Healthy Lawn Report: Grass Re-Seeding Disaster

I haven’t posted in several weeks for two reasons: it suddenly became too hot for me to want to be in the blazing sun for hours so I haven’t made much progress on outdoor projects, and I’ve been under the weather recently. I’m feeling much better, but it’s only getting hotter and more humid.

Lush Isn’t Always Pretty

It feels dishonest to feature only picture-perfect photos when the property is (still) a mess or when a project goes awry, so I’d like to share a grass re-seeding disaster that occurred in late May/early June:

I have a secondary front lawn and sizeable flower bed across the road from the main house. In recent years my town has been using a more caustic road salt that has slowly killed a swath of grass that is at least 6 feet wide and several hundred feet long. Because the ground slopes, that salt has migrated in certain spots and created other dead areas of lawn where only a bit of crab grass and weeds grow.

It looks awful.

Why Is the Grass Dying On My Watch?

Last year, I’d applied gypsum to desalinate and de-compact the soil, with the intention of over-seeding in late summer/early fall, then top dressing with organic horse manure. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to do either so this spring I found myself looking at an ugly lawn that had once been lush and green. I don’t know how the previous owners kept the lawn in such good shape; some road salt must have always migrated onto the lawn – for decades. I know they used a mulching mower, but their lawn care activities are otherwise a mystery.

Fed up with how bad it looked, I had six cubic yards of screened loam delivered in late May. It couldn’t be dumped exactly where I needed it because of the slope and the limitations of the truck used to deliver it. So I shoveled the dirt by hand into a cart, hauled it across the road, and spread it by hand onto the area to be re-seeded. It took at least four hours to move less than half the pile.

I figured it made more sense to have the seed sitting on the fresh loam instead of the almost-barren soil bed. So, I lightly raked the loam then sowed fresh grass seed, sprinkled organic horse manure, covered it all with tacky straw, and watered it using a handheld sprayer and three five-gallon buckets of water.

The below photo shows about one-quarter of a long section of decimated lawn. I covered it quite heavily with the tacky straw, but the bottom of the photo shows a patch of how poor the area was. Notice how just a few blades of crabgrass are poking through soil that is covered with a sand and salt mixture.

High Hopes, Quickly Dashed

Anyone who has successfully seeded a lawn (as I have) probably knows that it all went downhill from there. Here’s what happened:

The next morning, I went outside shortly after 7:00am to see that wild turkeys had been scratching at the straw and disturbing the seed – there were deep gouges in some places. Other birds were picking up bits of straw, presumably for nesting material, but I sensed that the turkeys were going to be the real spoilers.
Upset but undeterred, I filled my buckets and sprayed the area by hand. The battery on the sprayer died after 30 minutes but gave me just enough power to empty the buckets. The soil appeared saturated but when I checked an hour or so later, it looked bone dry and when I dug my finger into the soil, it felt that way too.
Still, I awoke earlier than normal each day for two weeks, took note of the continued turkey disturbances and straw theft then watered the soil for 30 minutes. It always felt dry shortly after I finished watering it around 8:00am even though the temperature topped out in the mid-seventies (Fahrenheit) and the lows were in the fifties.
It didn’t rain for at least ten days – not one drop.
Nothing came up.
The turkeys visited at all times of the day and evening, one time appearing less than a minute after I’d finished watering. Other times, they’d stand several feet away, almost as if they were just waiting for me to leave. Yes, I directed harsh language at them.
After about ten days, we had a very light rain.
I finally noticed a few green shoots close to the roadside – success! My 7:30am waterings had been worth it. Excited, I then sprinkled some year-old coated mini-clover seeds. Within a few days, baby clover appeared!
I watered for a few more days, bringing my project to about the two-week mark.
My sister told me that much of what I’d thought were mini-clover were in fact baby weeds sprouting. What?!
Around Day 14, I went outside to water. No mini-clover. The new grass seemed to be gone too, but all the weeds were present. And bigger. Weeds that I hadn’t seen anywhere on the property before – or at my parents’ house just up the road. What had been in that loam? More importantly, what had happened to the mini-clover?

I saw hoof marks at one end of the seeded area, but the deer didn’t appear to have been near where the mini-clover had sprouted. I doubted the turkeys had eaten it – they seemed much more interested in scratching at the straw to look for grubs.

I’m sure it was the rabbits. They’d been pretty sparse this year – I assumed due in part to the coyote that I’d seen a few times. Just when I’d noticed them, they must have noticed the tender green shoots and feasted on them. Strange, as they seem to have no interest in the sizeable amount of white clover that is spread throughout the other lawns.

The area is as ugly as before, now with a new variety of weeds as seen below.

So, I will pull all the weeds then re-seed/fertilize the area in mid-late September.

So Many Mistakes

For now, I’ve taken stock of everything I did wrong:

Poor seed-to-soil contact. I should have raked the seeds into the loam instead of having them sit on top of it.
Bad timing. Although the temperature stayed between 50-75 degrees Fahrenheit after I seeded the area, it gets full sun and the soil likely gets pretty hot after baking in the sun all day in mid-spring. I should have seeded the area in late March/early April even though we had one or two snowfalls during that period. The snow melted within 24 hours so I don’t think it would have killed the seeds. We also had frequent rain then and those extra weeks would have helped the seeds to germinate.
Insufficient water. I should have paid attention to the weather forecast and waited to re-seed until we had a good amount of rain coming. The seeds needed sustained moisture more than anything for the first few weeks. How much better the outcome would have been.

Due to the lack of rain, I should have watered twice a day or better yet, I should have used my heavy-duty, tow-behind sprayer that needs to be hitched to my lawn tractor’s engine (PTO, I think) to spray a drenching mist – probably in the evening. But, I needed to secure the sprayer to the one cart I have which would have meant that I couldn’t use it to haul brush. I just couldn’t spare it, and the hook up of the sprayer and cart is tricky (to me anyway) since my brother had taken care of it for me last year. In hindsight, I should have tried to connect and de-connect them myself – like my sister suggested.

4. Attracted wild life. I think using tacky straw is a good idea – it’s supposed to stick to the soil once wet to keep the seeds in place, retain moisture as the seeds germinate, then disintegrate. For me, though, my first time using it just made the area too attractive to wild turkeys which disturbed the seeds every day, several times a day. I’ve successfully seeded areas without straw (and once, without watering the area at all). So, I doubt I’ll use it again.

Looking Ahead

I am not defeated or angry that I spent so much time on what turned out to be a disaster because I’ve learned from this experience. At the very least, it has reminded me that I have to be patient and persistent. This lawn will need to be majorly rehabilitated every year due to the horrible effects of road salt/sand and runoff. That will take time, energy, and money, all of which could be spent elsewhere. But the only alternative is to have a half-dead, weedy lawn in front of the house.

That’s unacceptable.

So, it’s onward and upward. The wild turkeys don’t visit as much now, but I see many more rabbits all over the property. They look plump and healthy, but at least I know it’s not from gorging on fresh clover shoots – not mine, anyway!