Patching Bare Spots on Your Lawn the Economical Way

When you shop around or read tutorials, you always see either oversimplified or somewhat complicated methods of patching bare spots in your lawn. What I'm about to share is my simple and easy way of getting this done! Now keep in mind, you may have to do at least a little bit of this at the start of each Spring, but by properly fertilizing your lawn with weed and crabgrass preventers at regular intervals, you won't need to patch bare spots quite as much.

Here is my procedure:

1. Have a bag of mid-grade potting soil handy, e.g. Scott's Hyponex. Fill a 5gal pot with it and loosen it up with your hands to the finest possible consistency.

2. Get a decent size bag of grass seed. I used Pennington "Ultimate" seed, "grows anywhere". $9 treats 750 square feet, which amounts to a lot when you are patching bare or thin spots. This seed is lightly coated with starter fertilizer, so you don't need to add any third party products.

3. Locate bare spots by where there is little to no grass, which can be bare soil but in PA this is often substituted with other matter such as dead grass, weeds,  seed pods, leaves, etc. Grab a hand rake and get this loose material out of there, while at the same time loosening just the surface of the soil beneath.

4. Grab and sprinkle small amounts of seed with your first four fingers at about 5 seeds per square inch.

5. Grab handfuls of the potting soil and work an even coating of soil up to 3/8 of an inch over the bare spots containing the seed you sprinkled. Flatten it down with your hand. This is now the mulch that the seed will begin to grow in. A decent enough quality soil (such as Hyponex) will have plenty of nutrients to get the grass growing.

6. Lightly shower water until the patches are completely moist and appear flat. This should only take a second or two for each area you work. Do not overwater! You don't want to wash away the products you just laid down. You should see little if no seed at the surface.

You should see new light green shoots appear in just a few days, with thick grass coming in full within a week! I find that my method works much faster than products like "patch mixes" and certainly faster than trying to rake seed into the soil after you've laid it. Remember, you should only patch your lawn in early Spring or mid-Fall. There simply is not enough coolness or moisture to do this in the Summer.