# Ajssbp's West Michigan Journal



## ajssbp (Apr 22, 2020)

Hey all. This year has been my "learning" year. I still payed my existing lawn service this year and paid attention to what they were doing, learning from you all, and formulating my own plan. The plan went into effect this week.

First the lawn. I've got about 6500 sq ft of primarily fine fescue with some *** mixed in. I don't know what cultivars or the ratio, it's just what came with the house  . Pretty heavy clay soil, but the front drains ok and isn't too soggy. The back is pretty wet and hard most of the time. That's a project for another time though....

In the front I had a few bare patches of unknown origin (fungus probably), and I decided to try and at least patch them up this fall. I also have a spot of bentgrass in my backyard I've been working on this year, and as a part of that I bought a SunJoe scarifier/dethatcher. I figured I might as well dethatch the front lawn (~2500 sq ft) since I knew it hadn't been done in at least the last 7 years and I knew I wanted to overseed the really bare patches. Here's what I started with at the beginning of the day Thursday:



I generally set my HOC at ~3 inches, so first step was to cut it down to 2 inches and bag it all. Looked rough, but not terrible. Started with the SunJoe set at -5mm because I knew I was going to overseed at least the really bare patches and I wanted to get good soil contact. First few passes looked like this:



:shock: Holy $#^%@($^.

There's a lot of garbage in there....... First pass done:


Used my mower to pick up the garbage. Then went over it again going 90* to the first pass. Second pass:


All done:




This is one of the areas where there were dead patches already. It thinned out quite a lot:


All the brown is live grass, but because I usually set my HOC so high I cut off all the leaf. Thinking the brown stuff should come back with time.

Random thoughts- Wearing shorts when scarifing results in a mess:


All the crap I got out of the lawn. It's a little deceptive because it's the clippings from my scalping plus the thatch, but it's 7 big garbage cans of junk + 3 cans of scalped clippings


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## ajssbp (Apr 22, 2020)

So, all that done, I set about with the rest of my plan. I initially bought 6 lbs of seed to fix the patches and the bentgrass spots in my back yard, after seeing how thin my front yard was I went and bought more. Total of 11 lbs went down in the front yard, so almost 4lb/1000. Rate on the seed said 3lb/1k for overseeding, but I went a bit heavy. Also put down some Tenacity as a pre-emergent because there is SO much bare dirt (and I already had it on hand from the bentgrass battle) along with a preventive rate app of BioAdvanced fungus control (granular propiconazole). Watering is set up to run at 0900, 1200, 1500, and 1700 for 10 min each time. Weather here isn't supposed to get out of the 70s for the next 10 days at least, so I think that should be sufficient for my heavy clay soil.

Only real question left is when to apply the starter fert. My plan at the moment is to wait until about 10 days after the new seed germinates. I don't want the existing grass to take off from the fert and slow the new seed, and the new seed doesn't need the fert quite yet. If I've got that wrong please correct me, I'm not at all confident in this game yet. Any other suggestions are welcome. Thanks.


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## ajssbp (Apr 22, 2020)

Little behind, but pic from 9/24. 21 days from seed down in my overseed, ~15 days from germination. Still some thin spots and the really bare/dead patches aren't filling in yet, but progress. First cut at 2.5 inches and I put down some 19-19-19 at a rate of ~1/3 lb of N/1k.


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## ajssbp (Apr 22, 2020)

Second cut was yesterday (9/27), again at 2.5 inches. One of the species in the overseed mix (I suspect the rye) grew almost an inch from Thursday to Sunday. The rest grew some, but not nearly as much. I think I'm going to be on a every 3 day mow cycle for a bit. In about two more weeks I plan on putting down some more N, but probably just a 1/4 lb of N only this time.


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## ajssbp (Apr 22, 2020)

So when I started at the beginning of September, the lawn looked like this:









5 weeks later after scarifing, overseeding, and doing two rounds of fert (first round was about a 1/3LB of balanced fert, today was a round of just N), this is where we're at:



It's certainly thin in some spots still, but still a BIG improvement IMO. Another angle:



I'm pretty happy with it overall. I'd like it to thicken up, but I think it just needs more time and fert.


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