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Another Scott’s PatchMaster Performance Update

JonC — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:13:35 +0000

The Scott’s PatchMaster I put down a while back has been doing well so far. It grew in pretty fast and has just been thickening up. It has now been mowed quite a few times. We started mowing when it ‘looked decent’ and have just kept mowing it as part of the normal yard. It’s not super-scientific (though I suppose it could be) but the right time to mow Scott’s PatchMaster is whenever the heck it looks like it needs to be mowed.

Turn the PatchMaster into part of your lawn as soon as possible because the chances are the rest of your lawn may look terrible compared to the patch. Have no fear, over time it will blend in. Before you know it you will want to patch your whole lawn so it looks as good as the patched spot but this would a bad idea, and very expensive. I know this sounds like an ad placement or promotion, but I’m not paid by nor endorsed by Scott’s to promote their lawn care products (aside from occasional advertising through an ad network). My true feelings is that a) the mulch material (paper) could be better filtered for plastics and other things b) if it’s watered it really does grow up quickly c) it usually looks better than the rest of your lawn and c) money well spent, so far!

YOU HAVE TO KEEP IT WET! This is critical or your PatchMaster will fail and your lawn will end up on FailBlog. Additionally, you need to have good loose soil for the roots to grow into. Heavy clay soil, or heavy rock soil may pose a problem to you. If you have either of those I recommend getting a pick axe and shovel and breaking up your soil (watch for water/sewer lines, check your basement for where they exit and use COMMON SENSE). Remove rocky/nasty soil or screen it to get rid of the rocks and debris and add sand/composted manure/topsoil if needed to turn it into decent soil. There are numerous sites dedicated to improving the condition of your soil, I have not written about that as of yet.

In the area in the photos below I added new topsoil to fill in a hole in the lawn. The soil is untreated with chemicals and all natural. It worked out great and I’m sure you can find similar materials local to you or make them from stuff from the local garden shop, Lowe’s, or Home Depot.

Anyway, enough from me, here are the photos of Scott’s PatchMaster at 63 days, slighty over 2 months.

Another Day, Another Thunder Storm

JonC — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 03:35:28 +0000

After weeks of nightly, hours long, rainy downpours they have subsided a bit, but now we’re getting these daily thunderstorms ripping across the Catskills and through town. I posted a video of one the other day which was pretty fantastic and very active for our area. The thunderstorm video below is in the daytime and mostly shows the quantity of rain that comes with these storms. You can see the Scott’s PatchMaster patch in there also after about 5 or 6 weeks of growth. It’s doing well, but of course it looks better than the rest of the lawn.

We will be over-seeding the lawn in September sometime, or possibly just ripping it out and seeding from scratch. I still haven’t decided which is a better way to go. Ripping out the old lawn and laying new seed would definitely be in order since this old lawn has been here for years upon years, and I don’t think there’s much that could make it look good or feel young again. It is certainly a lot more work though, and I would need to bring in more topsoil for some more spots where it’s thin over the rock base.

The gutters on the house are in terrible shape. The one you’ll see in the video is a newer one, but it was not put in properly. There should be a drop in height of the gutter from the non-downspout side to the downspout side, I think whoever did this one just put it in along the edge and went ‘good!’.

You can see the gallons of water pouring out over the edge of the gutters and even at the downspout end of the gutter, although some of the plants in the planter seem to benefit from it. It needs to be repaired to get the water away from the house though, the sump pump has been working overtime to keep things dry in the basement.

I think it’s kind of odd that the water is pouring out from the downspout end of the gutter. I’m guessing it’s plugged with leaves or something, I’ll probably have to get up there with the ladder on Saturday and see what’s really going on with it.

Also near the end of the video you can see where the blue stone pavers have been pulled up in preparation for the placement of a new concrete sidewalk. I found someone in the area who was working on a stone wall and they called up and helped me get rid of this bluestone. I still have some big bluestone curb and slab pieces sitting around, so if you’re in the mid-hudson area and interested let me know.

Anyways, heres the thunderstorm video, if you can’t see the embedded YouTube video below, just click the link to go directly to YouTube to watch it, you won’t leave the site.

If you enjoy thunder storm videos, check out my YouTube channel on the right. I have a few from the last couple of years posted there that you may enjoy watching.

Some Site Updates, Scott’s PatchMaster, Lasers, and Helicopters

JonC — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 03:08:42 +0000

It’s raining tonight again. It’s really been crazy, like it should be Spring right now and not summer. For the last two weeks we’ve had almost non-stop rain, perhaps one or two days without it. The Scott’s Patchmaster is doing great, but it’s not really getting a chance to get it’s roots deep in the ground and form a solid mat due to all of the available water from rain, as a result the ground is a bit squishy over there still. I keep a jar out on one of the planters so I can see how much it rains. In one 24 hour period I measured almost 3 inches of rain! Crazy weather!

There’s a few changes coming to the Thaltech.com website, it won’t affect this blog for the most part, but is part of me wanting to unify all of my various hobbies into something easily manageable and search-able.

I’ve started updating some of the other pages on this website. My most visited site, my current Jon’s Homebuilt Lasers , is slowly being transitioned over to Jon’s Commercial, Industrial and Homebuilt Lasers which will me in the format of a new CMS / Blogging style which closely mirrors the appearance of this site. I plan on getting some things going with that hobby in a month or two and wanted a site which was easy to update, as well as I am interested in merging appearance and access on my websites.

Also in transition at this time is my current Jon’s Helis website. I also be converting my rocket site over as well as creating a new one specifically for my high voltage projects and experiments.

When all is said and done I will replace the main Thaltech Webpage with a blog type interface as well which will receive general ‘stuff’ type posts and also receive updates from each of the partitioned sites. This will allow me to have all of my projects and work and hobbies and such indexed on the main URL for my website, providing for my own little gateway into things.

You may ask why I’d want to make everything completely separate, rather than just running one giant blog. For one I want to individually theme each site towards people who have interest in those specific items, without them having to dig through a ton of unrelated content. Additionally I like to keep things segmented for my own purposes.

Weekend Update: Lawns and Scott’s Patchmaster (28 day report)

JonC — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 04:17:56 +0000

This is just a quick update on things. The Scott’s Patchmaster is now right at 28 days and is growing nicely. We’ve had a huge amount of rain here in the NE the last week so that certainly hasn’t hurt things by keeping the patch mulch wet. My only fear is that the weather will go from very wet to super hot and dry with no reasonable transition, which may keep the grass from developing deep roots and result in it getting burnt out in the heat. All you can do at that point is try to keep it wet.

I only got one picture of the patch, but it turned out blurry as it was late at night. I will try to update with a newer photo on Monday or Tuesday if you’re interested in seeing how 4 weeks looks (Update: Good photos at the bottom of this post!) . It looks a lot like the last photos in the 21 Day Scott’s Patchmaster post just a lot more dense than before. Also, it’s very green and makes the rest of the lawn look terrible (but it really is terrible so that’s kind of to be expected). Hopefully we will get to over-seed or cut out the ‘original’ lawn and get some new fresh grass going there, rather than clover, once summer breaks.

I’m a bit concerned about the peninsula lawn which was seeded from scratch with just plain grass seed, mulching material and starter fertilizer. The new grass there has not grown a lot, if at all, since last week and looks kind of odd and lighter colored. In fact now that we’ve gone a full year that section of the lawn is dying out. There’s simply not enough fertility in the soil as it’s mostly sand and keeps leaching out. I don’t have the willpower to fertilize the lawn every 3-4 weeks so I think Spring 2011 I am going to start over by tilling in some good quality soil to the junk that is there now. The new grass in other sections I planted from scratch has grown great, several inches a week and they received exactly the same treatments and similar exposure to rain and sunshine. The soil in those areas is of a much different quality, not sandy at all. The soil on the peninsula is very sandy, so much so we tilled in about 15 bales of peat moss to the 1800 square feet area to try and help it retain moisture and nutrients, and on top of that we’ve had huge amount of rain recently. It’s possible that the rain is just washing the nutrients out of the soil. We put a small amount of fertilizer on Saturday, about 1/4 the amount of a normal fertilizing, to see how the grass responded. The last two nights, though, we’ve gotten long(hours and hours) torrential downpours once again. I’m not sure what to do here but I will have to do some reading to find out whats going on.

I’m hoping it’s not that the soil is draining -too- well and letting the nutrients wash out. I’m not sure of a good solution to that other than ripping up the lawn again in fall, mixing in good quality soil with the sandy soil and then replanting the whole thing, which would be a major pain in the neck.

It’s going to be a busy week, but I’ll try to get some new posts in. I’m in the process of converting my Laser and High Voltage and Hobby websites over to word press and wordpressifying all the existing pages. I’m really happy with WordPress as it makes it so easy to update and modify pages and has a huge number of plugins to make life easy, doing so has given me the urge to get back into my other hobbies!

If you’re looking for Scott’s PatchMaster information please see all my PatchMaster Related Posts

Update:(September 9,2010) It’s been over a year since I posted this 28 day update and I must say that the areas of the lawn which were patched with the PatchMaster are looking pretty good and like they belong in the lawn. I will add in some additional photos so you can see the results, but basically it will just be ‘It looks like the rest of the lawn.’ which is what the goal was going into this whole lawn restoration project. My overall experience is that if you have the right weather conditions, or you are willing to make sure it stays watered and fed, it is a suitable product for this purpose. Remember, the end of August and early September is a great time of year to get some new grass started because it will have the Fall and Spring to become strong before having to endure the next Summer. Good luck and please share your success or failures with this product.

Scott’s PatchMaster 21 Day Update

JonC — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 15:32:11 +0000

I wanted to provide some photo’s of the Scott’s Patch Master over time. It has been a few weeks now since I put the paper/seed/fertilizer mix down on the blank spot, and there is grass growing. It will take some time to fully fill in, but if it survives the summer which is now upon us, I think it will do ok.

There are quite a few different patch ‘solutions’ out there for fixing holes in lawns and trying to make them blend. The advantages that a lot of these have over ‘plain’ seed is that they include some kind of recycled paper mulch to help retain water and keep the seed wet. When you first put down grass seed it must remain constantly. If the seed starts to germinate, and then dries out, it will die. With these patch mixes, the mulch or paper will help retain the water, and it will also help keep the soil from drying out beneath it. However, there is no patch mix that will work if you completely neglect it. We mowed the patch to about 3 inches after the 21 days.

If you remember, I put the patch on about May 18th, so up to today, June 7th, that gives us a total of 21 days now that it has been ‘doing it’s thing’. Click on the photos below, when they open up you can use the arrows to move back and forth through them. Each photo is titled with the date and day number information.

If you’re looking for Scott’s PatchMaster information please see all my PatchMaster Related Posts and don’t forget the 28 Day Update! A lot of folks find this update and miss the last one!

Lawn Watch 2009 – First Scott’s PatchMaster Update

JonC — Mon, 25 May 2009 21:18:03 +0000

A couple of days ago we posted pictures of the lawn where we had done the Scott’s PatchMaster patch mix over some new topsoil we put down when we were trying to level a large low spot in the lawn. There was no grass to be seen, but I said it would pop up any day now.

Well we went out today and and behold there are now grass chutes popping up all over the place in that area. Within a week it should be looking pretty green and grassy as long as it is kept wet. The area has been getting water twice a day, but it could probably use it at least 3 times a day, I’m just always running short on time in the mornings. So even with less than perfect attention, it’s sprouting! Check out the photos. I’ll continue updating as things progress. Total time from Scotts PatchMaster mix to sprouting was ~7.5 days.

If you’re looking for Scott’s PatchMaster information please see all my PatchMaster Related Posts

Working to Rebuild a Lawn in Poor Condition

JonC — Sat, 09 May 2009 21:42:36 +0000

I took some more photos on the progress of the lawns which we planted a while back. The peninsula area of the yard seems to be growing alright, although I had expected that maybe it would be further along in it’s growth phase. I just need to be patient I guess, grass will take it’s own time to sprout. The lawns current condition is certainly an improvement the moss mess that it used to be!

I took photo’s of the lawn patch on the area we dug up for the drain pipe from the gutters and then replanted. I bought some of the Scott’s PatchMaster and applied it and kept it watered and damp. It sat for a little while doing nothing and I was started to get frustrated with it thinking that the patch would never grow in and then it grew rapidly with little green shoots popping up all over the place seemingly overnight. The Patchmaster might not be such a bad product after all!

The area of the property where we filled in the big sunken spots in the ground with fresh topsoil and used the brown germinating mats over the grass seed seems to be doing okay. Again, I would like to see faster growth but I’ll just have to be patient and keep myself contained

I recorded a video of one of the modified square spray sprinklers sucking water out of the lawn! Well, not really, but due to the shutter/frame rate of the camera, it looks as if things are moving backwards at points. Check out the modification at the link there, it’s semi-high tech and works great!