I am looking for recommendations on a watering schedule to germinate Centipede grass seed. A large portion of my yard has died from fungus I believe. I have since resolved the fungus issue. I am ready to seed with some centipede seed I have purchased. My question is what would be a good watering schedule for the zone if I also have a considerable amount of actual grass on the zone?
I have about 2000 sq ft of grass on the zone and about 600 sq ft I want to seed. I don’t want to harm the existing grass by over watering. I am in New Orleans so the hot days are hot!
Does anyone have any suggestions or experience with this? I have never seeded before I always lay sod.
Have you seen this help article? I would think this method would apply to any type of grass seed. Key is keeping seeds and soil moist a few inches deep.
An alternative method, by way of example, uses the cycle and soak feature:
Thank you for the information. I was able to use that and figure out the schedule. I used the manual cycle soak feature. I actually more concerned about constantly wetting the current grass I have growing while trying to get the seeds to germinate. Probably not a Rachio issue but so many people seem to have good advice and experience here.
I’m a little gun shy after losing so much of my lawn to fungus last year! It rained 81 days in a row here and I was not familiar with Fungicide at the time.
It took me a while to figure it out and I ended up using the cycle and soak feature. I think the terminology is a little confusing but finally figured out I run 2 minute cycles on 4 stations and then the total runtime is 48 minutes because it setup 6 cycles with 2 hours in between. It has been working as expected.
The “New Seeding Schedule” help article is NOT practical or helpful because we can’t define when to ‘stop’ at night… I don’t want/need it watering every hour after sunset.
Like Billanderson… your better off setting up manual soak settings.
For me… in Seattle area… I have 3k sq feet of new seed, full sun, 5" of fresh sandy/loam topsoil.
My schedule for just my new grass zones is:
Type: Fixed
Interval: Everyday
Zones: (new seed zones)
Times: Start after 6AM
Duration: 2h 20m (calculated by how much I want the zones to run over the course of the day)
Cycle and Soak: Cycle: 10m Soak: 1h 50m
Weather Intelligence: Rain Skip: ON, all others off
This results in 10 minutes of watering on each zone with a 100 minute pause between watering, everything done at 6.20pm. Starting again the next day at 6AM.
I do my overseeding by setting up 3 fixed schedules, each with just one or two minutes per zone (depending on the kind of heads). I do one in the morning, one around noon, and one in the late afternoon. I put in start and end dates, having all three run for one week, just two the next week, and then just one the last week. A little more work to set up the first time, but I liked this method because I could set it and forget it.
Nope don’t think I am seeing a “grow-in” option. My ten year old rain bird controller had this. You could simply say water the grow in zones for 5 mins each 4 times a day or whatever you wanted. Would be a nice option Rachio
Hi all. I created this excel file to simplify the inputs when using the Hourly Interval and Cycle Soak for new seeding. Hope you find it helpful and useful.
type: fixed schedule interval: everyday zones: zones that were seeded watering duration: total time for the day (eg 40m for each zone) times: start at 8:00am cycle and soak: manual, then set the cycle for 5mins and the soak for 1 hour.
This appears to be calculating everything correctly and running as intended, when viewing the running schedule I see 1/31 and zones are running at 5min intervals. Whoop!
It did take some figuring and the device was capable, I just wish the ppl developing the tools would’ve provided a work around like this instead of dodging.
