How To Properly Seed Your Los Angeles Lawn

Properly seeding your lawn can be complicated. You have to choose between seeds and hydroseed. You need to know what type of grass is already growing in your yard. You need to prepare the soil appropriately. Then you have to apply the seeds or hydroseed evenly across your yard. It’s a complicated process, and it never hurts to call a professional Los Angeles lawn care company like Aerations Plus to help you seed your lawn.

Choosing The Perfect Grass Seed For Your Lawn

When it comes to lawn seeding, it is imperative to pick the right grass seed. It helps to know what kind of grass is already growing in your yard and whether it’s a warm season or cool season grass. Usually in Southern California, you’re going to find warm season grasses which stand up well to our warm spring and fall and our hot summers. 

Then you need to figure out which warm season grass you’ve got. Fortunately, there are only a dozen different grass varieties that grow in peoples’ yards – and some yards do have two different types of grass growing in them.

The most common warm season grasses include:

• Bermuda grass
• Centipede grass
• Dichondra grass
• Floratam grass
• Zoysia grass

Professional lawn seeding companies can help you determine which type of grass you have in your yard so you’re using the right variety of seeds.

Getting Your Lawn Ready For Seeding

There’s a lot of work that goes into getting your lawn ready for seeding, regardless of whether you’re working with a company that provides lawn seeding services. First, you need to determine what type of soil you have, what its pH is, and whether it’s missing any key nutrients.

Second, you should remove any thatch and rocks from your yard. Thatch is a layer of dead and living plant material that collects between grass leaves and the ground. If it’s more than half an inch thick, it can prevent air, nutrients, and water from reaching the soil.

Third, you need to aerate your yard. Aeration is essentially poking a bunch of holes in your yard. Core aeration pulls plugs of dirt ½ inch across and 3 ½ inches deep from the ground, leaving holes that allow air, water, and nutrients the space they need to get to the roots of your grass. It also provides a perfect place for grass seed to fall when you seed your lawn.

Fourth, you need to decide whether you want to apply seed or hydroseed. Hydroseed is a slurry of seeds, nutrients, mulch, biostimulants, and water. Biostimulants are substances that help the grass enhance its nutrient absorption, use those nutrients efficiently, and protect it from environmental stressors.

Using dry seed is less expensive, and you can effectively do it yourself. However, you’ll have to go step-by-step after seeding to apply fertilizer and water. Hydroseed is more expensive and not as easy for you to apply well – for this you’d want help from a lawn seeding company near you, like Aerations Plus. 

How To Encourage Grass Seed To Grow

After you’ve done all the work to prepare the soil for your new grass seed, there are still a few steps left to take to encourage your new grass to grow, including:

• Fertilize immediately after scattering your seeds. This step isn’t necessary for hydroseed, which should be fertilized 30 days after application. 
• Water your lawn – in a specific pattern. For the first few days, you only want to mist your lawn, so the top inch of soil stays moist but doesn’t get soggy. After the new grass sprouts, move to light watering until the top two inches of soil are moist and the grass reaches a height of three inches. Once it’s tall enough, you can start watering heavily, so that six to eight inches of soil are moist. If you under or over-water, you can cause the grass not to grow.
• Mow your lawn the right way. When your grass is three inches tall, you can start mowing it. Set your mower blades so they only cut off the top ⅓ of the blades.

If this sounds like a lot of work, you can count on lawn seeding services near you, like Aerations Plus, to take over. 

Need Your Los Angeles Lawn Seeded? We Can Help!

Lawn seeding in Los Angeles is a long, arduous process that takes a lot of hard work and patience. If you can’t or don’t want to put in the time and effort, you can count on a lawn service company like Aerations Plus to complete the process for you. We’ve got more than 25 years of experience in the industry, and we want to help you get better results for your lawn. Let us help you seed your lawn – contact us today for a free estimate and to learn more about our Los Angeles lawn care services.