Bare areas in your lawn can be quite a frustrating sight. Fortunately, there’s more than one way to mend your lawn and return it to its best form. Here are two fantastic ways to remove bare areas from your lawn and help it look its best.
How to Mend Your Lawn by Sowing and Planting on the Bare Areas
Finding bare areas on your lawn may be concerning at first. But if you know how to fix the issue, you can restore your lawn quicker and more easily than you might expect. This article will show you how.
The Two Best Ways to Get Rid of Bare Areas on Your Lawn
While bare lawn patches can appear for many different reasons, the remedies for this problem are a bit less numerous. In general, there are two go-to ways to mend a lawn with bare patches:
- Repairing your lawn with seed
- Repairing your lawn with sod
Both those methods can be incredibly effective for eliminating the bare patches on your lawn. Now, let’s consider the steps you need to take to implement each one.
Filling Bare Lawn Areas with Seed
Our first option for mending your lawn’s bare patches is to sow grass seed in the affected areas. However, fixing your lawn using seeds can involve more work than it first appears. The following sections will walk you through the most important steps in the process.
Remove Existing Dead Grass
Sowing new seeds to mend bare patches begins with removing any dead or dried-out vegetation in the area. Use a rake to tease out any existing grass blades or other plant debris. Your goal at this stage is to create an exposed area of soil into which you can sprinkle your seeds.
Improve the Soil
As is the case with nearly all plants, your grass will benefit from soil improvements. Such improvements could include loosening the soil to give the roots a better chance of spreading. You can also consider adding organic materials at this point to improve the nutrient quality of the soil and give your grass seed plenty of fuel, which it can use to grow and fill the bare area.
Sow Your Grass Seed
Once you have an exposed patch of loose and healthy soil, sprinkle your grass seed into the area. Be sure to spread the seed evenly rather than allowing it to pile up in one part of the bare patch. Spreading your seed as evenly as possible, without overcrowding one particular area, will lead to even and consistent future grass growth.
Give Your Sown Seed Water
After sowing your seeds, you’ll need to give them plenty of water both right away and for the days to follow. Continue watering about once or twice per day for about one to two weeks, or until your grass looks healthy and ready to mow. At that point, you can water your new grass patch as often as you do for the rest of your lawn.
Filling Bare Lawn Areas with Sod
Now that you know one of the most reliable ways to mend bare lawn patches, it’s time to learn the second popular approach. If you choose to repair your lawn with sod, follow these simple steps.
Cut a Piece of Sod to Cover the Area
Start by cutting a piece of sod that can cover the entirety of your bare area. Sod pieces come in regular rectangular shapes, while bare patches tend to be quite irregular. As such, you should cut your sod so that it is slightly larger than the bare area to ensure that it covers the area entirely.
Remove Existing Grass
After cutting your sod, cut your bare lawn area to match the shape of your sod piece. In most cases, you’ll need to remove both the dead grass and some otherwise healthy grass to ensure your sod will fit neatly in the area. Your result should be a neat rectangular patch of exposed soil that has a nearly identical shape and size to the sod you cut in the last step.
Improve the Soil
Once you remove the existing grass, you can remove some soil as well. Taking away some soil will help your new sod piece be level with the rest of your lawn. This stage is also an opportunity to loosen the soil and add any amendments like compost that will encourage healthy grass growth.
Lay the Sod on Your Bare Patch and Water
The final step is to lay your sod piece into your bare lawn area. If you made your cuts correctly, this should be quite easy to do. When your sod is in place, you should walk on it to press it into the ground. As was the case when sowing grass seed, you’ll need to water your new sod patch at least once a day for at least a week.
Conclusion
Mending bare lawn patches takes patience and some effort on your part. But if you use one of the two reliable methods described above, you can expect your lawn to be lush and free of unsightly bare patches once again.