Over Winter Grass Seeding

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. You know, there's a lot of things to do around the warm season in your yardscape, and perhaps patching your lawn was one of the things that you didn't get to. Well, as you can see here, it's pretty wintry out here. It's late November, and can you plant grass seed now? Well, the answer is yes. It's called dormant seeding, and let me show you how I do it, and then we'll fast forward this to the spring to see how it turned out, to see if the proof is in the pudding, so to speak. So, what you see here is soil mix that I've bought from the local home improvement store, and I've mixed grass seed, a general sun and shade mix, fescues and rye and so forth, and I've mixed it into this so that you get a very thorough mixture with lots of grass seed, but a lot of organic material around it. Now, the reason for this is to give the grass seed something to be hidden in and to have contact to, so when the warm weather returns and the seed germinates, the roots have something to grasp into right away and start taking in nourishment and moisture. Well, let's show you how we apply this. As you can see, it's late fall, and winter is about ready to set in. The days are getting short, and our lawn did not do as well as we like last year. We had an irrigation problem and found that our well was having issues, and therefore water was not getting where it needed to. Well, a lot of damage was done, and so we need to overseed and reseed in some areas. Some of the lawn has already been treated, but this is the remaining amount. As you can see, there's a high amount of organic material we've applied, and we have rototilled this in using a little portable tiller, a mantis. So now I've gone ahead and raked in the organic materials that was tilled up a few minutes ago just to level it a little bit, and now we're going to go ahead and apply our seed and organic material mix. Well, there you go. You can see that the seed, along with all the organic material to help it, has been put in. Now what I'll do is very quickly come across this with a rake, just to level it again, and then here's one of the big advantage of dormant seeding. The snow, which is forecasted to hit in the next 12 hours here, will lay down on top of this and then make it all settle in and germinate and get good seed to soil contact. Well, let's take a look here. We'll fast forward to next spring. What's it look like? Well, here it is. Time lapse. Several months have rolled forward. It is early spring here. It's the first part of May, and we have a little bit of a cool rain coming in, but as you can see, the overwintered seed has definitely germinated and filled in the area that you saw just a moment ago that I had put all the organic material in and then pressed the seed in. Well, it's really taken off, but you'll also notice that there's a lot of weeds that come up along with the seeds that we pressed in, and that's not because the seeds themselves had a lot of weed content. It's just that weed seed is so prevalent in the landscape that they are opportunists. As soon as there's an open spot in the lawn, those weeds are going to sprout. Well, there's a couple ways you'll need to handle that. One, you can either go through and manually cultivate them, take them out with weeding them and pulling them by hand, or you can use a chemical like a weed and feed. We actually take both approaches, and what'll happen is after the weeds die off and the lawn fills in, then you'll have a lot less problems with weeds. The best deterrent for weeds in your lawn is a healthy lawn because the weeds can't get started. So here's a great thing to know, that if this year you get a little too busy and you need to do some patching of your lawn, but summer gets by you, you can certainly use this method of dormant seeding. It works quite well. Hey, if you found this to be helpful, why don't you like the video? And better yet, won't you subscribe to our channel? That'll help us to keep producing videos that'll help you around the shop, the kitchen, the yard, and as well as great product reviews. Hey, thanks for watching. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com.