Fall is the perfect time to overseed your lawn to strengthen it and repair thin or bare spots in your lawn. Overseeding your lawn is essential to maintaining a young and vibrant lawn, and Fall is the perfect time to do it.
Overseeding Your Lawn in the Fall
Fall is our number one choice for the right time to perform lawn overseeding. Fall is the best time of year for grass seed because the cool nights and shorter days are ideal for seed germination. Your grass will be better able to retain moisture in the Fall, and the young grass will thrive in the absence of Summer heat.
While overseeding in the Spring is perfectly acceptable under most conditions, most people wait too long and end up waiting until heat waves start to set in. At this point, it will be increasingly difficult to get your seedlings to grow. Also, if you commonly apply crabgrass prevention herbicide to your yard in the Spring, it will completely stop your grass seed from germinating for up to 12 weeks.
What is Overseeding?
Overseeding is exactly what the name implies: applying extra grass seed over the top of your existing lawn. It can be targeted at thinner areas of your lawn or applied generally over the whole area.
Why You Should Overseed Your Lawn
Overseeding your lawn occasionally is essential to keeping your grass young, strong, and vibrant.
Why?
If you consistently mow your lawn, the grass won’t have the opportunity to grow seed to propagate itself and create new grass. This means your little grass plants will have to rely on rhizomes, stolons, and tillering for new growth. Unfortunately, an old lawn will eventually have trouble keeping up strong growth and competing with troublesome weeks. Old grass may also contribute to bare or thin spots in your yard.
How to Overseed
Overseeding a lawn in the Fall isn’t overly difficult. For optimum results, follow our step-by-step process below:
- Properly aerate your lawn depending on what type of turf you have
- Decide which seed to use
- Use a fertilizer spreader to evenly spread new seed over your lawn
- Follow up with the application of a Fall fertilizer on the same day
- Water at least once a day until the new grass has begun to grow
The new grass may take up to two weeks or more to germinate. You may continue mowing your lawn as normal.
What Type of Seed to Use When Overseeding
When choosing the right type of seed for your lawn, you should take into consideration your climate. If your area can experience drought or intensely hot summers, you can find drought-resistant grasses that are available in both warm and cool-season varieties.
If you live in the north, you will probably want to choose a cool-season grass variety for your lawn. If you live in the humid south, you will probably want a warm-season variety of grass. However, many people live in a type of “transition zone” between these zones, where it may be a little more complicated when choosing the right type of grass.
If you have any questions about choosing the right grass seed or if you want help with any of your Fall lawn activities, give our experts a call today!
