April 13, 2024 Update

It’s been a few weeks now since I killed all the Bermuda in the front lawn. I also treated with the 7-0-20 Yard Mastery ‘Stress Blend’ fertilizer as planned. It looks worse, but I think it’s actually better. I was really careful when applying the RoundUp, and the green spots you see among the brown are little patches of St. Augustine that I hope will spread.

I mowed last night, nearly scalping the dead stuff, but cutting the St. Augustine at my mower’s highest setting. My intent is to get the current grass as healthy as I can, then see if I need to do anything to encourage more horizontal spread. I don’t think we’re quite to ‘growing season’ yet, but close. I’m starting to see some stolens projecting into the bare spots.

In case you were wondering, yes, my backyard is just as bad. Here, I mowed the St. Augustine at the highest setting, but didn’t mow anything else. I spent much of the day raking up dead leaves and thatch and am about half-way done. I think I’m done raking for this weekend. Tomorrow, if I have time, I’ll treat everything I don’t want to keep with RoundUp.

In other news, I did a walk around the front yard inspecting my sprinklers. I partially dug out three to level them as they were severely crooked and likely impacting the efficiency of the system. I also found one that wasn’t returning into the body fully. I starting digging to see what might be going on, and found the whole sprinkler body was about 2 inches under ground. I ordered some riser-thingy’s from Amazon and should be able to get it fixed and finished tomorrow. Fortunately, we’ve had a good amount of rain the past few weeks and I haven’t needed to run the sprinklers yet.