Growing Some Grass

While my patch is small and there is still a long we to go -- weeds, intermittent balds patches, crab grass, etc. -- we have come a long way.

To start this season, this is what we were dealing with the backyard.  It was an eyesore:

We had tried to slit-seed last fall with some success.  It had been an absolute disaster last summer as we didn't have the sprinkler system turned on and I rarely was able to water.  So we had this.

I was in touch with Marc Wise at Greenwise in Evanston and he hooked me up with some supplies - seed, starter fertilizer, soil builder stuff and a word or two of encouragement.

I got things roughed up, top soil put down, seed and starter fertilizer in place and peat moss to cover it all up (not proud of using a non-renewable product like peat moss, but its what everyone does and it seemed to work). It rained twice, heavily, in late May (or early June?) and it ended up washing a ton of the work away and into the garden/flower beds, but as they say, "third time's a charm" and we got things started again (amazing how just rain and thunder greened things up tremendously in a couple of week!

A couple of weeks later -- with some bi-daily watering, we got to this:

Still patchy and thin, but getting there.  I overseeded again in mid-june.  Fertilized, and dropped some more peat moss.

For reference, there is last summer's "before" (prior to slit seeding):

After cutting the lawn last Friday, I snapped somewhat of an "after" shot here:

Still patchy here and there.  Way more weeds and crab grass, etc.  But we are getting there.