If you’ve woken up and realized that you have dead or declining areas in your lawn and have addressed the root cause but now want to repair those areas of the lawn, consider top dressing. There are many ways to tackle this project. One of our favorite ways to improve declined areas of a Bermuda & Zoysia lawn is to top dress. Sometimes this involves the entire lawn but most clients have small patches no larger than a basketball and don’t need the entire lawn dressed. In these cases we recommend isolated top dressing to help speed up the recovery. Above is a video outlining how to top dress parts of your lawn. Hopefully this short & simple DIY video will help your lawn recover quickly by following these steps.
- Remove dead thatch or debris from the area. Make sure you clean out the area where you’ve seen the decline in turf. It doesn’t have to be perfect but make sure you’ve scratched the surface to allow for those new roots to reach the soil surface.
- Pickup a bag of play sand and topsoil (planting soil works too) from your local garden center. While we love a true local garden center we also like our friends at Pike Nursery for gardening supplies.
- Mix your play sand and soil together. 50/50 mix together in a wheelbarrow or bucket.
- Shovel a small amount of the mixture in the area and then take your rake and move around the area of concern. We like using a soft rake to work it into the area and blend it with the healthy surrounding turf.
- Take your hands and run along the area and make sure you’ve not applied too much product. You only need a light layer to accomplish our goal and too much can cause an unnecessary hump in the lawn.
- Water in the area and wait for new lateral growth to fill in the top dressed spot.
Continue mowing and watering as directed for your turf type. This is critical in maintaining a healthy Bermuda and Zoysia lawn.
