I'm with you, DeWayne. We do have a lawn, but we don't water. If it doesn't rain, the grass goes dormant - which is is supposed to do. When it rains, it greens right up again.

Meanwhile, our neighbors watered every day - and mowed twice a week. After a good rain, our lawn looked as good as theirs!

No sprinklers or grass. It’s irresponsible to spend thousands watering grass.

There is an irrigation forum on Houzz, too. They are the ones that will help you the most.

If you want more lawn growing help, this is the right forum. We would need to know where you live and what grass type you want to grow.

Northern where?

Hi @maddielee Essex County

Shall we guess which Essex County? Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Ontario, Virginia? Did I miss any?

I pick Colorado. That one is probably the hardest to answer the original question. Is there an Essex County in Ireland?

Hi @ramona1976 and @dchall_san_antonio , I am so so sorry! After reading your questions (along with the inquiry from prior post), I looked at the header and realized that it ended somehow with “Northern” 😂. I don’t know how to edit it and not sure if I can use “@yourname to reply back…. I am in Essex County in New Jersey. Thank you for allowing me to see the mistake.

@dchall_san_antonio, I do not know what type of grass seeds were put into the lawn. It is now covered with crabgrass, clovers, and other weeds. The seeds were put in 3 months ago. Despite daily use of manual sprinklers, the grass has grown out but the grass stopped growing and are now at a very short height and in clusters, with a lot of bald spots. These photos was how it looked like in June (the best the lawn ever looked) but is now all covered with clovers and crabgrass. Advice on how to bring the grass lawn back is much appreciated.

How deeply did you water? Did you put out a dish so you know how long it takes your sprinklers to deliver an inch of water?

Under-watering after your grass seed has sprouted results in shallow roots, which cannot compete with weeds. You need to get the grass established with a healthy root system, then let it do its thing.

Our soil is heavy clay. The best thing we do for our lawn is aerate every year.

Thanks so much for the location and the pictures. Now we can get started.

So you are basically just to the northwest of NYC. You are in the area where 'cool season' grasses grow. The normal grasses for turf in the area are turf type tall fescue (TTTF), Kentucky bluegrass, and rye. If you have a lot of shade, then you might want some different varieties of fescue, but those three are the main grasses to have for a successful lawn. Here is a brief explanation of the differences among those three grass types.

Kentucky bluegrass - thrives only in full sun and will spread by itself to fill in thin areas.

TTTF - will survive in shady areas but each seed grows only one plant which does not spread.

Rye - thrives only in full sun but each seed grows one plant which does not spread.

Three months ago was almost the worst time of year to reseed a cool season lawn. The only worse times were two months ago and one month ago. Why? Because three months ago the crabgrass seed was still viable. Crabgrass is a summer annual plant with a seed that germinates faster the normal turf grass seed. When the new grass seed germinates in the summer, it does not have time to develop deep roots and will die off in the summer heat. That leaves you with a crabgrass lawn within 2 months. The good news for you is the your timing of your post aligns with the best time of year to plan for seeding in the north. The end of August and September is when the summer heat normally breaks and cooler night time temperatures start to appear. If you reseed in a week or two the soil will still be warm enough to germinate the seeds, and you will have time to observe the results before it is too late to put more seed down if you missed some spots.

Since you have a mat of crabgrass now, it would be a good idea to spray it with RoundUp (or any generic containing glyphosate) to kill the crabgrass before it goes to seed. New crabgrass seed will not germinate now, but it is best to not have any when you start. So, spray the lawn now with RU and continue to water. Water daily if that is practical for you. The idea is to germinate all the weed seeds that might still be in the lawn. Water for a week and spot spray all the new green spots you see. Then you are ready to seed. I should mention that there is a type of RoundUp which will kill new seeds, so you do not want that one.

While you are waiting for the crabgrass to die, you can think about what grass seed to buy. If you have full sun in the yard, which means no trees, buildings, or fences providing shade in the morning or afternoon, then I would go with straight Kentucky bluegrass (KBG). It is a relatively low-hassle lawn because of the ability to spread and form a carpet without reseeding every autumn. If you have shade in the yard, then it is easiest to find the triple mix of fescue, KBG, and rye. The issue with those is that they germinate at different times. Rye germinates first after 1 week of daily misting. Fescue germinates second after 2 weeks of watering. KBG germinates last after 3 weeks of watering. Some people see the first grass germinate and stop the daily watering. They will get a little bit of fescue, but they will be lucky to get any KBG to germinate. You have to stick with the germination type of watering to get a good mix.

Watering over new seed is quite different from watering any other time of year. To get good germination it is best to mist the seed three times per day (I say breakfast, lunch, and dinner times). The idea is to keep the seed moist but never soggy. The top layer of soil is where the seed is, so that's all that needs to be moistened.

I think I've covered the overview, so here are more details.

1. Spray with RoundUp, twice.
2. Rake up as much of the dead grass as you can and drop it into the compost pile.
3. Fill any low spots you find with soil taken from high spots in the area. Tamp that soil down. DO NOT ROTOTILL or dig deeply to level the soil.
4. Scatter the seed using a broadcast spreader. Handheld is fine. Follow the advice on the bag to determine how much to spread. It should tell you how many pounds per 1,000 square feet on the bag or box.
5. Roll the seed down into the soil with a rented roller. Usually these can be filled with water to make them heavier. Don't worry about this thing compacting your soil. The soil might still be moist from the daily watering you gave it while trying to sprout the weed seeds prior to the last RU application. As long as it is not soggy soil, you will be fine.
6. Then start watering, as directed above, for 3 weeks. You will not need any fertilizer for the first month. Why? Because there are no roots for the fertilizer to go into, and because grass seed carries its own nutrients good for about a month.
7. When the grass is 5 inches high, mow it back to 4 inches (or your mower's highest setting).
8. When the grass is about a month old you can fertilize it with a starter type of fertilizer for new grass. Or, if you would like to fertilize with organic fertilizer, let me know and I'll give you a different instruction for that. I've used nothing but organic fertilizer since 2002 and will likely never change back to chemical fertilizer.
9. Also when the grass is a month old you should be able to see if you have any thin spots. If you have KBG in the mix you can choose to let the KBG spread to fill the thin areas your you can over seed the thin spots to be more certain. KBG does not become a quick spreader during it's first year. As is said about a lot of plants, "The first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps, the third year it leaps."

If you choose to have a contractor do the seeding for you, at least now you know what to expect the contractor to do. Or you could hire a school kid to do it for you and you will know what to buy and what to tell them to do.

Proper watering is the most important part about lawn care. This reply is already long enough, so I'll post about watering separately.

Watering: Deep and infrequent is the mantra for watering. This is for all turf grass all over the place. Deep means 1 inch all at one time. Put some cat food or tuna cans around the yard, and time how long it takes your sprinkler(s) to fill all the cans. Memorize that time. That will be the time you water from now on. My hose, oscillator sprinkler (full sweep) and water pressure takes 8 full hours to fill the cans. Your time will likely be less. I like gentle watering. As for watering frequency, that depends on the daytime air temperature. With temps in the 90s, deep water once per week. With temps in the 80s, deep water once every 2 weeks. With temps in the 70s, deep water once every 3 weeks. With temps below 70, deep water once a month. Note that you have to keep up with quickly changing temps in the spring and fall. This deep and infrequent schedule works in Phoenix and for the most part, in Vermont, so it should work for you. The reason for deep and infrequent is to grow deeper, more drought resistant roots and to allow the soil to dry completely at the surface for several days before watering again. If it rains, reset your calendar to account for the rainfall.

Use the above as a guide, not a Bible. Try it and see if it works on your lawn in your area. You might need to modify the timing slightly, but getting the 1 inch down is very important. You don't have to worry about Phoenix weather, but I'll use that as an example. I have a friend there who waters more frequently when it gets above 100 and 110. When it gets above 100 he waters every 5 days. When it gets above 110 he waters at 3 days and then 4 days. But the important thing is to never water daily once you have a mature lawn.

As motivation to not water daily, here is a picture posted here by morpheuspa about 10 years ago.

Morpheuspa watered once a week back then while all the other neighbors watered daily. He's practically in your backyard, too living in Eastern PA. All these lawns are KBG.

@dchall_san_antonio and Ann THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for your kind response, advice, and directions on how to treat and care for the grass.

DCHALL, the soil in the lawn is not top soil. Dirt was used on the land for grading and then seeding was added l- so the ground is very hard. After the crabgrass is gone, does the dirt need to be “fluff up” (sorry this word is not the proper way to describe it) so that it can take the new seeds? I am asking because the lawn is pretty big and I do not have any electric equipment. I can buy an aerator or something similar if the soil needs to be turned for it to accept the seeds.

So glad you asked before doing anything. Too often people write in after they've already made the most costly mistake.

Your soil can be fixed almost no matter what is wrong with it. Unless it is oil soaked or otherwise poisoned, it can be fixed. I would start, and you can do this now, by spreading ordinary corn meal over the entire yard at a rate of 15 to 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. You can buy cornmeal in 50-pound bags at a feed store like Mikes, in Riverdale. I would call first to check on availability and cost. Cost should be under $10 per bag, but since the pandemic, prices are often higher than I would like them to be. Corn meal is one of the common ingredients found in organic fertilizers, so just consider it an organic fertilizer all by itself. Other common ingredients are soybean meal (SBM), alfalfa meal, cottonseed meal, corn gluten meal, and several others. In fact you might ask for pricing on any of those products and pick the cheapest one. You might find soybean meal to be much cheaper than corn meal and SBM is a much better organic fertilizer product. Corn gluten meal is also much better, so check the price on that, too.

What organic fertilizers do is feed the microbes living in the soil. It is the microbes which turn worn out soil into healthy soil. The process will take three weeks minimum to improve the soil, and it will continue to improve after the three weeks. These products do not flow through a normal fertilizer spreader, so I toss them by hand. 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet is the same as 2 pounds per 100 square feet. 100 square feet is a 10ft x 10ft area, so I have a 2-pound coffee can that I fill with the product and I stand in the middle of a 10x10 area. Then I try to scatter the product evenly over the 100 square feet I'm standing in. If you miss some you miss some. If you overdo some areas, no harm, because these grain type organic fertilizer cannot be overapplied when doing it like this. Even if you drop the coffee can and it all dumps out in one spot, you simply kick the stuff around so the grass shows through and you're golden. It's really pretty fool proof. So a 50-pound bag covers about 2,500 square feet. If you have 4,000 square feet, then get two bags and spread it all. Again, you can't mess this up.

After you get the organic stuff down, mist or water to moisten the fertilizer. With chemical fertilizers you need to dissolve it so it doesn't burn the plants, but these organics are actual food, and they don't dissolve.

Now I will address the hard soil. Getting the organic fertilizer down is sort of necessary for this next part to work. And you're going to think I'm a crackpot for suggesting this, but I didn't make it up. Spraying shampoo on the lawn is an idea I first heard about in the 90s. I blew it off as a crackpot idea for about 10 years. Then I started reading some of the heavy hitting lawn gurus talking about how shampoo-like materials could be used to soften hard soil. I continued to blow it off until people started writing in with their results. I finally decided it was going to cost me about 50 cents total to try it out. I mean you know the punch line - it worked. One application at a rate of 3 ounces of shampoo per 1,000 square feet and my lawn became soft for years (and years). That was 10 years ago, and I've done it at three houses since then. It works every time. Soil that my wife complained about being too hard to garden in became so soft it's like walking on dry beach sand. You can use any clear shampoo as long as it doesn't contain the cloudy conditioners. I like baby shampoo. Others get the apple scented stuff from Dollar Tree. It really does smell nice when applying. Again you cannot overdo it. If you have 4,000 square feet to spray, put 12 ounces or so into the bottle of a hose end sprayer. Slowly fill the bottle with water so it doesn't suds over. Screw on the top and spray it all out on the lawn as evenly as you can. Follow it up with 1/2-inch to 1-inch of water (irrigation or rain) to wash the shampoo deeper into the soil. What this does is set up the perfect environment for the beneficial microbes, fungi in particular, to thrive. The fungi send out long strands like you might find inside a bag of moldy bread. When they are moist those strands swell and push the soil particles apart. When they dry out, the strands shrink leaving open holes for air and water to go through. When the holes are full of moisture the soil becomes spongy. When the soil is dry, the soil firms up, so expect it to become hard between deep waterings. This, again, takes 3 full weeks to see the results, but once it happens, it should last for years. You cannot overdo this one either. If you accidentally spilled the shampoo on the grass, nothing bad will happen. If you worry that there might not be any research on this topic, the golf industry has paid for the research at several universities. Using a surfactant like shampoo has been shown to work as well as core aeration, but I think it works much better. In fact I did not have a good experience with core aeration, but with shampoo the effect was dramatic.

Just to kill any urges you might have, never use a rototiller to fluff up the soil. It is actually counter productive and will leave you with a very bumpy surface to mow over. The soil does not need to be tilled to accept seeds. Mother Nature never tills Her soil before or after seeding. Rototilling destroys the existing soil structure, destroys the beneficial fungi I was talking about, brings weed seeds up to the surface where they can germinate, and it buries the surface dwelling microbes to a depth where they will die off. All you have to do is use the shampoo, organic fertilizer, and water.

DCHALL, thank you for sharing all the invaluable details. With this process, should I ask the lawn company to stop mowing for a period of time?

And if I use Round Up to kill all the crabgrass and weeds, will the entire lawn be brown and “dead-looking” for a period of time? I ask because we still need soil conservation’s approval for a CO. We were given a TCO due to lack of grass and we must meet this requirement in the Fall so I am quite nervous about it. It is raining but will show you how the lawn looks like now. Thanks a million!!

Tell whomever you need to tell that you're doing a full renovation. Your lawn company might be willing to do all the work for you. If they stop mowing the cost of the reno might be just a little more than the cost you didn't pay for mowing. If you hire them to do that you can tell the soil conservation people you have hired a contractor to do the work in the quickest time. Plus the lawn company should be happy you will have real grass to mow and not weeds.

Hi @dchall_san_antonio , our home is situated in a deer and other wildlife area. Will the animals see cornmeal as lunch and attract them over?

We recently moved away from a preserve area that had axis deer, white tail, and black buck antelope roaming around freely by the hundreds. My neighbors fed deer corn to the deer every day, but when I put out corn meal, the deer ignored it. I'm just a sample of one so that's all I can tell you. I also use alfalfa pellets (i.e. rabbit food) and the wild rabbits never came to eat that. What you might seed is an influx of birds after the corn meal. They don't eat that much and they leave behind their own organic fertilizer, so I think it's an even trade. Here is a picture of the axis deer in the back yard before we put up a fence and started serious lawn rebuilding.

Ok. I don’t have much of a green thumb but will try my best. I will gather your comments and start the road to a green lawn. Thank you so much again for your time!

About the only thing not really covered already is fertilizing. Basically the first application of the year goes down at the end of May. Second one is in early September. Last one is in late November. I use the holiday dates as reminders.

You don't need to buy an aerator; your lawn service probably has one, or they are pretty cheap to rent. In our old neighborhood, several families would rent an aerator for a Saturday, which was plenty of time to do 5 or 6 lawns, and cost us each about $20.

@dchall_san_antonio I have way too much crabgrass now. It has overtaken the lawn 😭😭. I have soil inspection in 2 weeks- they need to see no risk of soil erosion so the crabgrass and weeds will be needed to fill the ground. Meaning I can’t use RU. But can I spread the seeds in the bald spots and water it? Not sure if the seeds will grow with raking the soil. There is a barren spot and so raked the soil so it is fluffed. I seeded it and watered. Since there is just soil, I am using this spot to test out before I do it on the rest of the lawn. My goal is to pass the inspection. If I kill all the weeds, I am worried the grass will not come in time, although I have until the Fall to comply if the inspection fails in September but I do not want to fail. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

A Naka, I can answer your other question from the lawnmower topic here. I didn't recognize your handle over there. First lets address the bare spots. Very light raking is good for a start, but the idea is not to disturb the greater soil structure underneath like a rototiller or a shovel would. So loosen just the top surface, pat it down firmly (walk on it), and drop some rye seed. Then walk on it again to press the seed into the loosened soil. Start watering those spots lightly just enough to keep the surface soil moist. The combination of the seeds pressed into the soil will help a lot to keep the seeds moist enough to germinate. Water 3x per day, again lightly. Rye seed should germinate in a week and help you through your inspection. Be sure to tell the inspector you are working with people to renovate the entire lawn before winter so it will be very nice for next year.

Would you mind posting a few pictures of the lawn? Many times we can be more specific about the advice with the visuals.

As for your lawnmower question, mowing is the easy part of lawn care. Getting the watering right is the hard part. My mowing advice is this: mulch mow at the mower's highest setting once a week. If you can time it so you water right before it rains, that is excellent. Never mow wet grass (because it clogs the mower) or soggy soil (because it compacts the soil). If you think you can stick to those guidelines, then get a mower and DIY. I love my EGO mower with the self driving function. If it craps out I'll get another one just like it.

dchall_san_antonio , I got the “Turf Builder Grass Seed Contractor's Mix for Sunny and Shady Areas” as recommend by HD. Should I go back to get rye seed? And very sadly, I raked the soil much l, much deeper than what you had described (due to soil looking very compact and I was concern the seeds will not stay and be washed away when it rains. Also, the lawn company doesn’t come consistently and I always worried about them mowing over the bald spots and moving the seeds with the mower. Tomorrow, I will spread more seeds on top and walk on the soil to compact it and then share some photos of how the lawn looks like. For watering, I have a manual sprinkler hooked onto the spigot for the lawn and it rotates. I move the sprinkler around every 15-20 mins to cover the lawn. Next week will be on the 90s so I will have to see how I can water midday to reach 3 times.

Lastly, how can I ensure that my messages here reaches you?

@dchall_san_antonio as mentioned on my post above to you, here are some photos of the lawn. My goal is to have grass growing on the brown spots and the entire lawn looks patchy. Some spots are not big so it will not be easy to rake the soil. If I sprinkle seeds and water those spots, will the seeds grow?

I'm so sorry. I recognize a couple of these picture. I forgot you had already posted them.

Sprinkle the seeds, and make sure the seeds get all the way down through the grass to the soil. Then walk on them to press the seeds down into the soil. Follow up with watering.

I cannot find the guaranteed analysis of grass seeds for the contractor's mix but I found one for the one that doesn't say contractor. It should be fine. It is the full triple mix, so the rye grass should germinate in a week, fescue in 2 weeks, and Kentucky bluegrass in 3 weeks. Keep watering for the full 3 weeks to get the benefit of the KBG.

@dchall_san_antonio thank you so much (simply typing this is not enough to express my gratitude!) for your input and for taking the time to response to my questions and helping to rescue my lawn. I have seeded the lot and will continue watering. Will provide an update in a few weeks (fingers crossed). Have a great weekend! 😊😊

No problem. Lawn care is a hobby as is writing about lawn care.