Hi everyone,
Wondering if I can get some advice on why my grass is browning and how I can fix it . For context I dethached and seeded my lawn in April . The first picture is how my grass currently looks . The second picture is a close up of a brown spot The third picture is after I dethached and seeded and when my grass was the greenest , the fourth pic is before . I live in New Jersey and I water about 3x a week for 15 min. Any advice would be helpful as I don’t want to put my and my wife’s hard work to waste. Thanks !
by j_pham92
25 Comments
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Sun….
Not enough water and getting cooked by the sun
I would water it for longer. Try 20-25 minutes 3 times a week in the morning right before the sun comes up. Grass needs at least an inch a week in the summer to be happy. Also did you use any fertilizer this spring to encourage growth?
that’s the fungus among us! too much water without drainage will cause that to spread
Did you apply any fertilizer and were you certain it was applied at the correct rate? Yikes! Sorry.
you removed the protective layer of your grass, I wouldn’t dethach anymore. 15 minutes also is probably too short for this heatwave. Probably need to aerate and overseed in the fall to fix this.
You should’ve waited until fall to dethatch and overseed. To salvage this, mow at a higher level until Sept.
Fungus (brown spot possibly based on the ring) and heat stress. Apply a fungicide (everywhere) and water deeply a few times (with a few days in between). Don’t water light or every day or you’ll make the problem worse. Watering in the early AM helps allow water to be absorbed and not give it time to contribute to fungus.
The fact that the first two comments are “too much sun; water more” and “fungus; water less” perfectly encapsulate the dangers of this sub
Spread organic fertilizer on top
It could be poa annua dying in the heat.
I have had similar issues, to a lesser extent. How compacted is your soil? I bet a manual aeration along with a chemical one can help with water absorbtion and retention. Is water shedding from your soil? Additionally I too have shallow roots when it cools I plan on changing watering schedule to deeper. Now high, the highest the mower can go it helps a lot.
In the fall. Cut lawn as short as possible.
Get topsoil and masonry sand
Mix together and spread over your entire lawn , then go over it with a lawn leveling rake. Leveling your lawn and making it smooth.
Then airaite the entire lawn.
Put down your seed .
Then mix peat moss and more seed
And use a roller spreader to apply
Water 2 times a day. Next spring in March start using Scott’s 4 step.
Your lawn will look amazing in May !
Need closeups of the blade for us to tell
cool season grass being asked to deal with anything other than a porcelain-perfect environment:
It’s that nuclear fusion bomb in the sky that is giving you cancer and killing your dehydrated lawn.
Something is eating it from the roots. My guess is chinch bugs. If it was a watering issue, your grass would be dying all together, not in patches. Get some granules and get rid of the pests
Maybe grubs
You’re also mowing way too low. You have a cool season grass so you need to mow it as tall as possible.
Welcome to
Summer
Summer
That’s another way, yeah. It’s just different math. Straight sided cans are usually already in the recycling, so you don’t need to go buy a meter.
The point, here, is that we can’t know if it’s under or over watered without seeing the grass blades and without knowing how much water is going down. 15 minutes at 2gpm is MUCH different from 15 minutes at 10gpm.
Focus on less frequent deep watering than more shallow watering