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It's been a crazy couple of weeks and so I'm only now getting back to focusing on the lawn renovation.
After measuring various sections and adding those square footages together, I came up with 1863 sq ft of grass area in the front yard, and 2278 sq ft in the backyard. Rounding those up to 2000 sf and 2300 for a total of 4300. It's a half acre but there are many planting beds (along all perimeters and island beds as well), two patios, two walkways, the house and the driveway -- so out of the total property footprint of 21,800 sq ft only 4300 of it is "lawn".
This seems to bring up a challenge when it comes to buying seed, because the Seedland.com mixes appear to be sold in either 25 or 50 lb bags and their overseeding rate (for their Elite mix as an example) is shown as only 1 to 2 lbs per 1000 sq. ft. So for example if I want to work on just the front yard this fall I would only need 4 lbs (or a maximum of 10 lbs if I were to overseed the entire thing.) Spending $99 for a 25 lb bag when I'd only be able to use a fraction of it and then have to discard(?) because it would no longer be fresh enough to use again in the spring seems wasteful. :-( Do the premium seeds come in smaller quantities, say, 5 or 10 lb bags?
I called up the lawn service and cancelled the remaining "treatments" that I had signed up for. They did do one treatment but I could not get them to tell me what they used. I do see that some of the crabgrass is starting to turn yellow but don't know if that's normal behavior for this time of year or whether they used an herbicide on it. At this stage would it be a waste of money and product to spray the front yard with Tenacity? Or should I simply pull out as much of the crabgrass as I can, and then just overseed? It seems to me that if the crabgrass is starting to die as a result of either cooler weather or something that the lawn service applied, it would not be taking up much of the Tenacity anyway -- and that stuff wasn't cheap, LOL.
Nik4me, you are a wealth of information! On the LI Soil Guide I seem to be either in Association 2 or just along the border where Assocation 1 meets 2. There are some really odd things in my lot's soil. When the excavation was done in March, they found a vein of very fine white sand -- literally beach-type sand -- about 6 feet below the surface. This was beneath a very thin top layer of dark brown soil, and below that a much thicker layer of very red/orange dense soil. Then this odd vein/layer of extremely fine sand above more red/orange soil. And there were deposits of bank run here and there as well as stones and rocks throughout, even in the beachy-sand areas. I guess the soil here grows great pebbles, stones and rocks LOL.
I am curious to know what advantage comes with stony/rocky soil though. Because the space taken up by a pebble/stone/rocks just means that's one less space that a plant root can occupy. :-)
Is it too late to overseed, being already the third week of September? If I use the Tenacity I assume I would need to wait - unless the pre-emergent in it only acts against seeds of the same weeds that it is formulated to kill?
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