Last Updated on: 3rd November 2020, 11:24 pm
When to lay grass in the UK?
The answer is – depends upon you. If you wish to sow from the Spring, then you are able to sow any time from late March onwards. But if you’re patient, there’s a lot to advocate waiting until September until you sow.
Primarily, any grass seeds lying on or close to the surface of the seedbed will probably be provided an opportunity to germinate and could be taken off. Second, English summers can create hot, dry spells and in case your new yard is sown in the spring, then continuous watering might well be essential to find growth began and to steer clear of the tender young seedlings from becoming scorched and murdered.
The floor is warm following summertime, there will be much moisture around, the seed will probably get off to a fantastic start ahead of the winter months, and weeds will probably be minimal. Afterward, during the late fall, a fantastic root system will grow, instead of high expansion, and your yard will maintain first-class order another spring and summer, prepared to withstand hot, dry spells.
How to lay grass seed (step by step video guide)
Well, today’s the moment that we’ve all been waiting for, and while probably about a month and a half from now when I’m probably mowing this yard is what I’m waiting for. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We got to get some things done today. First, to make that happen, so today’s going to be all about our seeding process, everything that goes along with that and it’s getting hot out here already it’s gonna be a very hot day, so I want to get rolling on this.
Spraying the ground with pre-emergent herbicide
So, let’s get going it’s the first thing I’m going to do today is to spray the ground with the Tenacity right before I put the seed down. This is the only type of weed pre-emergent that I know of that you can use at the time of seeding. Now it doesn’t work for every single grass type, so you do have to be a little bit careful there, but for the majority, it’s most of them and I’ve heard really good things about this product. So this is the first time I’m using it. You need very little, and it goes a long way. So the first thing I’m gonna do today is to spray that dirt out there and then we’ll get the seed on top of it, roll that in, and then we’ll be covering it up with some peat moss and I’ll go through the whole process.
With you, I’m spraying an area, it’s about 1,100 square feet somewhere right around there. So all we need for this is the Tenacity. The product is 0.5 teaspoons per thousand square feet. They give you this little measuring thing that comes with it, which is going to help you because it has teaspoons right on here. So all I need is a half of a teaspoon and since I have just over a thousand square feet, I’ll go just to touch more, but I don’t need much more than that and then I’m gonna put that into a gallon just over a gallon of Water in my sprayer spray that out over the soil – and I don’t think I’m gonna use a marking die today because I have flat dirt there.
What grass mix to use?
So I don’t think that’ll be too much of a problem for me to see where I’ve sprayed and where I haven’t. But you can use a dye if you think you would like to if you don’t have dirt as I do, and you want to make sure you know where you’re spraying, let’s time now for our actual seating portion and depending on what type of seed you use, You’re gonna have different rates, so I’m going with a ryegrass bluegrass mix, it’s 5050 three types of Brad grass, three types of bluegrass, all elite varieties. So for me, if I was going straight, ride be more like eight pounds per thousand and Kentucky bluegrass is a lot less, because the seeds are very, very tiny, so you don’t need as many of them. So usually it’s around two to three pounds per thousand. So, with this mix together drew from seed superstore told me are right around five pounds per thousand now do I need to get technical and make sure it’s exactly five pounds? No, I don’t necessarily need to do that.
So today I know that I have a twenty-five-pound bag. I have just over one thousand square feet to cover it’s gonna put probably around one-third of that bag into my spreader that’ll be about just over six pounds, and that should cover my about eleven hundred square foot section here. So we’re going to set the spreader at a really low rate and then just start going over the yard, going in multiple directions, and that way we know that we’re just getting even coverage and we’re not starting out too heavy. All of a sudden, we run out on one side because we went too heavy, so we just start out really slow with your spreader, it’s better to keep walking and walking and walking then to miss some sections or have some sections that are too heavy one thing I forgot to mention as well as what would happen if you put the seed on too heavy.
How much grass to sow?
So obviously, if it’s too light it’s just gonna take longer to fill in, and maybe you’ll have a few bare spots that you missed too. But if you go too heavy most people think just throw down as much seed as you’d like to throw down well in reality, I’ve actually had some problems with this before of something called overcrowding. So if you throw down too much seed and you’re, seeing it almost in like small piles, so then once this grows up, not every single one of those seeds is one blade of grass
Its one grass plant and all those little plants start to grow leaves off of there and it becomes a much bigger plant. So you have to remember that we don’t want to crowd those together too much because we want them to spread out over time and start to grow more naturally. So if you do overcrowd things, I’ve had some problems with some die-off in the past and also just a little bit of fungus because it gets so much moisture all in one spot and then it’s very easy for fungus to attack new grass as well. So just keep that in mind right now that I’ve made a couple passes here. I just wanted to stop and kind of show you the even distribution, so you can see kind of all the seed evenly put out there and I’m gonna go a little bit.
Heavier yet than this, but as you can see, there are no piles anywhere everything’s looking even and nice, and that’s exactly what we want all right: here’s what I’m left with after putting down the seed of course I’ll get down and show you a better view here in A second, but I just want to show you the top view as well, so I have plenty of seed left over here, knowing that probably a couple of weeks into this I’ll be able to see where I might need to oversee it a little bit. Of course, we don’t know, what’s going to happen with the weather as well, we could have some kind of storms that kind of put a little wrench into my plan over there, so make sure that you also have some extra seed on hand that you don’t use It all, preferably just because you’re gonna need to fix a few things over time, all right, moving right along here today. The next thing we need to do is take this thing in just very, very lightly.
You could probably get away with not doing this if you’re going to be covering the seed like. I am. However, I don’t want to put it too far under the surface, but I do just want to make sure that we’re getting the good seed to soil contact. So I’m going to very very lightly rake that in then we’re gonna roll it with a roller to make sure that the seed is touching the soil getting really good contact. There then we’re gonna cover it with a very light layer of peat moss, but first about that raking you can use something like just like a wire rake like this or what I’m going to try to use today, which I like to use as well.
Is this thing right here, and this is a batch rake, however, on this site right here, that has the straight tines: that’s going to be for your detaching, but on this site, you have some tines that have just a little curve on the bottom and what that’s? For is actually for soil cultivation. It works really well to just lightly put some seed under that soil right in the layer of soil where we want so we wanted about a quarter of an inch below, like I said, if we weren’t covering that’s probably ideal, you don’t want to go any lower than that, if we are covering with a light layer, you probably could technically leave it on the soil, and everything would be fine, but I’m just gonna lightly rake this with this side here that has the times that have the little curve in them, and so you can kind of do either.
Use the right tools when necessary
One doesn’t really matter, but if you do happen to have one of these tools or you would like to get one of these they’re useful for a lot of things and I’ve been using it a lot in this project to kind of help dig up my dirt. Every once in a while, and just to even things out there too so time now to roll in the seed and again we’re doing this just to get good seed to soil contact, that seed will be rolled right into the ground and then we’ll come over with just a light layer of peat moss and we will be ready to go all right so that rolling is done, and I know we’re kind of feels like we’re just doing step by step by step today.
But really that is how it’s working out today. So now I have to do some starter fertilizer on top of here, then, the peat moss. So, as I mentioned it’s time for the starter fertilizer and I’m gonna be personally using this Lesko stuff, you don’t really have to use this specific thing If you don’t want to, but I happen to have some from earlier this season, so I’m just gonna use that up, but this one is the 1424 and if you get this Lesko brand from Home Depot or I think on Amazon as well, it might be 1824. I can’t remember the exact numbers there, but it’s something just a little bit different, not really a huge difference there in the numbers, but just keep that in mind if you’re, seeing what I’m using.
Do you have to use starter fertilizer?
So the reason for the starter fertilizer going on is that it has a lot of in it which helps the new seedlings to grow roots. And so it’s just a little bit of extra food for that new grass to kind of grow in a little bit. Better so on a new yard like this, I would normally hit this right away and then, as I’ve mentioned before, if you’re doing an overseeding, where there’s actual grass already in place, I’d probably wait a couple of days after you’ve seed to put down something like this. Just because the actual starter fertilizer will give the grass there as well a real jump up and then you kind of are fighting with the existing grass versus the new seed. So I’ve already talked about that in previous videos. So I just want to kind of mention that real quickly, again and so time for starter fertilizer, our next process is one that can get a little bit messy.
But it’s one that, in my experience, has been very helpful when I’ve been doing overseeing projects or seeding in general, and that is adding some peat moss on top of here now we want a light layer on here to just kind of hold on some moisture make Sure we cover up the seed, so it doesn’t get as disturbed from rain, storms and birds and things like that, but it specifically helps a lot with just holding on to that moisture there. On the top of the surface, it’s still gonna be hot here. Coming up, it looks like it’s gonna help me a little bit to cover up that seed and not let it dry out as easily from the Sun. So I just picked up whatever you can get up the store, nothing special here, and then we’ll start spreading.
It and I’ll kind of show you how I do it I got. I got started here to make sure that my method was still gonna work for what I’m doing this time. But, so if you have a small area like I do, I prefer to just spread this out by hand and of course, it is gonna take a while. That’s for sure, but I feel like I get a little bit better coverage and even coverage when I kind of put it down by hand, so I just kind of grab it in my hands and kind of shake it out like this as I’m putting it onto The ground and it’s a very fine material, so you can kind of just use that as a shaker put it down on your soil there and it feels like it gives a very, even layer to me now. If you had a big yard, you’d probably be resorting to maybe looking into a peat moss spreader.
Let´s get dirty
They do make those and then otherwise You could probably just dump this out onto the yard in piles and rake it around as best as you could. But since I have everything leveled as good as I can right now, and I don’t want to disturb anything by doing a bunch of raking again, I’m gonna just continue by hand, okay, well, here’s where we’re at when, of course, Ryan ends out of peat Moss also, when I told you that it could get dirty a checkup, my arms yeah a little bit dirty.
Well, we finally did it I’m an absolute mess here, still filthy from all that peat moss but everything’s down today. Now I just have to start watering it and I’ll make a whole new video about watering, so I’ll kind of explain everything then, but on this first time here, I’m just gonna give it a good soaking. Make sure that I don’t have any puddles or things running around, but we want to give it just a little bit of a good soaking here to start out and then in the next video I’ll, explain a little bit more about my watering and how to do That part as well, so thanks so much for watching this today, if you have any questions, let me know in the comments and we’ll see you next time.
