Watering strategies to fix this bad area

Well now you can bring up the app and select the zone for turf, then power up the irrigation if it looks like he is looking to pee., all while drinking cold beer. That’s how I trained mine to use the pine straw

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The area is filling in better as the weeks go on. I thinker’s a mixture of poor watering, both from myself and possibly nozzle efficiency, and the dog. While my ground is pretty flat, I think water tends to run off from this area a little more than others.

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@emil has a compound, like rejuvinate or something like that, if you search the forums I would get that down as well. He posted it, I read the analysis and that is some really good soil conditioner

But yea, from the last pic you posted, the yard is recovering very well.

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I’m running my catch cups for the first time and I clearly have some water deficiencies in those areas. I’ll post results later on

Ran 10 minute catch cup test and most areas run 70-100 ml per 10 minutes. The 3 cups that were placed towards the bad areas ran 7.5, 10, and 5ml. Definitely need to evaluate my nozzles, probably time to replace some of them after 6 years

1 week later, I finished replacing all the nozzles that water this area so hopefully there is a bit more uniformity now

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It’s looking great.

If you get bored, a thatching rack on those bare spot will speed it’s recovery a bit.

Thanks. I actually took a handheld gardening tool ( cultivator?) a couple weeks ago over large parts of the area and I bet that help it out. I’ll have another go at it with the bare areas.

Here’s another area I’m working on. The red dot is a nozzle. Is this nozzle responsible for the area immediately around it? Or are the neighboring nozzles the ones that are responsible? Regardless, I replaced both this one and the adjacent ones.

Well, you should have head to head coverage so the adjacent head should water this area. If not, drive the screw that sits in the nozzle path to create mist? I don’t know. My hunter heads dribble a bit through a tiny hole to soak that area.

Get that thatch off of there.
Thatch is a host for “eyes wide shut” style parties where fungi flourish. this can cause a few things, 1, tinder new growth coming throu the thatch gets infected and dies very quickly. 2, mycelium for certain fungi create a hydrophobic barrier so water usually runs away from the spot (but most common in fairy ring). 3, if a thick spot, absorbs the water applied then evaporates it away, with water never reaching the soil.

If you can get a thatching rake. It is worth the money. It’s better than a gardening tool that is used to score earth. They have these fins on the blades that help lift the thatch off the ground causing minimal damage to the stolons. It takes a minute to get used to it, but you will be amazed at how much quicker it is to use that rake that’s any other thing.

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I’ve got rainbird u-series nozzles on my sprinklers which are supposed to have some dual spray design that helps minimize the dry spots near the sprinkler head. They seem to work well so maybe that can help. But yeah as plainsane said head to head coverage is best

The Toro precision nozzles are very good at covering an area if you don’t have head to head coverage. They have a chip that creates better coverage closer to the head. They also put out less water so you may have to adjust your settings if you do use them.

Just over a month and a half later.

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Nice @Modawg2k! What do you think made the most difference?

@Modawg2k Wow! That’s like one of those before/after informercials. Looking great.

:cheers:

Honestly just watering correctly. This area had issues due to overall poor watering strategy, old sprinklers not reaching, and coupled with the dog peeing in the area I’m sure that decreased irrigation didn’t help.

@Modawg2k Curious as to your watering freq & duration these days. I wasn’t happy with how my lawn was coming in so I dethatched and fertilized. Until it’s full and green I’m not confident of the watering schedule / zone settings that I have right now.

I have 3 grass zones on the same schedule. They run 2 cycles with a 12 minute soak.
Zone 1: 15 min/cycle
Zone 2: 8 min/cycle
Zone 3: 11 min/cycle

The differences in times are purely based on my catch cup results. So Zone 2 is low because it’s a small area and gets watered a litte by all 3 cycles. The schedule tends to run every other day. I would say about every 3-4 waterings it might do 2 days in a row.

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One of these days I’m going to get serious about training that dog to go on the rocks…

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