Prep Your Lawn For Grass Seed, step by step

It is like I have my own personal Alseed. Yes, that is a True Blood reference. I totally called John “Alseed” the whole time that he seeded our freshly leveled and ready-for-grass backyard. Why? Because I am corny like that. He rolled his eyes but secretly I think he liked it. What dude is going to complain about being likened to this guy? Although I tend to like my men tall, dork, and handsome. Which is why John = even better than Alcide for me (yes that is the correct way to spell his name, I simply went with Alseed for the pun). But back to the freshly cleared backyard (you can read about all the phases that led to the “now” in the pic below here, here, and here).

We get plenty of questions about how we seed/what we use/how we spread it, so here we go. First we raked the whole area we were seeding to fluff up the soil, get rid of rampant acorns, etc.

Then we brought in some top soil in a few not-as-level-as-we’d-like areas where we had dug things out (like liriope, weeds, etc)…

Then Alseed did his thang. Look at that carefree leg-in-the-air technique.

John simply rolled around the yard, broadcasting the seed with our spreader (from Home Depot a few years back). We like to use Scott’s Tall Fescue Mix, which is a blend that is formulated to work truly well in our area, especially in shaded plenty like ours (it is the same thing we used to seed our first house‘s front and backyard after clearing & readying them).

Not only did we seed the areas where we dug, we simply went over the whole backyard to fill in any bare spots or patchy spots where grass was already growing, but might have been thinned out. This is called overseeding. In an ideal world, overseeding each fall can lead to a especially excellent lush yard without pumping it with tons of chemicals since keeping a yard lush helps to crowd out any weeds that might want to grow (a thinned out yard is a lot more susceptible to them popping up everywhere).

Oh and we swept the seed that got sprayed on the brick paths into the dirt so we would not have a whole bunch of grass springing up along the bricks. So that is a pointer if your broadcaster gets seeds all over an area that you do not want to get grassy, like a walkway. Simply sweep those babies away (optional: when done, dust your shoulders off a la Jay-Z).

Only about four days later (with swift 15 minute watering sessions each evening, simply to give those little seeds a chance to sprout) we saw this:

Houston, we have liftoff! It typically takes us about a week to notice any green stuff sprouting up, but thanks to some near ideal grass-growing weather (not too cold at night, and not too hot during the day – with a fair amount of rain) we ended up with this surprisingly lush result simply a little over a week later:

The funny thing is that I did not do a thing to the after pics in photoshop after sizing them down and slapping a “now” on them (did not green up the grass or up the saturation). That is simply the remarkable neon-green power of fresh baby grass. Hubba hubba. Although the day I snapped the afters also happened to be after some strong rain and it was a less blindingly sunny than the day of the before shots, so that might explain why other bushes and trees in fact seem greener and less blown out than they do in those before shots.

Every day Clara and I look out the living room window at the backyard and I tell her that when the grass grows in she and Burger will have an excellent place to play. She loves peering out the window to check her “play grass.” See that big square window on the left of the pics below? That is our watching-the-grass-grow window.

Here is the view back at the house from the end of that path. Oh and check out the vine on the tree that we cut here. See how it is dropping leaves/thinning out? Woot!

One more b & a. Simply because I cannot assist myself. Man grass never looks as green as fresh new baby grass, does it? Me-ow.

So there it is, four phases of backyard upgrades that brought in up to one fairly remarkable difference. We will reseed again in the spring, simply to assist everything get pleasant and thick (and to assist keep those weeds away naturally). Then it’ll simply be maintenance (hand-pulling the occasional weed, mowing, etc), which seemed to work well at our first house. What are you folks up to outside? Is there any last minute hope-it is-not-too-late grass seeding going on? Or any other multi-phase projects that are at last winding down? It is pleasant to tie up this backyard project simply as we dive into basement stuff… and after that we have the hall bathroom in our sights!