This is the story of how our beautiful backyard lawn of lush grass painfully dwindled into patches of dirt. We had originally stopped lawn care services with Emerald Lawns in the backyard to be abundantly cautious of our free-ranging chickens. Couple that with severe drought and a broken irrigation system and grass-catastrophe ensued.
In case you missed it, here’s the original lush-to-ruins lawn story…
..and here is the 3 month follow up in July…
You’re reading the 6-month update and the final results to the story.
Here is our 6 Month Lawn Care Update
On day one we had a beautiful display of vibrant green covering every square foot of our backyard landscape:
I posted a random photo that captured a part of our lawn the first month we moved into our house. Mary, a owner of Emerald Lawns and personal friend commented on it.
Then puppy + drought + broken irrigation = lawn destruction of biblical proportions (almost).
Since the original devastation we did a few things to attempt to re-gain our backyard’s lawn potential:
March 2023 – Emerald fixed our irrigation system.
April 2023 – I applied Bermuda grass seed across the lawn.
April 2023 – I added 27 bags of 40lb topdressing.
May 2023 – With excitement and expectancy we saw… nothing happen for a month.
June 2023 – The grass seeds sprouted finally! But the lawn was a bit patchy:
After giving some time and watering, the new grass finally burst through with life. There is still some nutsedge sprinkled throughout the lawn and it’s mixed with patches of St Augustine that had the resilience to withstand the previous year of grass torment:
It’s not perfect but it’s a significant improvement! And my family is delighted with the results.
After following some advice from the Emerald Pros and mowing regularly to encourage the new grass to spread out wide and develop higher density we saw some great improvements!
October 2023 – I hope you’ve enjoyed the journey as much as we have. And if you’re wanting to have a greener, fuller, more lush lawn I hope these posts help along with hiring the lawn experts here at Emerald!
Tips I Received from the Emerald Lawns Pros:
- If you have areas that are frequently visited like the area around the picnic table, try to rotate locations to relieve stress and give additional time for recovery and strengthening of the grass.
- From an expectation standpoint, next season with good turf now across the lawn, you should see some resurgence of the St Augustine from the established areas moving into the Bermuda grass.
- Put some pre-emergent down to avoid weed breakthrough in areas that did not get as much recovery over the winter. There is a lot of Bermuda present and it won’t fight off the weeds as well as the St Augustine did.
