What if I have an old Hybrid or Common Bermudagrass lawn?

   If you are planning to have us re-plant an old lawn, you have to make a decision. Do you just want us to plant the new lawn over whatever you had before? Or do you want the new lawn to completely replace the old lawn?

   Of course the first option is a lot easier. But you'll have to accept that, although the new lawn might be prettier than what you had before, everything you had before will still be part of it. If you have common bermuda, that means seed heads will continue to pop up between mowings to aggrivate your allergies and make you sneeze. If you have weeds, they'll still be part of the lawn.

   If you have Tif or Santa-ana, whatever is left of the extremely dense old lawn will try to take over the new lawn. And if you don't continue to mow it very close with a "tif mower" it will build a thick, heavy thatch quickly. On top of that, Santa-ana and Tif don't look like Blu-muda. For those reasons, we don't recommend hydroSeeding over an old Tif or Santa-ana lawn without killing the old lawn first.

   If you want us to plant over your old lawn, all you need to do is make sure your sprinklers cover evenly, and the materials we apply will have good soil contact. Good soil contact may just mean scalping it down as close to the soil as you can, or it might mean renting a machine or hiring someone to de-thatch it (like you'd do if you wanted to overseed in the Fall).

   Unless the mulch has good contact with the soil, the old grass could lift it up as it grows. If we try to shoot over a layer of dead grass (thatch), the new grass might not survive long enough (after it germinates) to send new roots all the way down to the soil.

   We get a lot of inquires from people whose old Tif lawns have been damaged by Pearl Scale. The improved grasses we use are resistant to Pearl Scale. In fact we've never heard of them getting it. But truth is, we don't know what would happen if we plant over soil that is already infested with Pearl Scale.

   If you want to kill the old grass before we plant the new lawn, preparation is more difficult and will take at least 2-1/2 weeks. That's because the bermuda family of grasses can become so deep rooted that it's impossible to completely kill them. We've seen common bermuda roots go 6' deep in swimming pool excavations.

   And trying to kill an old bermuda lawn in the Winter when it's dormant is a lost cause. That's because the chemicals that work best to kill the old grass migrate to the roots, then kill the plant from the roots up. If the grass is asleep, it won't draw the chemical into the roots.

   If you were thinking about roto-tilling as a way to get rid of an old common bermuda lawn - it's a bad idea. Roto-tilling makes common bermuda spread faster. Even if you do a very good job of raking out the pieces. That's because breaking apart the bermudagrass nodes in the stolons and rhisomes (runners and roots) into smaller pieces buried in the top few inches of soil stimulates new growth. Instead of making it easier to get rid of an old bermudagrass lawn, rototilling is one of the most effective ways we know of to re-plant it.

   The best way to kill an old lawn is with repeated applications of Roundup. It takes about two weeks for Roundup to kill a lawn because of the way it works. Instead of just killing the top growth, it gets deep into the plant and kills the roots. Then the top dies.

   Roundup works best on healthy, actively growing plants. Therefore, we recommend fertilizing and watering for a few days (or even a week) before you apply Roundup on an old lawn. For a quick green up use sulphate of ammonia. In cool weather you can use as much as one pound of actual nitrogen per 1,000 s/f. If it's over 100 degrees, only use a half pound. (If the numbers on the bag are 24-0-0, it will take four pounds of fertilizer to get one pound of actual nitrogen.)

   After you apply the fertilizer, run your sprinklers long enough to dampen the soil at 9 AM, 11, 1 and 3 PM, but don't make puddles. After a few days to a week, stop watering for one day and apply Roundup. Use enough so you can see a milky residue on the leaves. Start watering again the next day.

   About a week after you spray, stop watering for a day, mow it close and de-thatch or thin it out with a stiff rake. Do whatever you have to do to get us the soil contact we need.

   Then resume watering for another week. If everything is dead at the end of the second week it's OK to Hydroseed. If some of it is still green, let it dry out for a day and give it a repeat application of Roundup. Roundup bio-degrades so quickly that we can hydroseed two days after it's used.

   Most often, one application of Roundup will only stunt the bermuda family of grasses. . If you really want to kill it, you might have to use several applications two weeks apart.

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Nature's Way HydroSeeding
Post Office Box 1114
Queen Creek, AZ 85242
www.WhySod.com
(480) 540-9850
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