North Texas Bremuda Grass help

Cassandra – posted 25 May 2005 20:21

I NEED MAJOR HELP!!!I bought a house in December (5 months), the sod was Bremuda grass and it was dormant. It is now May and my yard looks HORRIBLE. There are so many bare and yellow spots and the weeds have taken over. We water approximately twice a week for 6 minutes (each zone), and have used round up and fertilizer…we were told not to use weed and feed since our lawn was new; however, it has been mowed several times. We have pasty clay, not sand or soil.What can I do to get my lawn back and maintain it????

mdav – posted 25 May 2005 21:50

I’m not sure, but I think the round up may be your problem. And six minutes a day probably isn’t helping when it’s been 95+ degrees in North Texas.

hosgtage46 – posted 26 May 2005 11:32

Wow, don’t use that round up, it kills everything green!! Once they are up you’re not going to have much luck with chemicals.

Get a good fertilizer going every 6 weeks or so, one rule of thumb is go with the summer holidays, Memorial Day, 4th of July and Labor Day.

I let things get away from me last year and had quite a bit of weeds this spring. Chemicals were too late, so I just started pulling them. Old school? Maybe but it actually worked. I’ll be sure to hit it in the fall with pre-emerge.

It’s hard to say how much you need to be watering, if you do a little on line research you’ll find a simple way to calculate how much your system puts out, then go from there. I currently go every 3 days for 10 min, and I could likely cut back a bit. But this all depends on your soil type, runoff etc. Be sure you water in the early AM, NOT evening.

The nice thing about bermuda is it likes to be cut short and looks good when you keep it cut. When you get it down below an inch, it will get more dense and eventually choke out most of those weeds. I cut my tiff twice a week with a reel mower and all the weeds problems I had about 6 weeks ago have gone away.