Fall Lawn Care How to Aerate Dethatch Overseed Your Lawn the Easy Way Sun Joe Dethatcher

Alright so I guess we could call this part three of my 2021 lawn care set of videos here. The first one we de-thatched with the Sun Joe de-thatcher, got some great results. The next one we put on some baby shampoo, we've washed the yard, and I think it worked. But then I think this is going to be the one that really does the trick, and I think this is where we're going to see all of our results. And so today we're going to go ahead and core aerate with this aerator that I got from a local rental place. Alright the night before the lawn is actually looking pretty good. It looks like we're making a bunch of progress and getting rid of some of those dead spots. That is until we start the first step of the process. And it is cutting the lawn a whole lot shorter than I normally do. Normally I mow this about three and a half inches. I'm lowering it down about an inch to two and a half inches and I'm using the bagger to get rid of all of those clippings. We mow it low so that it's a little bit easier to aerate. Then the only other thing that I'm going to do is water the lawn for about a half hour just to try to soften things up so those tines can get down in the ground a little bit easier tomorrow. Now it's the next morning and I've just gotten back from the rental place and this is the machine that I chose to rent. This is a Ryan 26 inch aerator so it'll make 26 inch wide passes which is kind of nice. A little bit larger than my lawnmower. And it's a fairly easy machine to operate. It has two handles. The first handle is the drive that engages the drive and moves it forward. And then there's a second handle lower down which actually raises up a set of wheels and allows the tines to come in contact with the ground. When we look at the back of the machine you can actually see the tines themselves. There's a few rows of them and they rotate independently of each other so you can make slight turns but you will end up having to pick the machine up at either side. The other thing that's nice about this machine is it has removable weights. You can remove them to get them in and out of a vehicle or you can add water to the front roller to add even more weight if you need to. And that weight helps push down on the machine and helps get those tines down into the ground. Alright so you can see on the first pass here it takes me a second to get used to it. It kind of jumps out on me and gets going. But really once you get used to these machines they're not that difficult to run. It pretty much pulls itself along. I just push down a little bit on the handle to get the roller to sit up off the ground so we can get the full amount of weight on the tines and then you have to pick it up and rotate it to bring it back up the other way. These things move pretty quick. You can throttle them down to go a little bit slower so that you're not running after it. But you can cover a lot of ground pretty quick on this thing. With it fully weighted down, like I kind of alluded to earlier, this thing was pushing down in the ground about two and a half inches or so is the is the plug depth that we were getting which is exactly what I wanted to see. And here's the hardest part, picking it up and rotating it around. Just take your time. One thing that you really do want to look out for is kind of obstructions in your yard. If you have sprinkler heads or drain cleanouts like I have here you want to make sure that you look out for those. Alright so after the first pass you can see a distinct pattern starting to show up in the lawn. You can see a nice pattern of holes going across the yard. You can see those plugs have kind of nicely ejected out of the machine and then just are laying on top of the yard. So I like this so much that I figured some are good and more are better. So we went over again and I went in a different direction and I offset it from the previous pass. You wouldn't necessarily need to go in a different direction, just offsetting it from your previous pass so the holes aren't hitting in the same exact spot. So you can see we have twice as many holes now and twice as many plugs which is a good thing. The machine was already paid for and I still had it so I figured why not go over it for a third time. So the third pass I went over it again. I went in the same direction as the previous pass but I did make sure that I was offset just a little bit of the other ones. I'll be honest once you get going the tines aren't going to line up with the other holes perfectly and you're just going to make more holes. Then while I was taking the machine back I let the plugs lay on the yard and dry for about an hour or two and then I came back and I kind of had a decision to make whether I was going to pick up the plugs or leave them on the yard and depending on who you ask they'll give you a range of different answers. I decided I wanted to pick them up and so I did a little bit of an experiment with the Sun Joe dethatcher that I bought. I wanted to see if this thing would actually pick them up for me instead of raking them by hand. This did work, it just took a while. So with the dethatcher I set it to the highest setting and I had the rake unit attached on the bottom of it and it did a really good job. It pretty much picked up about 90% of the plugs and some of the plugs it kind of beat up a little bit and turned them into kind of dirt or dust that created this fine layer over the top of the grass which was actually kind of nice later. The only downside to this is that it took forever. This little basket that it has on the back of it is almost useless. I could make it up and back before I had to empty it again but overall the results were so good that I would probably do it again. Then the last step of the process is to overseed and I'm using a mix of grass that's really worked out well for me in Ohio. It's just called an Ohio state mix that's a combination of perennial ryegrass and Kentucky bluegrass. I add a little extra Kentucky bluegrass seed to it just for my own liking but then I spread that over the surface of the lawn and they give you rates on the back of the bags for overseeding versus seeding new lawns. So I just spread that over the lawn with a broadcast spreader and then as soon as that was on the lawn I got out the sprinkler again and watered the lawn for about a half hour or so. Then I came back every night and every morning and ran the sprinkler for about 20 minutes each just to make sure that the lawn was getting enough water. All right so it's three days later now and it's fair to say that my lawn is stressed out. Because I make YouTube videos now I ended up doing this project probably sooner than I really wanted it wanted to only because I want the video by the time I get it edited and posted online I want it to be on there by the time that you guys are doing projects or before you're doing those projects. So I did mine to mid to late August when it was still kind of hot out. When I did the project it was 80 degrees and then these next two three days here have been like 90 and 88. Not ideal for the type of grass that I'm trying to grow. So it's it's stressed out but I've been watering it every single night. I plan to continue watering it it looks like we're going to get some rain in the near future. The only other thing that I really need to do is to put on the starter fertilizer. So that's what I'm going to do tonight put on the starter fertilizer and then water it and I think we're going to be good to go. I did make a mistake when I was buying the grass seed that it already had fertilizer a little bit of fertilizer in it. I like to kind of wait to put on the starter fertilizer like three four days after I reseed when I core aerate that way that the rest of the lawn doesn't kind of take off and it gives the the grass seed a little bit of time to hopefully start germinating before we put fertilizer on it. I could be wrong but that's kind of my thought process there. So far I've been able to check the lawn with my soil probe. I bought that in that last project and that thing's really paid off. You can see how the water and moisture is getting pretty far down into the soil. I can see that the seeds have actually washed down into the holes from the aerator so I think we're going to start to see some germination here pretty quick. The Sun Joe dethatcher didn't fill in all the holes. It was kind of cool how it pulled those plugs up and it broke some of them up so it was kind of like a fine dust over the yard while also pulling most of the plugs up and then it kind of power raked dethatched whatever you want to call it at the same time and pulled up a lot of that grass so it was a cool combination of things. I'll be honest with you using that aerator is a little bit more difficult than I remember. I'm used to the ones at the golf course that are kind of self-propelled and they plunge down in the ground rather than using the the circular method. The hardest part of this project is picking that aerator up and turning it between every pass but overall I think it's something that you can do pretty quick. I ended up doing my yard in the neighbor's yard. I went over mine three times and I went over the neighbor's once so we did quite a bit of area there and I had the thing rented for four hours brought it back with plenty of time to spare so I think this is going to be a great project. I hope you enjoyed the project. If you liked it please give it a like. If you want to see how this turns out please subscribe because really I'm not going to be able to give you another update with the lawn kind of like this probably until next spring. You know what I can do something later in the fall maybe to see how it comes out but if you want to see an update maybe consider subscribing but other than that I'll see you guys in another video.