The Best Time To Seed Your Lawn
Even if you do your best to take care of your lawn during the summer, high temperatures can cause damage to your grass. This is even truer if you experience any droughts or if your lawn consists of Fescue grass, which tends to struggle with Virginia’s weather conditions.
You may end up with patches of thin grass or bare areas as a result, which is why you’ll want to repair any damaged spots in your lawn once summer ends. This means seeding your lawn once the fall season comes around.
Seeding is a process that will help keep your lawn looking green and healthy. Seeding is the act of spreading grass seed to add more young, greener and healthier grass to your lawn.
Why You Should Seed in the Fall
It should be pretty obvious why the summer and winter months are a poor time to attempt to seed your lawn. But what about the fall?
Aeration and Seeding will give your lawn the rejuvenation it needs after each summer. Fall tends to be the best time to seed because cold-season grasses grow much more during this time of year and warm-season weeds are much less active.
In some cases, your lawn may look perfectly fine coming out of the summer. Maybe you went the extra mile with your lawn and it paid off. This doesn’t mean you don’t need to seed your lawn.
Why?
You mow your lawn regularly, right? This is a good thing; however, if you mow your lawn consistently, the lawn won’t have the chance to propagate itself.
As the grass ages, it will have difficulty maintaining growth as it deals with the common stresses that all lawns deal with and as it competes with weeds. So aerating and seeding provides your lawn with new seedlings that grow into new, healthy turf.
Aeration and seeding is a cumbersome, multi-step process. If you don’t want to take on the hassle yourself, trust Virginia Green to take on your lawn care needs.
How to Seed Your Lawn
The following are the steps to properly and effectively seed your lawn during the fall season:
1. Preparing your lawn
Before you begin seeding your lawn, make sure that you mow the grass. Remove the clippings as well. If you don’t remove the clippings, they’ll end up blocking much-needed sunlight and water from getting to the seeds you spread.
When seeding during the fall in Virginia’s warmer climate, you may want to cut your grass extra short. Once you’ve mowed the grass, rake the soil to not only remove the clippings, but also any thatch or debris that have built up. Raking the soil will also loosen it up and expose it so that it’s better prepared to receive the seeds.
2. Dealing with existing problems
If your lawn has any problems, you’ll want to deal with them before you attempt to seed. For example, if there are serious flaws with the lawn that go beyond normal thinning, you should test your soil and add soil amendments if necessary. If you spot any disease or pest problems, then it makes no sense to seed your lawn until you’ve taken care of the issue.
3. Aerating your lawn
Aerating the lawn, which involves puncturing small holes into the soil, should be done prior to seeding as well. Lawn aeration will help ensure that your seeds reach the soil and that water, air, and nutrients will, in turn, reach the seeds.
4. Choosing a grass seed
You can’t just use any grass seed. Not only do you need to choose a grass seed that’s appropriate for the Mid-Atlantic region, but you’ll want something of high quality.
Here at Virginia Green, we use a special blend that contains 3% Kentucky Bluegrass and 97% Tall Fescue grass. This blend also happens to be 100% weed and crop free and will help to establish a dense and healthy lawn that’s extremely resistant to drought.
NOTE: We also sell our special blend to customers – Click here for more information.
5. Spreading the seed
If you’re just seeding specific spots in your lawn that have thinned out, spreading the seed by hand is relatively easy.
However, if you’re seeding your entire lawn, you’re going to find that it’s much more of a challenge. You’ll need to use a drop or broadcast spreader to evenly spread your seed at its specific recommended seeding rate.
6. Fertilizing your lawn
Once you’ve seeded your lawn, you’ll want to fertilize it. A good fertilizer will help to provide your seeds with the nutrients it needs to grow healthy grass.
A fertilizer that contains phosphorus to promote root growth, and nitrogen to promote top growth and greening, is a good option. Phosphorus will also help to provide your new grass with the root support it needs all the way through winter and into the spring.
7. Watering your lawn
It’s worth noting that you’re going to need to water your lawn more than usual after you’ve seeded it. This is because a newly seeded lawn needs regular moisture.
For the first four days after you seed your lawn, provide your grass with light waterings twice a day. Then water more heavily every other day for the following five days. Once those nine days are up, you can return to your regular rate of watering.
Let Virginia Green Help
Seeding your lawn is no easy task. There are a lot of steps involved, which require a lot of effort to execute properly. Because of this, you should strongly consider Virginia Green’s aeration and seeding program.
Whether your lawn is in perfect health or poor health, you’re more than likely to see positive results with our program. The following are included with our aeration and seeding service:
- We will perform a double core aeration of your lawn to ensure that sunlight, water, and air all reach your seeds to help promote the healthy growth of your new grass.
- We will use six pounds of our specially blended seed for every 1,000 square feet of your lawn to ensure that your grass is properly seeded.
- We will provide you with an additional five-pound bag of Virginia Green grass seed that you can then use to fill in any thinning or bare areas.
- We will provide you with detailed instructions on how to prepare your lawn for seeding so that you can achieve the best results.
- We will provide you with detailed instructions on how to mow and water your lawn after it’s been seeded.
Once fall comes around, you should prepare to seed your lawn in order to promote the healthy growth of your property’s grass.
Virginia Green has years of experience and expertise creating green, healthy lawns.