I'm glad that you found one of our reno threads to be encouraging to have you take the plunge! Ironically, I don't know if I'm really happy with the final end-state on any of the renovations that we've performed! This is probably partly due to ever-increasing expectations on our part, but I also sometimes wonder if some of our efforts ended up being mis-steps, rather than forward steps...aug0211 wrote:Thanks, ken-n-nancy. IIRC, your reno thread was one of the more impressionable ones that helped me decide to take the plungeI appreciate the advice!
In particular, maintaining our side lawn Bewitched monostand has been a challenge, as I had never before had to address a fungal issue. I don't think our side lawn has really yet exceeded the overall grass quality we had before we killed off the old lawn -- the side lawn definitely has a higher potential now, and has shown a few glimpses of greatness over the past year or so, but it hasn't yet lived up to that potential! We're hoping that we've now learned what we need to learn to attain that increased potential this fall...
I didn't realize until reading above that you had not yet applied glyphosate, yet you have already lowered the cut significantly. There's a potential danger here -- glyphosate works best at killing plants that are actively growing. If your scalping of the lawn has stressed the grass enough to nearly kill it, but not quite, then it may survive the glyphosate application. Yes, this is very counter-intuitive, but that's the way it is.aug0211 wrote:Unrelated note, no glypho tonightBattery needs an 8 hour charge and it's a bit too windy. Hoping for more luck tomorrow after work, otherwise, I'll be taking a day off work because I need to get going!
If you're doing "germination watering" during the fallowing period for the better part of a month, I think you'll be fine. However, in the future, or for others reading in, it's preferable to not start lowering the height-of-cut in anticipation of the first spraying of glyphosate, but to keep cutting at the normal height until the glyphosate is applied.
Others have already answered most of your other questions, but I noticed one that had slipped by, of which I have a strong opinion, living up here in "the granite state"...
You want to start removing as many of those rocks as possible, starting now. There will never be a better time to remove rocks than when all of the grass is dead. No amount of top-dressing gets rid of the rocks that you already have in your soil. There are more than a handful of threads on this site every year of people taking a picture of a patch of their lawn where the grass just doesn't do well, somebody suggests they probe with a screwdriver or dig down to see what's there, and they find that area is all gravel -- you want to remove those rocks now, *before* you seed!aug0211 wrote:I'm also a bit nervous about all of the rocks through the lawn; I'll be pulling out what I can of course. Knowing that there are more rocks than I'd like (from the original home construction, I'm sure), should I plan to get top dressing down before seed down, to help with a bit more quality dirt contact?
My suggestion would be to walk the (dead) lawn regularly, and remove any rock you can see that shows area the size of a dime or larger. Keep doing it until you aren't finding anymore rocks of that size. You will never have a better time to do this than now. Grass plants can't grow in the middle of the rock -- if you don't remove the rock, you will have a little hole in your lawn with no grass at that spot... (The only consolation is that it won't be a weed, though, either!)
