Beginner Gardening: First time grass grower - from seed...help!, 0 by corundogs

corundogs wrote:
OK, I moved into a new place about 3 months ago...site unseen. Well, I saw a picture...LOL!!

It has a HUGE backyard...fabulous for my 4 dogs! However, it is an all dirt backyard, and access to the backyard is through a door that opens from my living room. So when my kids go outside (my kids are dogs to many!), they step down from the middle of my living room onto a dirt surface. And just outside that door is the low part of the yard...which means that all water drains there and it's the "mushiest" part of the yard.

It's been really dry here in Austin but we had one afternoon of a good rain about 2 weeks after I moved in and I cannot imagine living like that! I would have half of the dirt in my backyard inside my house each and every single time it rains!

But of course, having just moved in at this time of year, it's not "optimal grass growing season".

But I was told I could put Rye seed down and it would in fact grow!

AND GROW IT HAS!!!

I put the seed out two weeks ago TODAY and it is truly phenomenal how thick and long it is...it literally feels like carpet!

I made a couple of mistakes - I figured it wouldn't come up, and if it did it wouldn't take very well cause the soil is very rocky. So I put out a TON of seed - boy was I wrong! HA! And I also didn't realize how soon you are supposed to mow it so I let it get waaaay too long before asking my neighbor to do it for me.

So what happened was that it mostly got trampled down flat and when he mowed it, it didn't cut anything. There are some tufts here and there that are sticking up...it's like someone got a REALLLLLLLLLLY BAD haircut! HA! But the root system is so thin and the grass is so thin that if I raked it, it came right out of the ground. So I just had him go over it from each direction - up, down and both sides - to get what he could.

This is how it looks today - he cut it yesterday. I then deep watered it yesterday afternoon to hopefully get the roots to grow deeper.

But is there ANYTHING ELSE I can do? I don't think it's going to do very well this way and it certainly doesn't look very good but of course it has done EXACTLY what I needed it to do...cover up the dirt so that when it rains, it doesn't turn to mud.

Do I just need to leave it how it is for the winter and it's just going to look like this until Spring? I will then seed over this - or I may have to pull it up, I don't know. Can you help me with that as well?



This message was edited Nov 19, 2008 5:36 PM