# Boltfanindenver's lawn journal



## boltfanindenver (May 2, 2019)

Better late than never starting this. So last year was my first year owning a home with a lawn, it's backyard only and about 3k sqft of lawn. No built in irrigation and all I knew were the standard hose end sprinklers. Due to the shape of the yard watering my lawn was an all day chore and I didn't care too much so it almost all died off.
Over the winter I went through some personal stuff and decided to find some more productive and positive things to focus on and my lawn has become one of those things.

So this year I am not doing a "Reno" but a "rehab."

Here is where I started on April 20th:


My soil was super compacted and almost repelled water. During the fall when it rained or winter here in Denver whenever we got snow (then it melted in the next 48 hours because Denver) it became a bog of standing water. So I had a company aerate and also spray fert and pre-emergent (package deal was pretty cheap for first time customers). 1st lesson learned there, I'll be doing it myself from now on, the aeration coverage was terrible and so was the spraying.

I ordered a custom seed mix from SSS because there are some large spots I needed to re-seed and I plan to overseed in the fall as a lot of the lawn is thin: (just realized the picture might not be good enough to read. It's 40% Bluebank 20% Midnight 10% Bandera 20% Radar FF 10% Cardinal II)



I did a thorough hand raking, multiple times, to get as much of the dead stuff up as I could. I threw that down on a particularly bad area (first I broke up the ground in that area thanks to finding a video from Pete at GCI Turf showing that if you've sprayed pre-emergent and still want to seed an area you can break up the ground and should be good to go), although I left the few pieces of living grass that were there (which was probably a mistake and I won't do again), top dressed with Scott's premium top soil(which is mostly peat and not much actual soil at all), threw some Scott's Step 1 starter fert/post emergent, and started the hand watering.



I started building my arsenal of products to throw on the lawn, and although it's definitely a "fan boy" list of products, I can't argue with the results. Sprayed the lawn down with an app of Hydretain, got a full cocktail of N-Ext products. The yard has gotten 2 apps of RGS, an app of Air-8, an app of Microgreene, the seed area and another small area I threw seed on got an app of GreeneStart. 2 days ago the whole lawn had an app of Humic12 and an app of GreeneEffect and D-thatch (still a lot of dead stuff the raking didn't get). 
I also recently hit all the remaining bare spots and dead spots with AH's dead spot recipe of D-thatch/H12/RGS at a heavier rate. 
The lawn also got Carbon-X at 3lb/1K as the 2nd full fert app of the year.

I started tall for the first 2 mowings but started reading that mowing lower is better to encourage thickening/spreading and I wasn't sure I was ready for a PGR yet. So I've worked it down to about 1.75" - 2" (the lawn is pretty uneven which I'm going to start addressing in the fall) and I'm mowing about every 2-3 days right now. Not bagging.

For watering I've had to be semi creative. I have extremely low water flow (3.8ish GPM) due to my service line being a 1/2" lead pipe installed in 1906. I got a hose faucet timer, a few 25' sections of hose, some sprinkler spikes and some Hunter sprinkler bodies and rotators. I have 2 360 degree MP2000 heads and a single 90-210 MP1000. That's basically all I can run, any more water flow than that and it won't work. (I'll be re-visiting this system and improving it as the year goes on but this is working well enough for now)



So what has that done? Here is the same section of lawn as the first picture, taken yesterday:



I plan on continuing the frequent mowings and proper watering. The area in the back left of those photos I am going to just be working on the soil until the fall, and removing that stump so that I can seed that whole area. There's a 540 sqft area to the left of that picture that is all dirt that I am going to sod (luckily I found a local sod farm that has a sod that has a blend that has 2 of the 3 KBG cultivars I have in the seed mix I made). Neither my wife (nor my dogs) are patient enough to wait for seed in that big of an area in my yard.

My biggest challenge remaining (which you can see in the last picture) is what to do about my dogs. I think I'm going to add a descent sized mulch area near the side fence that is next to my neighbors house (there's a 4'x20' area that gets 0 direct sunlight ever so it's almost impossible to get grass going well over there anyway) and try to train them to pee there.


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