Hey everybody it's Heath from DoMyOwn.com. Today we're going to talk to you about newly seeded
turf and how to care for that newly seeded turf. So you've overseeded your lawn. A key element to
do is to then fertilize that lawn. You'll need something high in phosphorus generally speaking
depending upon your turf type to establish that root system. Something with that middle number
being 20+ is key for root development. Your grass type is going to determine the
timing of your fertilizer. Some warm season grasses like bermuda, centipede, or zoysia
can take up to 21 days or 3 weeks to germinate. You wouldn't want to put a starter fertilizer
down at the time of seeding, you may want to wait a week or two before you apply it. With
that being said, some cool season grasses like rye or fescue are gonna germinate within 3 to 10 days
so it's not a bad idea to go ahead and put your seed and your fertilizer down at the same time.
So once you've done your aeration and overseeding and you've applied your starter fertilizer,
you need to pay attention to the fertilizer. Depending on what type of starter fertilizer
you put down, you may have something that has 50% slow release or you may have something that
has no slow release. Depending upon that would determine your second application.
If you've done something with say 50% slow release that's going to release over a 6-8 week period.
If your starter fertilizer that you've put down has no slow release to it,
then you would want to do another application about 4 weeks later. Once you've established
that turf, you want to water it every day until that grass has actually germinated.
Make sure you're only watering for short periods of time - 10-15 minutes maybe once or twice a day
depending on your climate and your location, you may have to water it twice a day just to keep the
seed moist throughout the day. You want to make sure you're not watering to the point of runoff,
we don't want any soaking wet lawns but we also want to make sure there is a little bit of dry
out period throughout the day as well. This will work for either overseeding lawns or establishing
entire new turfs. Now that you've established your turf and you see it's starting to fill in,
you can cut back on your watering habits a little bit. If you were watering twice a day, you can
go back to once a day or if you were watering once a day, you can go to once every other day.
You'll do this for about another week or two until the root system is kind of established
and you're almost to that point where you're about to do your first mowing. After that you
can actually do your normal watering practices from there on out. This will also include those
people who want to overseed their warm season turf with ryegrass to establish a green lawn throughout
the winter time. Another popular question we get asked is the mowing of the newly seeded turf.
And that's gonna depend greatly on the type of turf that you are putting in and how long it
takes to establish that turf. With certain grass types we have talked about, it can take 3 weeks
for that grass seed to germinate so at that point you want to make sure that you've gotten it at
least 3-4 weeks worth of growth on it before you do your first mowing and make sure that grass
is established enough to take that first mowing. Another thing is the mowing height. You wanna make
sure you're mowing your lawn for the first time at a pretty high height. For fescue lawns, you wanna
be close to about 3 inches so that you're not ripping that new grass out from the root system.
Make sure that you have a sharp mower blade and you're mowing on a dry turf as well
when you're doing that first cut so that you can make a clean cut and not pull it out by the
root system. Make sure you're not cutting more than a third of the leaf blade off at a time.
If you've got some bare spots and you're just touching up seed in certain little areas,
you can apply all these practices to that as well but you could maintain your normal lawn,
cutting it on a regular basis just avoid the new areas where you've applied the seed. So now
that your newly seeded lawn has germinated and is established and you've got some weeds in the lawn,
you need to make sure that you have established that turf, that it is matured at least 6 weeks
after germination or you've done at least 2 mowings on the lawn prior to applying any weed
control. To get the best benefit of the herbicide when you're applying it, you wanna make sure that
you haven't mowed the lawn for about 2-3 days and then after you've applied the herbicide make
sure you wait 2-3 days for that herbicide to fully soak into the weeds. Generally speaking,
fall is the best time to overseed your cool season lawn. Depending on your location, generally from
late August all the way through to about November 1st is the best time to do that. Your warm season
turf is normally done in the spring time... late spring sometime around late May depending on
your location anyways that would be the best time to do zosyia, centipede, st. augustine,
bermuda anything like that. Taking some of these few steps can allow your lawn to flourish.
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