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.

This Blog is Now Live!

After over a year and a half writing in MS Word, my blog is now live! Older posts have been backdated, and range in simplicity since they written mainly to document doings in my garden. I hope to even go to the extent of backfilling the posts with pictures to more clearly explain the work I have done.

Once again, I hope to use my own experiences to help others negotiate common issues found in southwestern PA's environments.

Spring Freezes Stink

We’re stuck in a trough in the jet stream right now, which is unfortunate because most of the US is above freezing, whereas the central Atlantic region has been under freeze watches and warnings every few days or so. We had one hard freeze about a week ago, that thwarted much new growth on the macrophylla hydrangeas as well as butterfly bushes, to name a few. We’ve yet to see if the flower buds will survive, as some leaves have dried to a crisp. 

Winter 2012 Results

To say the least, it was a mild winter… This was to the point where the USDA released a new zone hardiness map where it moved my region from 6A to 6B! This said, the colder weather broke around the second week of the month, forcing almost everything out of dormancy. To boot, daffodils and the like had sprouted shoots as early as mid-January!

I had decided to winter-protect my macrophylla hydrangeas, which went for not since most of the winter was actually above freezing. As I recall, the lowest temperature was about 7 degrees and there was no cold snap that lasted longer than a day or two.

Warmer temps also led to me moving a few things around, such as daylilies, many of which were donated from Carol who had her side garden tilled. 

We've seen a welcome return of what we'd call normal weather here in western PA.  With that is also coming the end of the planting season for this year. Over the last couple of weeks, we've bought our small selection of hardy mums and some clearance perennials to plant into the fall. Included in these are 2 additional types of hardy hibiscus and 2 types of panicle hydrangea. The panicles were starter sizes of Pinky Winky and Little Lamb.