# I think I screwed up on my reno...(too much milo?) UPDATE: we have germination!



## bunjamins (Aug 15, 2018)

original post here: https://thelawnforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5800

I dropped a 36lb bag of milo on 2700sq ft of my front yard during reseed of bewitched, I think this may have been too much, I didn't realize I should have used less than normal amount for new reseed. mixed with constant watering, my front yard smells like a sewer, I didn't know milo would stink that much.

Aside from this, I've got ants going nuts on my bewitched KBG seed, I'm not sure how many i'll have left by the time they germ. Brief research says I can't do much about them now to stop them until after the grass has started growing. I went around by hand with some ortho lawn pest granules and dropped them into all the ant holes I could see around the perimeter, and it seems to have helped, but i still am sure the ants have made a dent, any suggestions?

and some update pics:
Seed arrived








morning after seeding:








this morning (day 5)








first threw handfuls of cornmeal out as a ant killer/deterrant, it was effective the first day and you could see the ants start to grab the cornmeal instead of my precious KBG seed, but by day 2 they were back to the seed, either they wised up or didn't like the sprinkler wetted cornmeal.








one small patch of grass i must not have killed all the way, this is the only patch I see right now, hopefully there's not much more over the next few weeks:








bad sprinkler adjustment, i'm not going to fix this until later, the sprinker is too low and needs to be raised primarily, but the pipe is trapped in the concrete of the driveway addition on top left of image. 








too much milo/pete down with my seed? (hand for scale):


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## Ecubed (Apr 26, 2018)

As far as I know you can't put too much Milo down. As far as how much you put down they say a 36 lb bag covers 2500 SQ ft at the recommended rate. So if you ask me you put down the perfect amount. Kentucky bluegrass takes 21-28 days to germinate, so just keep watering.


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## TreyDoc (Aug 16, 2018)

+1 above. You have to try to burn your lawn with Milo. With new lawns, it's actually recommended to apply 72lbs per 2500 sq ft. You're good on that front. As far as ants, I'll leave that up to the experts. Good luck with your reno and be patient with your KBG. Check out @Pete1313 s reno among others on the wait game.


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## Budstl (Apr 19, 2017)

I put a full bag of milo over 1700 sqft of my reno this year. No problems here.


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## Miggity (Apr 25, 2018)

Borax and sugar in little containers around the reno will take care of the ants. For specifics see


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## ken-n-nancy (Jul 25, 2017)

First off, nice looking seedbed!



bunjamins said:


> I dropped a 36lb bag of milo on 2700sq ft of my front yard during reseed of bewitched, I think this may have been too much.


That's perfectly fine. You'll be fine. Yes, milorganite will make your lawn smell like a farm for a day or two. That's just the smell of fertile soil! 



bunjamins said:


> Aside from this, I've got ants going nuts on my bewitched KBG seed, I'm not sure how many i'll have left by the time they germ.


The ants probably can't actually carry off enough seed to make a major effect.

That said, for exterior ants I'd highly recommend any product which uses fipronil as the active ingredient. The product I use is https://www.domyown.com/taurus-sc-termiticide-p-1816.html It's incredible for ants. Read the reviews on this product and you'll be amazed -- the reviews really aren't exaggerations. There's no need to overapply the product. It's a professional product and it works just fine when applied according to label directions. It's amazing how little it takes and how well it works.


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## g-man (Jun 15, 2017)

In your images, the soil looks too dry.


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## gm560 (Feb 22, 2018)

This stuff is great for ants, too https://www.domyown.com/maxforce-complete-granular-bait-p-1603.html. They cannot resist. And once they take it, they arn't coming back. Your ant population will be devastated in 24 hours.


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## Shadow4478 (Aug 22, 2018)

bunjamins said:


> original post here: https://thelawnforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5800
> 
> I dropped a 36lb bag of milo on 2700sq ft of my front yard during reseed of bewitched, I think this may have been too much, I didn't realize I should have used less than normal amount for new reseed. mixed with constant watering, my front yard smells like a sewer, I didn't know milo would stink that much.
> 
> ...


What about that corner sprinkler seems like it's laying down the water really hard


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## bunjamins (Aug 15, 2018)

Thanks everyone for the reassurance with the milo, i really was scared i screwed something up.



Miggity said:


> Borax and sugar in little containers around the reno will take care of the ants. For specifics see


I'm trying this tonight, right after i finish typing this reply, thanks for the suggestion, something like this is exactly what i was looking for, great idea.



g-man said:


> In your images, the soil looks too dry.


@g-man thanks for the suggestion, i'm worried about the watering, the surface does seem to get a little bit dry between waterings, currently i've got my rachio set on those 2 zones to come on for 5 minutes each every 2 hours, i'm upping to now to 7, i'll see how that does. I've been more worried i think about creating standing water.

It would be painful to create a rachio schedule just for germination that would slow down watering at night, and adjust for the hot, dry days in the Utah summer. 2 hours at 82 deg it stays wet, but 2 hours at 85 and it starts to look a little dry. maybe a rachio with a soil meter would be good, is that an option I wonder? Why haven't they already added these features to the app? I just need a KBG germination radio button. maybe someone already has an IFTTT for this?



Shadow4478 said:


> What about that corner sprinkler seems like it's laying down the water really hard


@Shadow4478 I did mention in the post that the sprinkler is too low, I think the force comes from it spray diffusing too low to the ground, since it should pop up 4" and it's only up about 1.5" I'm going to have to fix that little piece once the lawn is somewhat established at this point. I don't want to disturb the huge chunk i'll have to dig out in order to fix that sprinkler, the pipe is wedged in the concrete.


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## bunjamins (Aug 15, 2018)

they're small, but i have them, first showing up yesterday afternoon which was day 8 after seeding my bewitched KBG:









And this morning I took a couple more pics before work:

















So I guess you really can't drop too much milo


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## g-man (Jun 15, 2017)

I forgot to reply earlier to this post. You can setup the rachio to water every hour. I been using the one hour setup on my Reno. I turn off the schedule at 8pm and turn it back on in the am to avoid constant watering at night. I have it setup to start at 10am, but I turn it on when I walk out there in the am to check the progress.

One thing I did notice, turn off the water hammer feature. It spills too much water at low pressure and puddles around the heads. Also turn off the weather intelligence on that schedule, so it doesn't skip if it might rain in the afternoon.


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## Khy (Jul 27, 2018)

g-man said:


> One thing I did notice, turn off the water hammer feature. It spills too much water at low pressure and puddles around the heads. Also turn off the weather intelligence on that schedule, so it doesn't skip if it might rain in the afternoon.


IS THIS WHAT CAUSES THIS??? I thought I was imagining the puddling since I got my Rachio. Just assumed that always happened with my old one and I just must not have noticed it.


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## g-man (Jun 15, 2017)

I noticed it now during the reno. When there is grass, it is not a probleml.

The water hammer feature turns on two valves at the same time for 30s to a minute. This avoid stopping the flow of water and then starting it again. The compromise is that the two valves open at the same time will have less pressure/gpm for the 30s-1minute.


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## bunjamins (Aug 15, 2018)

g-man said:



> I forgot to reply earlier to this post. You can setup the rachio to water every hour. I been using the one hour setup on my Reno. I turn off the schedule at 8pm and turn it back on in the am to avoid constant watering at night. I have it setup to start at 10am, but I turn it on when I walk out there in the am to check the progress.
> 
> One thing I did notice, turn off the water hammer feature. It spills too much water at low pressure and puddles around the heads. Also turn off the weather intelligence on that schedule, so it doesn't skip if it might rain in the afternoon.


I went the extreme after a day of doing this, and set up a daily schedule w/ set start time for each hour i wanted it to water, so it comes on at night 1/2 the time and only every 2 hours at night.

I noticed the water hammer issue and turned that off right away after they added that a year or so ago. I also had to turn off wind-sense on all zones, because i was drying out because it would skip 3 waterings because of light wind and my lawn wouldn't get watered for a week. I turned off all skips for the germination, but I still use the weather sense skip for the rest of my lawn.

If I did it again, I'd submit a request to rachio for a new-seed germination schedule. Or buy a soil meter and then the rachio could just keep it wet. At the very least, create the custom germination schedule through an IFTTT


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## g-man (Jun 15, 2017)

I doubt rachio will do something about this request. There are not that many reno/user in a year for them to invest the development time. I would love for them to allow manually edit the precipitation for those times the PWS is wrong.


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## bunjamins (Aug 15, 2018)

g-man said:


> I doubt rachio will do something about this request. There are not that many reno/user in a year for them to invest the development time. I would love for them to allow manually edit the precipitation for those times the PWS is wrong.


I agree, I can see this would also be something very dynamic and a bit outside the range of what they currently offer within their application. I still think this is a huge use-case for their timer and I submitted a feature request, during review of my submission it asked me if hourly or flex schedules would do it. I did do it, but i have 5 schedules in my rachio right now to sort of accomplish what I need. I suspect it would take 1 daily, set-start time schedule for every other hour of the night, and one daily, set-start time schedule for every sunrise hour. To do it right in their app, I'd need about 18 distinct schedules.

One germination program that asks you what times of day are too wet and what times are too dry tied in with their weather sense would be awesome, but I suppose it might take more machine learning than their system can handle to make it work. I'll update if I hear anything from rachio support on the feature request (i'm sure i won't)


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## probasestealer (Apr 19, 2018)

What kind of fruit trees in the front yard? I can't zoom in enough.

Love the green babies


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## bunjamins (Aug 15, 2018)

probasestealer said:


> What kind of fruit trees in the front yard? I can't zoom in enough.
> 
> Love the green babies


I have 3 red delicious trees, one of which fell over due to trunk rot, the little sucker sapling is one of those, these are 60-80 year old orchard trees, they only fruit every other year. They are not the red delicious that you can buy at the super market, these are the best apples! 
I have 2 Winesap apple trees, a very tart apple used for rounding out the flavor of our fresh cider.
I have 3 peach trees, the one in the pictures is old, but really small, I'm not sure the variety, but they are delicious, so i'm committed to keeping that thing alive.
And the other volunteer by the boat is another winesap tree i let grow in my grass and it will be transplanted to my sister-in-laws house now that it has bourne fruit.

also an update on the bewitched babies, I'm going to start calling the two part of my lawn "**** York" and "**** Sargent" DY being the front corner and the first lawn I really tore up. DY has got some great growth throughout, while DS has some big bare patches, I'm not sure why yet, may just be late germ.

DY:
a green haze on the medow yesterday:








closer:








and real close this morning (Bewitched KBG day 12 after seed down)









now DS, which is struggling:
day 11 yesterday








and day 12 early this morning:









regarding the rachio I do realize rachio probably won't release a germination setting, they've got too many posts about how to accomplish it without a specific setting, but it's still a pain. 
I've got a somewhat working bash script that works via cron and makes rachio api hits via curl as a test, I can feed it a csv of times and durations and it waters, it has a bunch of hardcoded identifiers right now to my user, rachio, and zone IDs. but with a little polish maybe i could make a webapp you could use for germination scheduling. main concerns are uptime, If i have a server that makes these hits, you'd rely on the server to start the watering cycle, unlike native rachio programs that are cached on the device. also a concern is rate limiting, their API does rate limiting and without an exception, they could kill my grass without notice, at least i could put a notification when a schedule doesn't start, but that's less than optimal. if you're interested in trying it, let me know. The nice part is a germination schedule could easily be shared and tweaked for geo/sprinkler/soil/etc...


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## probasestealer (Apr 19, 2018)

@bunjamins I love fruit trees. I just planted my peach and apple trees last fall.
Out of curiosity are you going to change the management around these trees? 2 of my 4 are in natural areas and I try to keep herbicides, including pre-emergent, at least 3-5ft away from the trunk. It likely doesn't matter though.


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## bunjamins (Aug 15, 2018)

probasestealer said:


> @bunjamins I love fruit trees. I just planted my peach and apple trees last fall.
> Out of curiosity are you going to change the management around these trees? 2 of my 4 are in natural areas and I try to keep herbicides, including pre-emergent, at least 3-5ft away from the trunk. It likely doesn't matter though.


Absolutely, it does matter, and the trees don't do well with grass against the trunk. grass against the trunk harbors bugs against the base of the trunk where water can keep it soft. The plan here is all these trees on the perimeter of my yard will be in some type of bed with mulch. ideally mulch all trees to the drip line so they don't compete with grass according to the arborist at our local Utah State University extension service. In the pictures I planted grass near the trees because i didn't want to interrupt the edge of the grassline where it will meet the beds. The bed boundaries have yet to be determined, once i can walk on the grass and mow it, i'll start discussing the bed line with my wife. ;-)


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