fall is a fantastic time to take care of your lawn so that you have a gorgeous lawn all year round
come with me as i show you how we maintain our yard
hello friends welcome to gardening with creekside i am jenny and today we are standing in our front
yard and i want to walk you through how we take care and maintain our fescue lawn now if you
will remember we are in north carolina zone 7b and the last time we talked about doing grass
somebody asked a very good question they said if you're in the south and you deal with southern
climate why are you growing fescue which is a cool weather grass excellent question well where we are
we are right on the borderline of being able to grow both fescue and hot weather grasses we
personally have just chosen to have a fescue lawn even though it is a cool weather grass because
honestly we just like it personally better than say like a bermuda or a zoysia or a centipede
grass because fescue is a cool weather grass it looks great basically all year round yes it
will start to look a little stressed and actually start to go dormant in late july and august when
we hit our highest temperatures so it will start to get it will slow down on growing it will start
to get a little bit of a brownish tint to it some people think that it is dying it is not dying it
is simply going dormant it's like it's too hot i'm checking out i'll see y'all again later when it's
cooler and if you go back and watch several of our videos where we were here in the front yard back
in the summer you can kind of tell where it was a little stressed now here we are in the end of
october november is just knocking on the doors just a couple of days away and you can see how
much it has already perked up bermuda centipede all those kinds of grasses yes they thrive in the
heat and the humidity of the south but because they are a hot weather grass when it turns cool
then they go dormant and they are brown so you will see these um a lot of more southern um
climates a lot of homes have them so really like south carolina georgia alabama all of those guys
will have those and even golf courses around here will do some of those hot weather grasses
we personally would just rather have a little bit of a more of a brown yard for maybe six to
eight weeks in the summer as to hoping having a completely brown yard all winter long into
the spring we like having a nice lush green grass also fescue is a more of a lush looking
grass because you do not cut it really short when jerry or the kids cut the grass they set the mower
really about that three and a half inch mark so it's a lot taller it's thicker it's fuller and
honestly it's a little softer on your tootsies when you're walking around barefoot in the yard
fall is the perfect time to come in and shore up your fescue grass we for the most part in our yard
have a pretty good stand of fescue so we did not have to completely start from scratch there were
a couple areas that we had shown you that the invasive pesky grass had gotten into whether it
be the bermuda or what we call wire grass johnson grass it's a really invasive grass and we want to
get it out so we did kill that off and then we've come back in and really heavily seeded that area
but for the most part all we have to really do is come in and aerate the yard so what in the world
does it mean to aerate aerate is simply that you are scratching up the surface of the soil
with a machine that's poking holes in your lawn so this is a great time to do right around if
you've had some wet weather so your your ground is already nice and soft so the machine comes in
and it has a roller full of basically spikes and it comes and it makes these divots all in your
yard why in the world are we doing that well as you remember here where we are in
north carolina we have gorgeous red clay soil and we need a pocket for that soil that grass
seed and the fertilizers kind of to fall into as opposed to just laying flat on top of the ground
so you can aerate you can we actually borrowed the aerator from a friend of ours so we
if you have somebody that has one i'm sure they'll probably be happy unless you borrow it
before we in years past what we would do would simply be to go to a local rental store
and they have aerators that you can either pull behind on your mower or different things the one
that we had that we borrowed this time was simply one that you could ride on so that was really nice
um but maybe you don't have a huge yard maybe you're just working with a small space you can get
a small tiller and just lightly till up your soil the whole idea is to break up that flat surface of
your soil and create little divots little nooks for the grass seed and the fertilizer to really
kind of fall into so that it doesn't get washed away and grab hold and they can take off and
grow so first step is that we aerate this well actually first step is you want to cut your grass
really low as low as you can go because you're not going to be coming back and mowing it for a while
you want to get it as low as it can go so you're really going to kind of scalp your grass
then you're going to come through and you're going to aerate create all those little nooks and
crannies for your grass seed to fall into then you just simply go along and you can use a spreader
spreaders are really easy relatively cheap that you can get at you know your local hardware store
and put that grass seat in there and then walk it off in a pattern so that you make sure you have an
even spread of grass seed throughout the yard now what kind of grassy did we use well we use fescue
obviously but there are tons and tons of different varieties of fescue for you to choose from there
are fescues that are more sun tolerant there are some that are more shade tolerant depending on
your growing conditions we like to use whether you're doing sun or shade or maybe you have a
mixture of both a lot of times you can buy the fescue with blends so it's not just a specific
type of fescue but it has several different varieties of fescue in one bag that you're
putting out onto your lawn the one that we had actually had three different blends out i mean
in the bag so we have three different blends out in the yard we here are full sun so the the blends
that we chose are for that majority of full sun grass my mama has a lot of shades so if she was
doing it then she would go more on the shade side so depending on what your growing conditions are
use that blend also i would say a great resource for you to use would be just go online
or call like your local agriculture extension office ask them if they have certain
blends that they recommend for you to use in your grass because they are experts in your
local area so those extension offices are there for your use they are free because they are paid
with taxpayer dollars so take advantage of that so contact your local extension office and talk
to somebody about grass also go online and look at local universities that are in your area that
really have strong agricultural programs for us a big great resource is nc state and clemson both of
those universities have really strong agricultural programs they have all this published material
on the different blends the different new varieties that are on the market that have done
really well in the area so again wherever you are because we have a wide reach and so i could
be talking to somebody in washington state or canada or texas or wherever you are and so what
the blends that work really well for us here in north carolina may not be the best blends that
work for you so reach out to your local people and talk to those folks once you got your grass seed
in go ahead and you're going to come back with a great fertilizer you need to feed your lawn
so there again there are just a wide range of different fertilizers out there that you can use
there are now great organic fertilizers that you can use or you can use synthetic
whatever it is again use those local resources to find out what the best fertilizer is for you
and then the last thing is you've got to make sure that the grass gets water
fescue especially when you're coming up you've got to keep it of course a nice moist environment
for those seeds to germinate on average once it's established fescue has to have at least
one inch of water per week so whether that is from rain or is that is from irrigation but it is vital
if you want to have a nice green yard that you've got to water it just like if we're talking about
potted you know a potted container of annuals if you don't water it it's not going to do well
so you've got to look into you know do i get enough rain or can i do some sort of irrigation
on this area to give me nice green grass year round this all depends on what you want for
your lawn it's your yard you be the expert of your yard and you decide how you want your
space to look as far as going into the rest of the season there's a whole other maintenance
schedule that you can do you know in the spring and the fall and the summer as far as feeding
again because of our red clay soil we tend to be very acidic so we would we want to sometimes
lower our ph level so we would use a lime to kind of balance out that for that ph level
so that we're not so acidic that's what we have to deal with here with our naturally acidic soil lime
helps to counteract that ph and as far as the rest of that goes we're just going to let it grow once
it gets to of a good height we'll come through and just give it a nice little light haircut
we have been blessed with some good rain here in the last couple of gosh the last week really i
mean i think we've gotten five inches of rain total in like the last week so the grass has
already germinated it is coming up we can see it there's all this little baby grass in here with
already established grass so hopefully that ensures that we're going to have a beautiful green
lush yard for the whole next year and if you do this on a regular basis if you do that
kind of maintenance and every year come in you know maintain your weeds get rid of those guys
shore up the existing lawn that you have with fresh round of seed in the fall then really it
just becomes a little bit easier to maintain every year as opposed if you just do it once
every five years or so so as always a little regular maintenance eases the burden in the
long run again this is not an all you know exclusive how-to but this just shows you gives
you a glimpse of how we take care of our lawn here in north carolina as always thank you so
much for gardening with creekside you all have a great day we'll see you next time bye friends
so