What Is Thatch In The Lawn? | What It Looks Like & Why It's Bad For Your Grass 

You made my day Allyn, thanks for the kind words... now to see about fixing it huh? 😊

Couldn't agree more

Yes it is! This is an amazing video, helped me understand finally

Thatch is nature's way to healthy grass,it has existed long before human interaction

Best vid on this subject!

Thanks a lot, im glad my yard had such a thick layer to give such a clear demo! Lol 😆

Love the feedback, im proud if this vid bit wish I could reedit it to tighten it up a bit. That's so much for watching and for your comments!

Thank you for appreciating more in depth information. :) Hope you find more of my material useful as well! Thanks for chiming in and hope you see you again.

What if you have clay soil?

Thanks a bunch! Unfortunately for me this thatch is right here in my own yard! Luckily though it gives me good case study material. :)

It makes me want to use my pro plugger and pull some plugs to see my thatch in my Turf. If I do a video on it myself to show thatch in TTTF would you mind me linking your video in my video?

Thanks Benzo! Glad to win you over with info 😁

Good luck alex!! If I was at home in front of my pc I could drop a couple links to specific vids but since I'm not you can browse this playlist for vods documenting my thatch series a couple years ago ru-vid.com/group/PLOsquTri3niMEHo1Sa5Q5TXMAR7aVOod6

Thanks a lot for saying that, it means a lot! Thanks for watching!

That's awesome to hear! Glad you got something out of it!

You made my night, thanks for the compliment. Im glad this video is helping a lot of people understand a somewhat difficult to understand concept. Fixing these problems unfortunately is sometimes harder than I wish it was.

Thanks Don! That plugger tool is good for lots of things, visuals would be lacking without it. 😊

Turf Mechanic for sure! The plugs came out great!!

Thanks for the compliments! My guess is that thick thatch is more common than people realize in aged sod installations. A little thatch and dead grass buildup is fine in lawns but these thick layers like mine are not easy to create on accident.

Dude! What an awesome way to start my day! Thanks for sharing and I hope others find it just as useful. 👊

👊

So glad I helped you solve the mystery! 😃

Thanks great to hear because I just put D-Thatch and two other similar products on my lawn today! Filmed of course, so look for that video and results in the coming weeks. I hope so much that the liquid thatch digesters can make a meaningful impact on the lawn in one summer.

I use a mechanical deathmatch and takes a lots of dead grass out.is it good or not

thanks a lot! Thanks for watching!

Its always a good time to start...even if its just the learning and planning phase. 😃

I totally agree, ive settled into calling the loose stuff on top surface debris and the fiberous layer underneath thatch but thats just me.

Thanks so much for saying that, I love knowing that people like yourself have found what I do helpful. Good luck come spring, you'll be busy!

@Turf Mechanic no problem. Thank you for the info. I just read a bit of your bio on your website. I'm curious about your location? Is your healthier lawn book applicable to all turf grass? Is it applicable to my area in zone 9?

@Turf Mechanic nvm, I purchased it anyways. I'll find out, but it looks promising so far.

Ohh thanks, I am actually reworking stuff on it from now through February and should be adding in-depth content to it soon. I'd like to build out as many pieces on it as possible before Spring but everything will be there for you and anyone else as I put them online. Expect the content to be incomplete now but probably not for long.

Of course, go for it! 🙂

Chemical fertilizers kill the good stuff, these lawn guys really like to use a lot of chemicals, no wonder they have these problems....fungus is great, it breaks down almost everything, have you seen the mycelium caskets, they even break down formaldehyde and all the fabric softener that our bodies are full of when we are buried, that saves our ground water, humans are so toxic, thank goodness for nature!

Exactly. They kill all organic matter and animals/bugs/bacteria that would turn that to healthy soil. That is why you get thatch. Probably has no worms in that lawn cause all life has been killed off with chemicals.

Some would start over but i see lawn care as a long term productive hobby. Incremental improvement makes it fun and interesting over the long haul IMO.

I never heard of any type of grass for home lawns having roots go as deep as 4-ft -to 6-ft? I don't think many trees' roots go that deep.

I feel your pain. Lawn care addicts will enjoy this but many people won't but I'll say what I would do and yiu can decide for yourself what you will do. I would rent a core aerator (or hire someone to do it) and do an extra heavy aeration on the lawn. It will look super rough if you shoot for 40+ holes per square foot but doing that and removing cores from the lawn right after will physically remove over 10% of your thatch in a single day. I would then topdress in a heavy layer of straight biochar and go over the lawn a few times with a push broom trying to get as much biochar into the holes as possible. I would then spray cytogro on the lawn or some other sea kelp product, and then I would give the lawn an extra deep watering session, probably shooting for two inches of water all at once. After a couple days I'd then come back over the lawn with a hard tines scarifier blade on my electric dethatcher and score the thatch layer as deep as possible removing all debris from the lawn...then I'd wait another 5 days and then I'd probably apply an application of my diy dethatch recipe and then water the lawn again, somewhere around an inch of water all at once. This should get moisture into the lower soil and Jumpstart the decomposition of the thatch layer while pushing new roots into the lower soil where you want them. For moss, apply a dose of Moss Out (fehedta) and call it a day. Deep thatch doesn't go away overnight, expect to recover for a couple years but you can make a huge difference in that first few months if you go at it hard!

4-6” of heavy clay for me. Thatch is literally impossible for me. The builders couldn’t even put the staples in half the sod. They just bent in half.

Another interesting and unique idea, the sugars in Coke sound like a decent alternative to molasses that is frequently found in d-thatch products - the sugars feed the microbes. I'd have to research more of the differences between the sugars in molasses and coke and how soil biology would react differently but it's good out-of-the-box thinking.

@@TurfMechanic It is important NOT to use sugar-free Coke, as that's just chemicals. I notice a lot of worm casts and bird activity on my lawns after I spray with the solution. The grass is going crazy, here! I mowed on Monday morning, then brought my mower up to its highest setting for the rest of the season. I mowed again today and it took more off the top!

I'd say it isn't, but I also don't spray chemicals in my yard to keep up with the Jones.... Use organic compost teas and let nature do her thing....

Probably because farm fields need something to hold water for long periods of drought? Just a guess. Holding water on a lawn may kill the roots.

I got rid of a lot of it, here's my ending video for this thatch series that I put together just a couple weeks prior to moving away from the property last fall ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-geWkl23DTbM.html

Sorry Owen, I don't follow. Can you explain 🤔

Only qualified Greenkeepers know of black layer lol .And I am one of many.

Oooo, insider information 😃 I will look that up and see what I can learn. Thanks

@@TurfMechanic learn being a Greenkeeper first it helps .

@@owenparker636 I already started down the rabbit hole learning about this. Thanks for the tip. Started reading some golf specific publications on the topic last night. I've still got lots to learn...never stop learning 😀

You can put the plug back in

Earthworms and beneficial fauna was probably all killed off by all the chemicals applied by companies like TruGreen over time.

@@jayclyde6045 absolutely . One mix for 60 different lawns.

Good hypothesis but I cut the lawn a lot longer prior to this video and it was just as bad back then. The culprit was probably compacted soil at sod installation (2018) along with a sprinkler system that wasn't watering deeply enough for my full sun location. Only some areas of my lawn have a problem this bad so it's not a lawn maintenance practice issue, it's localized around the yard.

@@TurfMechanic aerate the lawn with liquid aeration and mechanical aeration problem solved

@@TurfMechanic when you say soil compaction, are you saying it became overly-compacted during the process of installing sod? Or was it overly compacted prior to installing the sod? What could have been done to avoid this? Possibly tilling in some compost before laying sod? I'm considering killing all of my Bermuda grass and resoding with Zoysia here in South Texas (I've got a fair amount of shade that the Bermuda grass does not like).

Exactly. It makes it harder for the grass to thrive. Too much direct sun on grass clippings and top layer. You can’t build healthy grass and soil trying to mow it like a golf course.

You’re trying to mow it like a golf course. So totally unhealthy for the soil. That’s why golf courses have to spend so much time on it. I don’t rake. I don’t bother with thatch. I just mow tall. The grass thrives and grows like crazy, material breaks down.

Airate, verticut, topdress

@@garyboardwine3349 yes, I’ve never been a big person to verticut. I do know it gets good results. Fortunately, a good long rain or watering, then a deep tine plug aeration. A good top dressing of sand, maybe a little peat moss mixed in if it can be afforded. Then maybe a few bags of washed sand every few weeks out of a rotary spreader in a smaller yard.

@@zacturf-n-sports6203 yes sir!!! We use 70 20 10 , or 90 10 mix on our putting surfaces

Also, all of my friends with kids come play in my yard during summer because they can trash my lawn and it comes out perfect after the summer. While they invest alot of money to keep theirs alive. It never looks "neat" but it functions. Thats more important to me

Not really the same thing, but the area of Kentucky I bought my house in was built up on a marshy patch of land. I literally do nothing to my lawn but have it cut every 2-3 weeks during the spring, summer, and fall and I've never had brown spots either. I do however have a lot of wild grass mixed in with the Kentucky blue that is prevalent in this area. So if I let it grow too high, my yard starts to look like a tall grass field.

Yeah, its amazing I was able to keep it green last year since I wasn't keeping a close eye on it. I knew there was a problem though just by its feel but you know how it goes, humans like to ignore problems until they are ready to deal with them.

Yep, that's one method. I tested it out a bit two years ago and have settled on feeding the microorganisms that are there, watering better, fertilizing better, and not applying chems that harm the beneficial biology in the lawn and a few other things. I have a long-standing series documenting my thatch remediation process and things are way better now than they were two years ago.

@@TurfMechanic darn nice, thanks for sharing

Sorry to disappoint, I talk a lot and most of my viewers appreciate the depth...its not for everyone though.

🤔 I'll consider your comments as a possibility even though my knee jerk reaction is to say, nah. Thanks for taking the time to spell out your theories, I value critical thinking like this.

@@TurfMechanic a good easy way to verify my comment is to go out at night with a flashlight, see how many earthworms you see, I can also see that your soil is very compacted, another sign of poor soil health, not trying to be a prick, I did learn something from college and 24years as a golf course superintendent, how often do you aerate? Or topdress, or verticut, or add soil amendments such as gypsum to relieve some of that soil compaction, or do you roll your lawn contributing to it?

What I meant by the good bacteria, and the microbes, will feed on thatch in layman's terms

@@garyboardwine3349 I can guarantee you I have tons of earthworms, my kids find them in the lawn multiple times daily and I could grab a number of them out of the lawn any time I want.. If you go back on the channel you'll see that I mechanical aerate, liquid aerate, use biostimulants, don't push fungicides or chemicals, and focus primarily on organic fertilizers and root development products like cytokinins, alfalfa meal, azomite, and michoriza. What you'll also find is that we had a landscaper install a 10 foot high retaining wall 3-4 years back and backfill the wall to give us a flat yard on our hill. This required weeks of heavy machinery compacting the sub soil before locally made top soil was placed on top (and compacted) to prevent erosion. Sod was then placed and the irrigation system was programmed improperly causing thatch on the surface to develop. Basically, my terrain is man made and the problems are man made. The soil is good but im now correcting problem(s) incrementally over time. I disagree that my management of the Turf is causing dead soil devoid of life, it is improving year after year with thoughtful maintenance and mechanical "manipulation" (aerators). Hope this gives you a better understanding of my lawn and where my challenges come from. I'll be putting a video out in the next week all about my lawn and I'll touch on a lot of this in that video. Hope you watch it and add your opinions to the comment thread. 🙂

@@TurfMechanic hey I stand corrected!!! Keep up the good work !

True,this is result of deeply unhealthy and very compect soil so roots only grow in top they can not grow deep if I am not wrong airreting once a year and add topsoil Makes root system better.

@@dilipdesai52 and stopping the addition of herbicides, commercial fertilizers, etc. The thatch doesn't break down because the soil is dead.

Well ill never convince you nor will i really try but for my family id have it no other way. We have 9 veggie beds, an 11 chicken coop with large run, dogs, ornamental garden beds full of largley hands off flowers, and our somewhat small fenced in lawn area (2500 sqft) is a safe space for my four small kids to play. I also have a full acre or more of land that is in a natural state, no lawn or landscaping. I wouldnt have it any other way and wouldnt expect anyone to fault me or anyone like me for the decisions made on our property. Lawns provide safe ground cover around homes and regardless of your thought of them your opinion is in the minority, most people want to have some lawn space even of they dont want to tend to it. 🤷‍♂️

That's 26 months after sod installation, it shouldn't look like that after such a long period of time. That's the point.

🤦where were you last year? 🙄 if only I blanketed my lawn in Epson salt, all my troubles would be over...magnesium and Sulphur. How did I miss that? 😒

@@TurfMechanic think of the best natural ingredients to decompose compost= salt, sulfer, enzyme 👍

@@Lord_Joseph17 I'm sorry, I simply disagree, although salt *may* help start a compost pile which im not convinced of at this time, it isn't helpful to add unnecessary salts to the soil in our lawns.. Elemental Sulphur will acidity soil over time while Sulphur fertilizers are primarily used in grass in chlorophyll production. Enzymes should ready exist in the soil so feeding them should help the most in the decomposition of thatch.

@@TurfMechanic what you think table salt is i dont use that...... the other salts are minerals👍👀

Interesting comment, no disrespect intended here, my entire channel here is about lawn care without using chemicals and using as many natural organic products as possible. Dig in and you'll see. My thatch problem arises from before I knew how to tend to a lawn, sod specifically. I'm correcting the problem now and it's improving significantly as time passes. I even top dressed my entire lawn this year with worm castings after core aeration and am preparing for a biochar topdressing this fall. I hope you give the channel a chance Adam! 😁