It’s hard to believe, but cold weather and dormant bermuda lawns are right around the corner. The lawn will lose its color and turn a light tan color as the frost kicks in. Is that good or bad?
The real question is whether or not to overseed the lawn to mask this brown look. Obviously if you hate the look of a dormant lawn you would lean towards overseeding to have a green lawn year-round, but here are a few reasons not to overseed. It’s nice to have a few months off from mowing. Secondly, bermuda will not have to compete next spring and early summer with an aggressive ryegrass lawn for space. Bermuda will green up faster and fill in quicker without ryegrass. The use of pre-emergents will help reduce invasion of winter annual weeds to help keep a uniformly clean, brown lawn and need to go down September-October.
Overseeding your lawn in early October can give you a beautiful, green lawn this winter. It is especially a smart option when facing a mixed stand lawn or patch stand of grasses. This will help hide and even the uniformity of the lawn. As the trees grow larger and produce more shade, the bermuda lawns start thinning out and the ryegrass can provide some much needed cover in those areas. On the negative side, overseeding results in mowing the lawn for 3-4 months a year that could have been avoided had you not seeded. Once you start the overseeding process it is difficult to stop in future years as portions of the ryegrass will remain from the previous season through seed or just persistence. The non-overseeded year will often be a mostly brown lawn with numerous clumps of rye. Also, as stated above, the bermuda stand itself may be thinned somewhat due to the persistent and aggressive nature of ryegrass.
If the scales tip in favor of overseeding your lawn, you must then choose the right seed. Without going into all the various improved varieties and their features I will sum it all up by saying DO NOT OVERSEED WITH ANNUAL RYEGRASS. It is a low quality grass used in erosion control and pastures. It grows quickly, its coarse textured, yellow-green in color, and prone to winter diseases. Perennial ryegrass vastly excels annual rye in all categories. Be sure to buy a clean, high quality seed without weedy grass contaminants. Please check the seed bag tags.
As for me, I overseed my common bermuda front lawn for the neighbors, but I also love that clean, dormant hybrid bermuda in the back that gives me a break for 4 months.
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I wanted to find out on who's the best in Atlanta lawn overseeding. I think my lawn badly needs it. I wanted it to be green and with no patches.
ReplyDeleteThere is a Weed Man office in your area. Give them a call and they can help you out. http://roswell.weedmanusa.com/
ReplyDeleteThat is really helpful and very informational. Thanks for all the great info. I was actually looking for a lawn maintenance place in Provo ut. Where is it that I can find one that can really help me out? I am hoping to have my lawn being taken care of since I cannot do it by myself.
ReplyDeleteI really wanted my yard to be taken care of. I wanted to know more about the yard overseeding Georgia and maybe it can do something great in my place.
ReplyDeleteWe have had a tall fescue lawn the past couple years. Between the heat of summer and the army of rabbits that scalp the grass in the fall it seems impossible to keep it healthy. I would love a lawn that tolerates heat, short mowing and that goes dormant in the winter. Would overseeding the fescue with Bermuda in the summer eventually result in the kind of lawn I'm looking for? It doesn't have to be perfect, just healthy.
ReplyDeleteI didn't even know overseeding was a thing. So should there be a question about whether the topsoil in Vancouver can take it, or is the average lawn pretty receptive to this kind of thing?
ReplyDeleteMy lawn is pretty dead now and I would like to get it in better shape. I think that seeding it would probably be a good Idea to help it get better. It is interesting that you can over seed because I didn't even know that was possible. http://www.superiorlawn.com/maintenance.htm
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