Grass after 5 weeks

These photos were taken September 21st - a little over one week after the photos in my previous post.

Still crabgrass growing near the road.

A view from the street - looking greener!

 Then there's the backyard - still not much to see, but there is a little green fuzz visible, but it's patchy...

Good grass growing conditions

After several days of close to 100 degree weather, we've cooled all the way down to the mid-60s today. I'm sure the grass is happy about that.

On Saturday I mowed the the front yard again, this time mowing all of the newly planted areas at about 1.5".

There has been a breakout of crabgrass along the road.

The crabgrass is the lighter green.

My guess is that aerating and overseeding turned up seeds from last year and provided places for them to germinate. Also keeping the grass mowed at 2" probably helps as well. I'm bummed about this as there is quite a lot so it's competing with the new grass (which granted there doesn't seem to be much for some reason) and it doesn't look good, but I'll do my best to pull it before it's able to seed.

I have also noticed a number of weeds throughout the yard, but this is to be expected when growing grass. I've been carefully pulling some of the larger ones.

I thought that the grass I planted last year was looking patchy and I was concerned that it had a disease or something. Recently, my neighbor showed me a patch grass in his lawn that had died and he said his lawn treatment company said it was due to a fungus (I'd like to know how they could tell that because I couldn't see anything other than the dead grass). He also said that the neighbor across the street used to have an immaculate lawn and one year it completely died due to some disease. Yikes! That wouldn't be very cool. I guess I need to start learning more about grass diseases so I can be proactive (thankfully, Purdue turfgrass program has a number of publications on turf diseases). When I compare before and after shots, I don't see a whole lot of change, so at least it doesn't appear to be getting worse. Perhaps I didn't water enough during the heat/drought this summer, or is/was it a disease of some sort? I don't have the slightest clue.

Yesterday

Before (August 16)

I'm still waiting to mow the back yard... that is if there is any grass left after the squirrels are done doing their thing.

Crabgrass at bay

It appears that the crabgrass preventer that I applied earlier this year has done it's job well! I have not found any crabgrass anywhere in the lawn, except for along the very edge along the road and in a few places along the sidewalk.

Young crabgrass (the light green in the middle) growing on the
 edge of the sidewalk.

Crabgrass along the road in my neighbors yard (not ours). The seeds
had better stay over there!

I'm very pleased as I was expecting that my tearing up the lawn last year likely spread a lot of crabgrass seeds around. If it continues that none grows in the middle of lawn, I'll be extremely happy. Our lawn is small enough that I can hand pick any that pops up as long as it's not in huge numbers.

Crabgrass preventer application

I went to multiple stores trying to find a good preemergent crabgrass herbicide that didn't have quick release Nitrogen in it, but I couldn't find one. Ultimately, I ended up purchasing a bag of Endure Crabgrass Preventer Plus:

Endure Crabgrass Preventer Plus

The active ingredient is dithiophyr. It claims to be "extended release fertilizer", but when looking at the Fertilizer Analysis on the back, it listed 19% Urea Nitrogen, only 5.7% of that slow release.

19% Urea Nitrogen (5.7% stabilized/slow release)
3% Potash

It was better than my other options and I needed to apply it as soon as possible, so I went for it.

I only applied it to the front yard since crabgrass hasn't been a problem in the backyard, but also because it would prevent the new grass from germinating along with any crabgrass. The general rule is to never use preemergent herbicides along with seeding. This wasn't a problem for the front yard. I calculated the square footage of the front yard to be roughly 1600 sq ft., and the recommended rate is 3.5lbs/1000 sq ft, so I applied roughly 5lbs of it using a handheld spreader. I'll save the rest for next year, assuming it doesn't expire.