Help - my Lawn in Los Angeles is dying in patches and smart cycle is asking me to do very long infrequent cycles which is causing high run off. I also have some weeds in weird places.
My lawn I believe is Warm season grass with likely St Augustine. It is dying in patches. When I select smart cycle - it asks me to do every 3 days but 15-20 mins each. Problem with that is that it causes Run off and many days it is so dry. To make this worse my Gardner is giving me opposite direction of what Rachio is recommending - saying add 5 mins of water twice a day. Which is right? Who do I believe.
How do I manage weeds?
Does the Thrive kit help? What about Manual aeration techniques with spiky shoes?
What do I set as type of sprinkler? How can I be sure what I pick is correct.
I am in Los Angeles and have at Augustine. Mine runs about those time frames as well… but if you have a run off problem I’m guessing either you also have a sprinkler summing problem or poor “drainage”.
Are you set on flex daily or monthly or?
Are you on a hill side?
Have you made adjustments manually to any advance settings?
I assume you’ve checked and all your sprinklers are working properly and not pointed incorrectly?
Longer watering is just fine with at Augustine in general. But you may need to tweak some settings if you have a runoff issue.
Also you seem to not be totally sure of your grass type. Is it on runners? St Augustine generally will take over a yard and the weeds will get chocked out in my experience.
I third this. I’m getting pretty tired of my lawn dying. Why can’t we have a simple button that says “this zone needs more water” or “this zone needs less water” and let the automatic settings reset based on that? If the system had a camera and the camera saw that the lawn was dying it would be pretty bad programming to just say “well, the loam is set to x, so we’re sticking with this plan”. Come on guys, I’m an engineer too. This is not that hard.
Settings in Rachio fall into basically two categories, the ones that increase watering time like root depth, and the one that affect frequency, like Crop coefficient (evaporation).
Once all settings have been tweaked to work most of the time, I just use one or the other to make punctual direct changes like the one you mentioned.
