# A Shady Spring Seed



## OnyxsLawn (Mar 15, 2018)

It's been quite an off-season. Enjoyed the birth of my son in November and we moved to a new house in a much nicer neighborhood!



Of course the first priority was to get the yard into shape. The plan is for a Mazama monostand. It's beginning state was thin crappy grass full of moss. Lots and lots of moss. Lots of trees.













The backyard is extremely hilly so I'm going to wait till fall to do a full Reno on it. I'll throw down some of the crappy seed the old owners left to keep the soil in place. I also need to build a fence and possibly a retaining wall.

The front yard is relatively flat and small so it's a good test site. 
Order of operations:
3/30- first application of roundup, took a soil sample, and planted 5 trays of plugs
4/1- sprayed Bayer moss killer
4/3- used the sun joe with the scarifier cartridge to tear out the moss and grass and expose as much soil as possible. 
4/5- leveled a few areas with sifted dirt from the backyard. Sprayed another application of roundup spiked with iron. Spread starter fertilizer and procare (some milorganite rip-off sold at Lowe's, smells the same). Spread Mazama (from seed super store) at about 2.5 lb/k. Sprayed tenacity and covered everything in peat moss.





Now for the wait. Spring is hard since the lower temps make germination slow, weed pressure is high, and the rain comes in buckets washing out the seed, and to top it off the trees will cut the sunlight down to a few hours once they leaf out. Luckily I've got a lot of time on my hands to baby this Reno through. What's life without a few challenges.


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## OnyxsLawn (Mar 15, 2018)

Time for an update-

5/5

5/13 electric fence installer came and ruined a nice strip with his equipment. Overseeded the whole yard to help it thicken up.

5/22 sprayed propiconazole and about 0.1 lb N/k

6/2 spread 0.25 lb N/k from Anderson's 16-0-8 with Fe and Humic. I also started plugging but there is still quite a lot of germination happening from the overseed so I'm going to wait a few weeks to do more.


It's come a long way in a month. amazing what some warmth will do. 
Not a lot of weeds yet but I'm planning to spray turf vigor and another application of tenacity this weekend.


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## Thejarrod (Aug 5, 2018)

congrats on the home and expanded family!
i'm curious about how the plugs are doing? do they have any noticeable spreading yet? 
i was about to ask if you planned on cutting down any trees to get more sunlight...but i see that Mazama is designed to be shade tolerant. i assume you selected it because you wanted to keep the trees?


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## OnyxsLawn (Mar 15, 2018)

@Thejarrod Thanks! The plugs have not spread yet as they are only a week old but their root system is much more developed so hopefully they fill in pretty quick. On my last reno the bare spots became unnoticeable after about 2-3 months after plugging.

Most of my trees are on the north side of my lawn so they don't provide much shade for the grass other than select areas. I will cut down 2 ugly pines in the back yard that will lighten that up some, as well as trim some branches up. Now that summer has hit I can tell that most parts of the lawn get at least 4-6 hours of direct sunlight so I'm pretty pleased.


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## OnyxsLawn (Mar 15, 2018)

First cut @ 3/4" with the pgm22!!


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