Bermuda Grass in North Texas
I switched to a new lawn care provider this year and completely forgot to cancel my TruGreen subscription. 24 hours after my new landscapers applied pre/post-emergent, TruGreen showed up and applied even more weed killers (Barricade, Rhomene, Clash) and did a fertilizer treatment.
I wasn’t home, otherwise I would have stopped it, and didn’t realize the double application until a few days later when I promptly ran the sprinklers awhile to try to push as much down as possible.
It’s now been 5 weeks later and the lawn looks mostly burnt (even more brown than when it was dormant).
Is there hope it will pull through? Is there anything that can be done or should I see what happens and start over in the fall after the herbicides are gone?
by pch736m
4 Comments
Yeah, don’t stress. It’ll be obvious when it’s not coming back. Bermuda is hard to kill. Just keep your eye on it. That much pre could be just delaying green up. I’ve seen a lot of double sprayed lawns and never seen a Bermuda yard die from it
Still early in the season. May will give you a better idea.
Well I don’t know if it will make you feel any better but if you had cancelled TruGreen they probably would have shown up anyway. That’s if you ever managed to get to the point of successfully cancelling. They will keep you on the phone forever trying to convince you not to.
Ouch, that sounds rough, but there is hope. Bermuda grass is very resilient, especially in North Texas, and it may just be showing stress from the chemical overload rather than being dead. At this point, the best approach is to stop any further treatments and water deeply and regularly to help the grass recover. Avoid mowing too short and give it some time. New green shoots can take a few weeks to reappear once the stress passes.
You can lightly rake any dead tips to improve appearance, but do not overseed or fertilize aggressively right now because the residual herbicide could still affect new growth. If by late summer or early fall it has not recovered, you can reassess for reseeding or sod. Most likely, patience, watering, and letting Bermuda do its thing will bring it back.