There is a lot to do if you want to take your lawn from zero to hero. The first thing that you need to do is you need to borrow or rent a lawn dethatcher. This allows you to remove the bare spots in your lawn, and also remove all of the unhealthy grass that will keep it from looking great. Using a thatcher is kind of like giving your lawn a facelift. After years and years of less-than-perfect care, most lawns will develop a thatch layer. Removing this thatch build up will be like giving your lawn a facelift, and it will make it look a lot younger and healthier too.

After you thatch, the next step is to aerate your lawn. Aerating helps to strengthen the roots by encouraging water to go down deeper into the soil. Aerating also helps new grass seed to get established. I have one area in my front lawn where the grass is growing like crazy, where it came up through the holes that were left in the lawn by the aerator.

When you seed your lawn, make sure to use a light covering of topsoil. We just went and bought a yard of topsoil from the local nursery. 1 yard of topsoil will be enough for you to cover about 1,500 square feet of lawn. Once you do that, you want to put some fertilizer on top of your lawn, and make sure to water it regularly for the next 4 to 6 weeks. You know that your lawn is in good shape, after you have had a chance to mull over it, and all of the dead spots are filled by the new grass.

If you have to rent your own thatching machine and lawn aerator, you should still be able to repair your full lawn for less than $200. The cost of replacing a lawn with sod is generally $3-$5,000.

The second thing that you should do when seeding lawn is to make sure that you have high-quality grass seed. Having high-quality grass goes a long way and helps to improve the overall look of your lawn. Not all grass is the same. As a matter fact, some grasses are really ugly and won’t improve your lawn all. By taking the time to use good seed, you make sure that you increase the beauty of your lawn every time you seed it.

The last thing that you need to make sure to do right when you are seeding a lawn, is you need to make sure that you water it enough. Often people will not water their lawn enough. They think that if they water two or three times, then the grass seed will come in. However, it generally takes at least a week for the grass seed to germinate. The whole time it is germinating, it needs to be kept moist. If the grass dries out after it has started to germinate, it probably won’t grow. Make sure that you keep on watering your lawn on a regular basis until it comes in fully. Be careful not to over water because if you over water, you can wash away the grass seed that is on your lawn.

The last thing that you should know about seating a lawn is that you want to avoid putting a lot of traffic on the lawn for the first 6 to 8 weeks. A lot of people don’t think it takes eight weeks for the lawn to come in, but it really does. This is because for the first eight weeks, the grass is not established and it is still growing. You actually have to move over it once or twice before it will start to feel out and look nice. A lot of people think that seeding a lawn is easy, but sometimes it can take up to 12 weeks for the lawn to be fully established. Until it is fully established, you want to avoid excessive amounts of traffic across your lawn because it could damage the young grass.

The following are some basic instructions on how to seed a lawn:

Start out by buying the best quality grass. You can buy cheap seed, but if you do, you’re going to be struggling with it for a long time. There really isn’t that much difference in price between the nicest seed and the cheapest. I recommend that you get a moderate to high end seed that has mostly grass seeds and few fillers.

The next step is to make sure you have a strategy to get the seed to germinate. If you want them to germinate, you could aerate your lawn a few times, or you could also power rake your lawn. If your grass is sparse, then aerating your lawn twice and then seeding it is a good idea. If your grass has a lot of yellow grass or thatch in it, then you want to power rake your lawn first, and then seed it.

If you want to increase the germination rate of your seeds, it is going to be a good idea for you to also use a top dressing. The easiest top dressing to apply to your lawn is peat moss.  Usually, I have to put down grass seed first, then peat moss over the top of it by hand.  Make sure that you do not use more than 1/4 inch of top dressing on top of the seed. Then, you can water your lawn two or three times per day. When you are trying to grow seed, you want to water your lawn more often for less smaller amounts of time. Once your grass has come in, you will want to water less often and for longer amounts of time.

Some people also recommend that you roll over the top of your soil once you are done planting the grass seed. I think if you do, it will increase your germination rate by a few percentage points.  The most important thing you can do is to keep the seed from drying out. That is why you want to use the top dressing.  You can also increase the germination rate by using starter fertilizer. You don’t want to use regular fertilizer when you have just put down grass seed, since the fertilizer will probably be too strong. But you can use either starter fertilizer, which is slow-release, or you can use organic fertilizer. Either one of these will do a great job at fertilizing your lawn while your new grass seed is getting established.  Ideally, you want to wait at least two or three weeks before mowing your lawn again. If you wait too long, then the new grass will be at a disadvantage, but you want to wait long enough for it to develop some roots and get strong enough that you can walk across lawn without killing the grass.

The last reason why it is so important to do use an aerator to help you with lawn repair, is that it can actually poke holes through a lot of the thatch that is on your lawn. If you have too much thatch, your lawn will have difficulty breathing and will be more susceptible to lawn disease.When you aerate lawn, you allow oxygen to get below the surface. This oxygen helps aerobic bacteria to break down the thatch and turn it into useful components in the soil that the grass can metabolize.

Even though a lot of people think that you should only aerate your lawn as needed or once every three or four years, I think you should do it a lot more often. I have had the experience of aerating more than 5000 lawns, and I know that for the vast majority of my customers, it has helped them out significantly. The best time to aerate your lawn is in the spring, but the second best time to aerate is in the fall. Also, any time you’re interested in repairing your lawn or giving it a facelift, you should definitely think about batching and aerating at the same time.

To reverse the damage done by compacted soil and a buildup of thatch, employ the use of a hollow tine aerator.  These tools, available in both manual and power varieties, create space in the soil for water, nutrients and air to reach the roots.  They are also very helpful in helping you repair your lawn.  They do so by removing chunks of soil with small h0llowed spoons.

Using an aerator is not complicated, though there are some things to think about ahead of time.  The first thing to decide is whether you will use a manual or power aerator.  Manual aerators, also called hand aerators, look a bit like a shovel with several hollow tines at the base.  The tines are inserted into the soil with the force of the operator’s weight.  Because they are time and labor intensive, hand aerators are only recommended for aerating very small areas of land.  For full lawns, you will want to use a power aerator.  These tools look like a large, heavy-duty lawn mower.  They have a cylinder surrounded with hollow tine aerators that remove plugs of soil as the cylinder rotates.  Though far more efficient than the hand aerator, the power core aerator is very powerful and requires some physical strength and endurance to operate it.

Once you have decided which tool to use, you will need to plan when you will aerate.  In most climates, you only need to aerate once a year; however, if you live in a very hot and dry area, you may want to do so twice a year.  It is best to aerate right as the grass begins to grow, so in either late summer/early fall for cool season grasses or in spring for warm season grasses.

After Aerating your lawn, you may want to rake up all of the plugs. One of the best ways to this is by using garden carts. Plugs can get very heavy, and they are a great way to haul them around your lawn.

Next, you should identify any sprinkler heads and mark them with flags to avoid damaging the aerator or the sprinklers.  On the night before you plan to aerate, thoroughly water your lawn.  This will make the process go more smoothly.

To operate the aerator, set the penetration at its deepest setting, usually about 3”.  Pass over your lawn as you would with a lawn mower – in straight lines, back and forth.  If it has been a long time since you last aerated, your soil is high in clay content, or your thatch is more than ¾ inch thick, you will want to do a second pass perpendicular to your first.  For very severe cases, you may want to do a third pass.

When you are done, you can either rake up the resulting soil plugs or simply wait for them to be reabsorbed into the lawn.   By the time your grass has fully grown, you should see a marked difference in the quality of your lawn.

Learn all about Lawn Aerators!

The type of grass growing in your lawn depends more on the variability of sunlight and the variety of the existing soil, then it does on the outside temperature.

Did you know different type of grasses in different parts of the country grow differently.  Warm weather grasses such as those found in southern California, Florida much of the south and the south eastern coast are thicker, warm weather grasses.

Generally speaking, the hotter it gets, the better warm weather grasses grow. The faster growing time for these grasses is when the weather is between 85 and 95 degrees.  Warm weather grasses are a lot better at repairing themselves or self lawn repair.  They are also more vigorous and grow by shooting rhizomes out in many different directions at once.  Two of the most common types of warm weather grasses are St. Augustine and Bermuda grasses.

Cool weather grasses are a lot different.  These are predominately the types of grasses that grow in the north west.  Although this grass grows like crazy in the spring and the fall, it grows a lot slower in the winter and the summer.  Part of the slow grow in the summer is due to the hardening of the soil. This compacts roots and prevent water absorption.  In the winter, many of backyards in the northwest see less than 4 hours of sunlight a day.

Cool grasses grow in a circular pattern and are far less vigorous than warmer grasses.  These grasses also face a few other problems including poor drainage and competition from moss.  Lawns that don’t get a lot of sunlight in the winter may be replaced by moss (which has a shallow root system and needs less sunlight.)  Cool grasses includes different varieties of fescue and ryegrass.

The best way to maintain a lawn healthier is to mow higher and mow more often.  As  a general rule don’t moth your lawn under 2 inches and mow regularly so that you never have to cut more than 1/3 of the blade at a time.  Both types of grass benefit from longer, less frequent watering as a method to help develop the roots.

If you have trouble with your lawn, you may want to consider using a lawn sweeper.