I live in Arizona. Everything is dying on the Flexible Schedule

@Modawg2k Great article. I too was surprised by the talk of NOT dethatching as it was going dormant late summer or early fall. Like you did, prior to this year I used to do it exactly when I wasn’t supposed to. It made sense to me to dethatch prior to putting down rye, so the new seed could more easily take root in the soil. I never imagined it would be bad for the Bermuda. The more I spend time talking to people around here and reading up, the more I realize why my summer lawn had been struggling.

That is crazy, but I wish you success.

Kudos to you guys for reading up and learning about your lawns! The effort you are putting into it now will go a long way to a beautiful, more water efficient lawn next year.

That link directs to a page from the Arizona Master Gardner Manual. (Insert shameless plug for Master Gardners everywhere). Master Gardners go through intensive training in the art and science of horticultural practices. In exchange for this education, a component of the training requires volunteering and sharing of the information learned with others in the community.

Regardless of interest level in this program, the Master Gardner manual is a great resource for anyone.

There is an updated version of the manual, but not online, and this version is still relevant.

She said, stepping down from her soapbox.

Interesting, never heard of master gardners

Ooops! Might help if I could type! :blush: Gardeners–not gardners

Hi Everyone! I worked very closely with Emil at Rachio to help with my phx flex schedule and thought I’d share here. I don’t have grass, but am hopeful that his information helps others trying to set up their desert flex schedules. Just a note, my garden is brand new - shrubs planted in Feb 2016, so some of Emil’s suggestions refer to an establishment period. Those with well established gardens won’t need such high crop coefficients. Hope this helps.

****Emil writes: I’ve been working with Jeff Lee, who’s a Water Conservation in Gilbert. He’s testing the Rachio controller and was able to provide some insights into the issue we’ve been experiencing with desert watering. The biggest variable impacting the watering durations was the precip rate of the custom nozzle. Although the math indicates the values we were both using, he believes the value should be much lower on drip zones as they usually have a pressure regulator installed, which limits the water supply to the emitters. In his tests, he’s using a value of 0.4 in/hour for 2 GPH emitters; whereas as were using 3.2 in/hour. The best way to test this moving forward would be to use your water meter (if it’s accessible) and simply track the gallons reported before and after a zone runs. Since you’re watering your zones for long durations, I’d recommend running each zone for one hour and recording the number of gallons used per hour. This will allow us to quickly calculate the true water usage per zone. I edited a custom nozzle you weren’t using to 0.4 in/hour and it changed the watering duration of each zone to roughly 5 hours each @ 50% MAD (management allowed depletion), watering every 10-14 days.

** Additionally, in researching your plants, I believe we should edit the crop coefficients from 50% to 60% for this year, and reduce 10% per year for the next 2-3 years. Ideally, xeroscaped plants should have a crop coefficient of 30% +/- 10%.

** Moving forward, since your plants are young and establishing and have been use to getting water on a regular basis, I’d recommend we convert to a Flex Daily schedule with 10% to 20% MAD, and work to 50% MAD over the next few months, increasing 10% per month. As MAD increases, so does the watering interval and watering duration."

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@anniepants I went through a bunch of analysis on my own and ended up with 0.4 in/hr for 2 gph emitters and 0.2 in/hr for 1 gph heads to get the run times suggested by our local authorities. I’m so glad to finally have correlation to a second party that is a local expert. It’s a bit maddening going around these threads trying to knock down the recommendation to use 1 sq.ft. for the conversion equations that end up at 3.2 in/hr for custom nozzles.

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I’m in Chandler at Dobson and Germann.

I think this here is probably my real issue. I’ve never detached and probably wouldn’t do it myself. Isn’t that what landscapers are for? I’m at the point I think I need to find a better landscape company and not the guy that does the neighbors yard and doesn’t speak English. Point is, I hire people to take care of this for me so I don’t have to think about it. I have no idea when it’s best to seed, water, fertilize, dethatch, aerate, etc. Honestly this is the only thing I hire out because I like instantaneous gratification and gardening just doesn’t do it for me. I’d rather be doing other DIY projects. Time to find new landscapers I guess.

And sorry AzJazz, I didn’t mean to hijack your thread. :slight_smile:

@JBHorne How are your trees and shrubs doing? Any concern with those setups ?

Here is a shot of my grass with “dead” areas:


Here is a close-up of a dead zone:

Here is a close-up of some of the green stuff in my yard. Bermuda, or T.B.D.:

@plainsane I’m curious as to your opinion on the grass type and why @AzJazz might be having this problem. From the moisture graphs the schedule looks similar to mine, and @Modawg2k’s, who’s turf looks great. I would think maybe the nozzles weren’t nearly putting out what was defined, but in the spec sheets the heads aren’t drastically off from the default fixed spray heading.

http://store.rainbird.com/sprinklers/10van-10-ft-van-series-variable-arc-spray-nozzle.html3

The only think I can think of is a catch cup test, and maybe another dethatch, although it was detached last year. Maybe there is a pressure issue causing the pr to be lower than expected?

Looks like a catch cup test is a good suggestion, @azdavidr. Doesn’t look like there is much to dethatch.

@AzJazz, use a soil probe, or a screwdriver with a long thin blade and push it into the soil. A soil probe can be easily pushed into moist soil. It will become difficult to push into dry soil. That will give you an idea of how deeply water is penetrating your soil. Check several places around the yard.

From the photo, it appears to be canary grass in your bermuda. You can just mow it and when your lawn is health again, the bermuda should choke it out.

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I’ll stop by Sprinkler World today to get some catch cups. My grass is about 1100 sqft. with separate 3 zones.

How many cups should I buy for the test?

Also, I forgot - I actually did a manual dethatch of the yard a few months back when the grass was looking sad.

Pulling a thatch rake through the yard in 95+ degF weather totally sux.

Most people around here get these. Hopefully Sprinkler world has them.

I have a smaller yard so I only needed one set. However, I think you can still by one set but would maybe move the cups and rerun. @Modawg2k has experience with that.

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@AzJazz You are me, just with a different screen name. Same area of Phx, I have 1300 sq ft on 3 zones… you’ll get thru this, trust me :wink:

First, if you hand raked the thatch, you probably didn’t get it nearly as well as a machine can get it. Plus 1100 sq ft is a lot for manual dethatching. @azdavidr and I already discussed how backbreaking just doing his smaller lawn is. I guarantee you that your issue is a watering issue, just like mine… check out my post if you haven’t yet…

Do this like I did if you haven’t already

Soil: Sandy Loam (AW is 0.12)
Root depth: go to 6" since you do not have strong roots in those areas.
Allowed depletion: keep at default 50
Effeciency: if defaults to 90, but if you have clogged/broken heads, I guarantee you that your effeciency is much lower… probably sub 50. A catch cup test will do this for you. You can check out the store, but I bought the orbits on amazon FYI, love that one because it does all the calculations on line Watering strategies to fix this bad area - #26 by Modawg2k
Crop Coeffeicient: Default is 0.65… but i was running 0.73 all summer because of an older default setting in Rachio
Sun: just mark it for lots of sun.

Visually inspect your heads, it’s easy to see if you there is a gap in yoour spray arc… get cheap orbi replacement heads at Lowes

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You can get buy with just one set, you’ll just have to do multiple runs and keep track of the data. The typical pack comes with 12 I think. On my 900 sqft patch I did at least 4 runs I think.

Yeah just 1 set, i actually did just 1 10 minute run on each of the 3 zones, maybe i didn’t technically have them all correctly placed bout, but it made sense to me what i was measuring and they were appropriately spaced… i just made sure to combine numbers on cups that had overlapping zones

This looks like insect damage not water related, in my opinion. If this was a watering problem it would not be so spotty with small patches of death.

It could be fungal related but that single stem of Bermuda shows no fungal stress at all.

Plus the grass closest to the stone border looks healthy and it would be the first to show eat stress at that stone will radiate heat long after the ambient temp drops.

If it were my yard I would dig down about 1.5 foot and break up the soil to see if you can find larva or scales.

Can you post close ups of green grass on a border of death.

Another thing, the grass looks anemic so either insects are eating your roots back or you have a serious ph issue with your soil.

Have you ever had a soil analysis?

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Also, if your camera has a flower icon, switch to that so you can take a macro shot

I’ll take some of the suggested macro pictures tomorrow and post them.

No, I haven’t had a soil analysis done before.

As a side note: I’m not sure if this is an apples <=> apples comparison, but my winter rye grass was mostly OK. There were some bare patches, but probably due to a few areas where the seed didn’t land or didn’t take (maybe due to the sprinklers).

If the rye grass would be similarly damaged due to soil pests or pH levels, it may be less likely.

AzJazz