Proper Lawn Care (?)

This spring I became determined to improve the backyard of our home. Approximately 100’ x 50’, the rear yard is on the north side of the house and is shaded by several large oak trees and surrounded by maples and locusts. In the middle is a specimen Japanese red maple that turns a glorious shade of red in the fall. Because I used a mulching mower much of the oak flowers and not a few leaves got mulched and returned to the soil. This lowered the pH of the soil to around 5.5—which is not god for grass but just dandy for the moss that loved the shade. I don’t think we have had a real lawn in the backyard since my son was around 10 (he just turned 22).

Any way, right after Easter I formulated and implemented my plan of attack. First, I raked up all of the moss. Some of the moss was one-half to three-quarters of an inch thick and extremely plush. Then I screened the moss to get any topsoil back. I purchased lime—lots of lime—and spread it on the soil until it looked like it had just snowed. Then I spread some fertilizer over the lime, rented a tiller and turned all of this into the top four inches of soil. Next I spread some Scott’s shade loving grass seed and used a rented roller to tamp it into the soil. Then I began a regimen of watering. Three times a day I would water the lawn to ensure it would not dry out. And I waited. And watered.

Ten days later the grass began to grow. It grew slowly at first but then it began to fill in. When it was about three inches tall, I cut it for the first time. About a week later I cut it again. And then On May 13th, a Friday, I cut it for the third time. At this point some broad leaf weeds were also making their presence noticeable, but I had read that after the third cutting it was okay to spread some weed-and-feed on the new grass. So I purchased and applied Scott’s Step Two, along with another 150 pounds of lime. Temperatures soared to over 90 in blistering sunshine on the 14th and 15th of May but I let the chemicals sit on the lawn without watering so they could better work their magic on the weeds. The night of the 15th, however, I relented and watered the lawn heavily.

Then I went away for two weeks leaving the watering chores to my wife who did follow the program as prescribed. She therefore escapes blame in what followed.

Wha' Happened?


When I returned on May 31, vast swatches of my beautiful new lawn were wilted and dead. I almost wept. Then I looked more closely and could see that those areas where the weed-and-feed had not been applied were still growing well. (I had applied the lime first and then the w&f making full coverage difficult to determine—that whole white-on-white thing.) Did I apply the w&f too soon? My neighbor thinks so. Did I overlap the w&f in spots to provide too great a dose? The stripes tell the story of missed areas but not necessarily overexposed ones. Did the combination of lime and w&f create too strong a chemical scene? Possibly. Did the searing heat without water do the damage? The still growing strips of grass suggest heat alone may not have been the killing factor but add the chemicals and the young roots may have been killed. Was the application of the chemicals on Friday the 13th to blame? Mmmm?

I’ll be back to reseed the lawn during the end of July when I can be sure to keep the watering on schedule and perhaps I will yet have a real lawn again. And this time I will let it grow a whole lot longer before I apply any weed killer—maybe until next April!