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Cool Season Grass Lawn Care Schedule
How to Aerate Before Overseeding Video

The whole yard's been aerated, the front's been fertilized, and now it's time to overseed in the back!

Overseeding is just simply spreading seed over the existing lawn. But in my case in the back and on the side where the Bradford Pears are, I hardly got a lawn to speak of!

There's still tiny pieces of grass that exists back here, but for the most part, it was all mainly moss. So, I'm going to take some new seed, throw it out over this area, and see what we get.

Overseeding's an easy way to fill in bare spots and it's also going to make lawns thicker. The thicker the lawn, the more grass we got, the less chance of weeds we're going to have.

There's a few things we need to know and understand before we over seed. The first thing we should do and it's what I've done, is get a soil test. The soil test will tell us if there's any kind of adjustments or amendments that need to be made for the soil.

In my case, the back and on the side, I had a ton of moss, so it was pretty acidic, and I needed to put down an application of lime to help try and balance that pH out.

You need to pick a seed that will match the conditions where you plan on putting it down. In my case, in the back and on the side, I have tons of shade. So I picked dense shade tall fescue mix, for those reasons.

As far as the timing of overseeding, for cool season lawns you want to overseed in the late summer or early fall, and you can overseed again in the spring if needed.

For warm season lawns, you should overseed in late spring.

The other thing we want to do, and it's what we did for the front when we aerated and fertilized, is we want to scalp the yard down. That way, we make sure the seed gets all the way down to the soil level.

Now that we know and understand all of that, all that's left to do is put out the seed.

I went over this before when we talked about fertilizer, but every fertilizer bag and grass seed bag, is going to have a chart like this one that tells you the spreader settings you need to apply the product. For this one it tells you both for overseeding and if you're throwing out seed for a brand new lawn. But because we're doing overseeding, we'll just use that column and we'll match our spreader according to what it says here.

Also consider this when you're choosing a grass seed, I went with a dense shade tall fescue mix! And what I mean by mix, is it's got four different species of fescue in it. And the reason I want to do that, is I don't know if one particular species of the fescue will thrive in the back yard and on the side versus another. So by putting out a mix, I have a better chance of establishing the fescue back there and it will help fight off disease and prevent that from setting in as well.

So again, how you calibrate your spreader, you read the product bag; it will tell you what you need for that product and you just simply come back here to the dial, and set it accordingly.

Just like my fertilizer, I'm going to throw down my edge control and make a trim pass on the perimeter of the yard. Again, I do not want to waste my product by throwing it into areas I don't want. Like the jungle! I want to try and get as much of it in the yard as possible!

Well, hopefully now, I'll get some grass to grow back here! Time will tell.

As far as watering the new seed is concerned, you want to make it light and frequent. Like I stated in the aerating and fertilizing video, I've got rain forecast for the next two days. So I'm going to let mother nature water in my fertilizer and my grass seed in for me, because I did all three at the same time.

Now the rain I'm going to be getting, it's going to be a light rain. I'm not going to have a torrential down pour because if I get that, it's going to wash all of my product out of the yard and I'm back to square one.

So if you are going to rely on rain to water it in for you, you need to make sure it's going to be light and nothing heavy that washes your seed and fertilizer out of the yard.

Another thing to keep in mind when overseeding, keep the mowing to a minimal. I'm going to probably wait about four weeks before I even think about putting my mower in the areas that I've put down seed, because I really want to give it a chance to really establish itself.

As far as fertilizer is concerned, I would wait about two weeks or until the seed has started to establish itself before putting any of that down. Depending on your soil analysis, you can use a starter fertilizer if need be, or something that has a high phosphorus count because that can create a really good root development.

Again, daily watering is important, but just make sure to keep it light and frequent.

Let me think...yeah! I think that's it. That's overseeding in a nutshell. If you have any other questions, you know what you can do. You can email our customer service staff, pick up the phone and give them a call, or you can leave them in the comments section below of this video.

So now hopefully, I'll get some grass to grow in those areas where I ripped out all of the moss. Time will tell.

So, make sure to click this button to subscribe to our channel and click this playlist to see all the videos we've done in the series so far, and continue to follow along with me as I learn what it takes to Do My Own Lawn Care!

And as always, thanks for watching!