noticed there is some new growth amidst the bare area but it is super bright green. Is that weeds, root rot, normal?

Will post some more photos


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## Ryknow48 (Jun 28, 2021)




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## Ryknow48 (Jun 28, 2021)

Before:



After:


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## Ryknow48 (Jun 28, 2021)

Before:

After:


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## Ryknow48 (Jun 28, 2021)

Before:



After:


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## ionicatoms (Mar 8, 2020)

Ryknow48 said:


> So a little update after one Massey service, some much needed rain, and a couple weeks. Someone had suggested using peat moss for the bare area where as others have suggested a mix of black cow and leveling sand to help fill in these areas. I noticed there is some new growth amidst the bare area but it is super bright green. Is that weeds, root rot, normal?
> 
> Will post some more photos


Looks like Doveweed to me.

It also appears that you have not raked up the dead material covering the ground. St. Aug runners need to have contact with soil or moisture retaining mulch.


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## Ryknow48 (Jun 28, 2021)

ionicatoms said:


> Looks like Doveweed to me.
> 
> It also appears that you have not raked up the dead material covering the ground. St. Aug runners need to have contact with soil or moisture retaining mulch.


Which would be better peat moss or the fore mentioned black cow/leveling sand combo?


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## ionicatoms (Mar 8, 2020)

Well, whatever you can keep moist will do the trick. This time of year you're probably getting enough rain that you don't need to use coconut coir or peat moss. I would probably do whatever is easiest.


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