Fall Lawn Care Plan
Fall is the optimal time of year to repair cool season grass. After suffering all summer and before the onset of winter, cool season grass needs help!
Grasses are categorized as “cool season” and “warm season”. Cool season grasses (such as Turf Type Tall Fescue, Rye grass, and Kentuky Blue Grass) thrive in spring and fall. Warm season grasses (such as St. Augustine, Zoysia, Bermuda) love the heat of summer, while cool season grasses suffer and often go dormant (turn yellow) in the summer heat. Hopefully this description helps you to know whether your yard has cool or warm season grass. I have cool season grass (TTTF), so that is the focus of this post.
As I wrote above, fall is the optimal time to repair summer’s damage to cool season grass. Timing is important – start too early, and summer heat will ruin your efforts. Start too late, and your repaired grass won’t be strong enough to survive the winter.
Before starting, you need to assess the condition of your existing grass. Is it salvagable? In general, if your yard has about 30% grass and 70% weeds, you can kill the weeds and overseed (apply fresh grass seed on top of your existing grass). If your yard is almost all weeds, you can perform a “lawn renovation” (indescriminately kill existing weeds and grass and start over). This article will focus on overseeding, as that is sufficient for most of you (and for me). I’ll write a separate post on when a lawn renovation makes sense.
Below I will lay out the major steps I perform each fall (for my location in Zone 7A, this all happens in September). I plan to write separate detailed posts on each step – here I provide an overview of the process.
Steps to Green Grass
Purchase Supplies
You will need weedkiller (possibly several kinds), fresh grass seed, and starter fertilizer. These items can be in short supply so best to purchase these in August and avoid the September rush. You can certainly shop at a Big Box store (Home Depot and Lowes). You can also purchase online (I have bought from both of these sites):
Continue reading to learn what to buy.
Kill Weeds
Weeds make your yard look like you don’t care. But you do care, right? Weeds also consume water that your grass should needs. They will also fight the grass for survival, and often win unless your grass is very healthy.
If you have a few weeds, feel free to dig them out. But, be sure to get the roots (and I mean ALL of the roots), or the weeds will come right back. For a guaranteed kill, you need to spray a herbicide on each weed.
If your yard is covered with weeds (>50%), you need to do a “broadcast spray”. This means spraying weedkiller over the entire yard. If you have a few weeds (<50%), you can spot spray, meaning that you spray each individual weed. Spot spraying is definitely preferable, as it saves money and is better for the environment. When I first got serious about lawncare, I did a broadcast spray (or two) to get my weeds under control. Since then, I have spot sprayed my weeds.
I’ll write a separate post on common weeds and the chemicals that will kill them (there isn’t a single chemical that will kill all weeds without also killing your grass – you knew this wouldn’t be easy, right?).
It is best to finish killing weeds well before you overseed (several weeks if possible).
Dethatch
Dethatching is removing dead grass from your yard. If you don’t mow regularly (I’ll do a separate post on mowing), you will have a lot of thatch between your grass plants. Thatch is bd for several reasons:
- prevents water from reaching the soil
- can kill the grass if it is too thick (especially if you leave clumps of cut grass on your lwn)
- insects hide in the thatch
- the seed you put down will lay on the thatch rather tha the soil, and thus won’t grow well. Seed is expensive – you don’t want to waste it.
So how do you dethatch? A few choices:
- Buy a dethatching rake and spend an entire weekend using it.
- Buy (or rent) a dethatcher. I have a battery powered Ryobi dethatcher that works well (I hate tripping over cords)
- Pay someone to dethatch your yard for you
Note that dethatching is stressful to your grass, so don’t do it when it is too hot out (i.e. in the heat of July or August).
Aerate
Aeration breaks up the soil in your hard, allowing water and air to penetrate. An aerating machine “pulls cores” of dirt from your yard, and discards them on top of the grass. They eventually melt back into the yard. Proper aeration requires a heavy machine that can be rentedfrom a Big Box store. A better alterative is to pay someone to do the aeration.
If you don’t know when your yard was last aerated, then it needs to be aerated. Note that I plan to skip this step in 2024. Will probably pay someone to aerate my yard in 2025.
Overseed existing grass
Believe it or not, we are now getting to the easy part – overseeding. Buy grass seed and spread it on your yard using either a drop spreader or a broadcast spreader (drop spreaders drop seed directly underneath the spreader, while broadcaster spreaders toss the seed several feet on either side of the spreader and make quick work of overseeing a large yard).
A few considerations when selecting a grass seed:
- If you know what kind of grass you have (TTTF, Rye, KBG) you probably want to purchase the same kind
- Check the expiration date on seed you buy at a Big Box store – new seed will have a higher germination rate versus old seed.
- Buy seed without weeds. Check the bag that the seeds comes in – it will have a tag which lists the ingredients, including the percentage of weeds. Try to buy seed that has 0% weeds (we got rid of the weeds above, we don’t want to be planting new ones). When you look at that tag, you may be surprised to find that your bag of TTTF actually consists of several different types of TTTF blended together. This is a good thing, as a blend of slightly different grasses will improve the grass’s resistance to disease.