Overseeding Lawn
Overseeding lawn areas is too often overlooked in American lawn care. Most homeowners assume that a dose of fertilizer will bring a lawn back, and often this is simply not the case. Grass can get tired, and you need to revitalize it every three or four years. Overseeding lawn areas is not difficult to do, and the benefits will outweigh the time and expense involved. After you overseed, your lawn should look as dense as new sod that is ready to be laid.
Overseeding is an important task in lawn care, but few homeowners bother to do it. You may wonder, if you fertilize, why you need to look into overseeding lawn areas, too. The reason is that grass dies, just like any other plants, and they produce less new grass for your lawn. Less grass means more places for weeds to spring up.
When you overseed, you are compensating for the way that turf naturally slows down its reproductive processes over the years. There are two major benefits of overseeding lawn areas every three or four years. The first is that you are insuring that your lawn stays densely growing, or you are making it thick again if it has thinned. Thick grass means less weeds, and less work for you.
The other benefit of overseeding lawn areas is resistance to disease. The new type of grass that you sow now will be better able to ward off disease than the type of grass in your lawn now.
You want your lawn to look and feel as dense as new sod of good quality. If you test a piece of sod, you will note how difficult it is to spread the grass blades and see soil. If your lawn is like that too, then you likely don't need to overseed. But if you can readily see soil when you spread your grass blades apart, you need to think about overseeding lawn areas around your home.
The best time to overseed is in early September. Overseeding is a lot of work, so you may only want to work on five or six thousand square feet at any one time. This is about an eighth of an acre. So if you have an average quarter-acre lawn, you can do it in two stages, to make less work for yourself each time.
Mow your area to be overseeded with the mower on the lowest setting. Bag the clippings if you have a bag. Then rake the area thoroughly with a grass rake, until you leave only stubble and soil that is bare and ready to receive your new seeds. It is imperative when you are overseeding lawn areas that you prep the ground, or the seeds will just sit on top of thatch or grass clippings and then it's bird food.
Use lots of seed when you overseed; a lot of homeowners fail to water their new seed as much as it should be, and heavily seeded areas will be more likely to grow even if you forget a few waterings.
After your new seedlings sprout, they can be mowed when they reach three inches in height. Then sit back and enjoy your “new” lawn.