Were I the sort of person who understands lawns I might have a better idea about what exactly happened to ours last year. Maybe it was the relentless rain. Maybe it was grubs. Maybe it was just the grass’s time to go. But, whatever the reason, by the end of last summer, our special mix of Bermuda grass mixed with weeds was looking decidedly unhealthy and full of bare spots.

Let me be clear and honest here: I don’t much care about my lawn. I say that very deliberately, and I mean it in a few different ways. One is that a lawn is just very far down on the list of house things I care about one way or the other. Some people get a thrill at at the sight of a lush green lawn; it doesn’t do anything for me. But I also have ethical objections to a lot of things people often do in order to create those green, weedless yards. I care a lot more about bees and bunnies than I do about a perfect lawn, and I’m not willing to dump either a lot of time or a lot of chemicals into the quest for perfection.

We will never have a perfect lawn.

But I do want some kind of green biodiversity in my yard, and we went into last fall with that decidedly lacking. What we had was more of a mudpit waiting to happen, and bees can’t pollinate mud! And things didn’t magically recover by spring (we were told by the people at Home Depot that fall was not the right time to plant grass around these parts, so we waited patiently for spring).

Here’s how things looked a few weeks ago, after Dave mowed everything down as low as he could in preparation for our feeble lawn restoration attempts:

Little bit patchy, no?

I should say that this is actually better than I was fearing round about October last year. I was worried there’d be literally nothing but red dirt left by spring.

And here’s how it looks now:

I’m just kidding! That’s SunTrust Park, where the Braves play. They spend a lot of money to have their grass look like that.

(Incidentally, I just went through a whole thing where I tried to decide whether it would be funnier to crop that photo way down so that you could only see the grass and then post the whole picture for punchline….but that would have been more work, and Ari told me it was funnier this way anyway).

Here it is for real:

I would like for you to look beyond our yard to the one across the street, where professional landscapers come along every couple of weeks to actually make the lawn look like Suntrust Park! Complete with those lines mowed into it and everything. And our next door neighbor literally used to work for a landscaping company. Sigh. Farther down the road there are, I would like to note, other slackers like us who do not have ballpark like lawns.

So this looks better, yes? But still decidedly not perfect. When you get up close, there’s a wondrous variety of different greenery going on:

Also, there are still bare patches which I have decided not emphasize in the photos. I need to order some more seed in fact, in an attempt to fix them. But I’m pretty pleased with the improvement so far.

Here are the handy steps we took to do a half-assed job re-seeding our very sad and patchy lawn.

Affiliate links ahead! If you buy something after following my links, you don’t pay anything extra, but I make a small commission.

1. Buy everything you can think of that might help

There are a lot of different ideas about planting grass on the internet. There are also a lot of different ideas if you just ask random people you happen to run into for their opinions. It’s hard to figure out which ideas are good. Or at least which are the best for your particular situation. So we just did some things that sounded reasonable. What we ended up buying was grass seed and some grass seed starter fertilizer mix type stuff and a few bags of topsoil.

Interestingly, we found that the grass seed on Amazon was significantly cheaper than at Home Depot. We bought Bermuda seed, because that’s what was in our lawn before (well, mostly) and because I like that it deals with drought well and doesn’t need to be babied. But it won’t grow farther north, so I’ve linked you to the general grass seed product page on Amazon.

I’ve done a whole post before about why clover lawns are so great. I did mix clover seed in with the Bermuda seed, but I’m not sure any of it is coming up yet. I used the old seed I bought a few years ago, so I don’t know if it was still good. I just ordered some more to put out there on remaining bare spots.

2. Work some new dirt in if you feel like it

Dave worked the new topsoil we bought into the spots that were totally bare. We considered a whole new layer of dirt over the whole yard, but that sounded expensive. And the bag of grass seed didn’t say we needed to.

3. Put a bunch of seed on the ground

We already had this little hand held spreader, so we used it since the yard is relatively small. If we do the backyard someday, we’ll definitely need a more hardcore one.

The bag of seed said we could rake the seed into the soil as an optional step. Since it was optional, we just….sort of did it. Particularly in places where there was bare dirt.

4. Water it. A lot.

Oh, hey, you guys: this part is important! It’s where we’ve failed in the past. Seeds need water to grow! Wild, right?! It’s true; it’s SCIENCE. The internet says something like twice a day for three weeks. Probably it depends on where you live. Anyway, we have been watering our little seeds dutifully, and they’ve been doing their part by growing dutifully. Sprinklers help with this. We got this cheap kind that just kind of goes back and forth, but I sort of wish we’d gotten a more exciting one that oscillates and whatnot.

And that’s where things stand now. I’m interested to see how things progress as the summer wears on. Bermuda grass is supposed to be great at spreading all over the place, so I’m hoping it will continue to fill in the bare spots. And that it’s not too late to get some clover to grow out there this year.

Next up maybe I’ll write an inspiring guide on how to force yourself to weed your front garden bed even though you really, really, really don’t want to. I’ll have to figure it out myself first, though.

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