Every fall, I try to make some progress on our lawn. We bought the house as a foreclosure and it had been empty for nearly a year. Needless to say, the yard was in b-a-a-a-d shape.
The first year, I learned about verticutting and overseeding. But I learned about in October…You are supposed to do it in September.
In 2011, we rototilled half of the front yard because it was completely filled with Bermuda grass. Again, we did it in October. We worked feverishly to get the new seed down and water it before it became too cold.
In 2012, I wasn’t going to do anything to the lawn.
But, once October rolled around, I got inspired and rented a power rake that pulled 26 bags of thatch from our lawn! What makes this surprising is that I used a grass catcher and bags every time I mowed the grass! Once again, we had to hustle to get the new seed down and water it before the cold weather set in.
This year, I was determined to do it when we were supposed to! So, on Saturday morning, I started by cutting the grass to a shorter height. It took 4 hours to mow a lawn that usually takes 35-45 minutes! My wife helped me by bagging 12 bags of grass.
I then spent the afternoon wrestling with a verticutter while my wife followed behind using the mower as a vacuum cleaner. We picked up 12 more bags of thatch.
All that was left was to overseed the lawn. And that was when I remembered last year…
After power raking, I spent many evenings pulling a weed that had a strong, woody stem that dominated yard. This obviously left many bare spots. I figured that I would need approximately 20 pounds of seed.
So I went down to nursery to buy it and ran straight into a classic buyer’s dilemna.
The price for 20 pounds of grass seed was around $2.50 per pound. However, if I bought a 50 pound bag, it was only $1.50.
Hmmm…20 pounds for $50 or 50 pounds for $75? You can probably guess what I bought.
When I finished sowing all of the bare patches that my weed pulling had exposed, I had well over a half bag left! Instead of the $75 that I spent, I figured out that I could have completed the task with $25 worth of seed. What was I thinking!?
As I poured the extra seed into 5 gallon buckets, I kicked myself because I honestly thought that we were going to sell the house this summer. Images of me loading those buckets onto the moving truck floated through my mind.
Well, guess what?
It turned out that I knew what I was doing…
All of that “extra” seed was just enough (and I mean just enough!) to overseed our entire yard! Yeah, I knew it..I was just planning ahead last year…:)
And our timing could not have been better. Just as I was finishing spreading the seed, it started sprinkle. It then rained softly all day today!
