Analysis Paralysis

Welcome to Season 2, Episode 6: Analysis Paralysis.

Ever have so much to do you can't get around to doing anything at all? Summertime drought, weeds, and disease pressure can really stunt our enthusiasm about the lawn here in August.

Stay the course - fall is right around the corner! Let’s break the cycle and get back in the saddle by prioritizing long term goals through achieving small wins along the way.

We will navigate questions like - How much should I be irrigating in the heat of summer? Should I throw down fertilizer to green up my brown and crunchy lawn?  What can I do to prevent diseases and other problems in the lawn this summer?

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www.TheGrassStationPodcast.com

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The Grass Station Podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbm5NaXXm8X7rp0Nf0ygs2A

Below are a few Grass Station approved vendor and product links.

Simple Lawn Solutions:
https://www.simplelawnsolutions.com/?rfsn=5926621.534683

Petra Tools: Save 15% site wide using coupon code GSPOD15
www.petratools.com

Be sure to follow our sister account @meadowridge.homestead on IG, Facebook, and Tik Tok for a deeper connection with what we have going on around the property. Our homesteading journey has just begun, and more content will be released surrounding the property as a whole in the coming months.

Transcript

0:12

Hey, what's going on? This is Marty from the Grass Station podcast. And welcome into season two, episode six, Today's show. We're going to call analysis paralysis. I think it's pretty fitting for where I'm at right now. It's and some of you might be in the same boat. Stick around. We've got a lot to unpack. All right, guys, welcome in to another episode. First and foremost, I just want to apologize to everybody. It's been far too long since I've had an episode out. I think the last episode we were doing was the last episode I put out was back in April. Completely unacceptable, no excuses. Things have just been absolutely crazy around the homestead, and we're just swamped. We've got a lot going on. Every spring happened and the grass just took over, right? So where it used to only take me about 45 minutes to mow, another ten or 15 to trim, a couple of minutes to blow off the sidewalk. At my last property on a weekly basis, it takes me about 5 hours to finish up mowing alone. And so if I were going to do all my trimming and all my weed eating and all that stuff, it would just take far too long and there's just a lot of work to go around. Luckily, I've had a good friend of mine at the property for several weeks, one of my best buddies. He grew up running a lawn care business. He's kind of an entrepreneur. He ran a moving company. He's been one of my best friends for several years, one of the original inspirations that I had to kind of go crazy with my lawn. Now when I bought my first house, one of my first mentors who had given me a lawnmower and kind of provided me with some guidance and things like that. So a lot of fun there. We had a good time having a conversation about some of the things we've been doing around the property, giving you guys an update. So he was here right towards the end of when I put out the last episode, and he just left. He was here for good eight weeks, just helping me kind of tame the property and get things going, try to do an episode. And unfortunately, that audio file didn't make it through, but we'll have to reschedule something. It was a fun time, and he did do a lot to get us kind of up and rolling with our lawn care program there in the early spring, getting us cut. He was out there mowing two, three days a week just to try and stay on top of the dandelions out there pruning trees and just making sure that some of those things that I wasn't able to focus on while I was working, we're getting done in the early portion of spring. So that was a huge help happening in there if you've been following it all on our sister's site, the Meadow ridge homestead. We've got chickens, we've got ducks, we've got rabbits. He was always helping to feed them and give them water. So just having that extra pair of hands when we were moving into this place was huge. It was great having him. And so I was sad to see him leave, and I'm really sad that the episode didn't really pan out. Being in a different environment with some of my recording equipment didn't work so well. So, unfortunately, we're going to have to reschedule that one. But we did cover a lot about what we were doing and just kind of getting a mow under our belt every couple of days to stay on top of that and getting prepared for the season. So a big shout out to my boy dane labau. If you're at all interested in giving him a follow on instagram, check him out. His handle is dmlo b o 87. Show him some love. Give him a follow on instagram. Check it out what he's doing? He's kind of living that RV life, living on the road. Thanks again, brother. I want to get back at where we've been at seasonally, right? I think that's something that we're all interested in. What do we do now? What should we have done by now? Where are we going? Everyone's kind of thinking about what needs to happen, and we always talk about how fall time is, like, when we do all of our repairs. So right now, in the heat of summer, what are we thinking about? We're thinking about fall. Last time we spoke, we were very early on in our spring program, so we were thinking about summer and just thinking about getting our season started. So that last episode about using the weather is very fitting because weather happened. Right. Since our last episode, we have had multiple 90 plus 100 degree days, almost. We went through several different weather patterns where we were getting lots of rain. We also got some drought. We've just been up and down with the weather. It's been very dry here for the last couple of weeks, although we did get like, ten inches of rain within a matter of 24 hours, one time in the last several weeks. So that's basically what my entire yard is living off of right now. But you've got to consider where we are, where we're going, where we've been, and help yourself get through this hump of what do I do now that my lawn is, like, looking kind of brown, looking kind of crispy. We're in the middle of summer. What do I do? So hopefully by now, everyone's got several MoS under their belt. They've gotten through their spring season. They've been watering their lawns. They've gotten a taste of what that feels like to get their sprinklers out. They've gotten a taste of throwing down some fertilizer. All of the things that you enjoy doing in your lawn care program by this point now, in July, you should have a very good sense of what your lawn has already received. And now you can start to think about what you need to do for next season. Summer is kind of a reset button for us. It helps us to understand what we need to do in the fall so that we can really have a beautiful lawn again in the spring. Spring is like our morning glory. Right after you do a renovation, you've got the springtime. It's been wonderful. Then summer kicks in and separates the amateurs from the pros, from the boys, from the men, the girls from the women. And it's a time where you really have to understand how your irrigation works, how your land works, what your grass is thriving for. You just have to be on your game. And it's very difficult to maintain a pristine looking lawn through July. So right now I would say a vast majority of people are going to be looking out their window at crispy lawns. And when you're looking out the window at a crispy lawn and you don't know what to do, you start to develop all these ideas and what you want to do and what you should be doing. You start researching and that's a really good strategy, but at the same time, because you're looking out at your lawn and you know it doesn't need to be cut because it's going to get stressed out if you cut it, you start to develop an analysis paralysis. You start to like, oh, I'll do that later, I'll do this later. You kind of postpone things. You start to maybe put things off because you know you've got things to do, so you're not going to actually do what needs to be done now. So I'm going to help you guys walk through a couple of scenarios that I think are really important right now as we're going through in the middle of July. August is in a couple of weeks by the time you get this, maybe a week or two out. And that's for a lot of us, go time. They always talk about like Labor Day weekend, but if you're ready, if you're able. August is kind of the time for me where I usually start to kick into high gear and start to think about, okay, what's my lawn care program going to look like this fall? Because I can typically now not being so much the case because I have so much land. Typically I can start to think about my lawn care program in August simply because I can control the amount of water that gets put down into my lawn. I can't control that first frost, which is why it's difficult to seed in the spring, but I can control the amount of water that I put down. Typically right now I'm in a very difficult spot because I have multiple acres and my well system doesn't have the capacity to irrigate like I'd like to. Yeah. So I'm hopeful. If there's anyone out there that works on wells and works with pumps, reach out to me. Right. Sneak into my DMs on Instagram. I really need some help with being able to set up my sprinklers here at this property. So I coach a lot of people through their program, but I'm actually in a very unique situation. I've never worked with this large of a property before, and I've never worked with a well system before. So from that perspective, I'm looking for some people that are experienced in this that could kind of walk me through some of the things that I need to do. One of those things I've actually looked at is like, getting a separate water holding solution. You'll see why I've got analysis paralysis and all this. I'm just going to walk you guys through some of my plans, but having a separate water system outside of my well would be beneficial. I worry about draining the well. People have talked about this quite a bit. I'm not sure if it's like a rumor or if it's actually possible. I think if you have a certain type of well, you're more susceptible to dry up, but also the damage it could do to your pump if you do finally go dry. And I don't want to put my family's water supply at risk by overrunning the sprinklers as well. So there's a lot of these give and take so that I got to figure out on my particular system. And that's what you're going to have to do too. Most people aren't going to have those challenges simply because you're running off of city water, and city water is going to have the pressure that you need. You won't have to worry about drying up the well or an aqua for none of that's really going to apply to you. But if you are on well, it provides its own specific challenges. One of the nice things about it is I get a little bit of iron that comes out from the Earth through my well system because the water that goes to my spigots is not iron filtered. My house is. I've got an iron filter that goes through the house, but it does not go through to the spigots outside. So that being said, I get a little bit of iron as things go through into the yard. I have like two or three working spigots right now. One of them needs to be replaced, and I just don't get the pressure that I need to be able to run sprinklers off them, which is very frustrating for sure. As someone that's a total lawn geek, I want to be out there doing as much as I can to throw down water and get things repaired. So my repairs have been put on a massive hold because I don't have the irrigation, and that's going to be probably like 80% to 90% of people's hang up. You know, it's got to be the irrigation piece. If you can't irrigate the seed, it's not going to survive. It's just not going to happen. If you're waiting for mother nature to take over, you're much better off doing that in a season like fall or spring. You're not trying to do that here in August. You're not trying to do that here in July. It's possible, absolutely. But it's only possible with water. You cannot grow seed without water. So you have to start to think about your irrigation schedules. And as we're in July now, hopefully a lot of people are already familiar with what they need to be doing. Go back, listen to my irrigation episode. I talk a lot about getting down certain solo cups and kind of filling them up, seeing how long it takes to fill up a half inch, seeing how long it takes to fill up a quarter inch, and then just verifying around the yard, making sure all of those cups match, helping you calibrate your sprinklers and things like that. That's a really big, important piece to making sure you get even coverage. This is what really makes your DIY lawn look pro status. You've got to have even coverage. You can't have overspray in the front where your sprinkler head is, and then way in the back, you don't get anything because it's just the trail ends of the sprinkler spray. You got to make sure you're getting head to head coverage. I talk about it in that irrigation episode in season one, but it's important to refresh yourself in that. It's important to make sure that you know how your irrigation is set up, how it's working, how many hoses you have, what's your pressure. Get geeky with it. You got to figure out how much water has got to go down. And it's not just time. This is such a common misconception, not really. Within the DIY community. I feel like they get it because they listen and they follow these podcasts, and they listen to other guys, and they watch YouTube videos, and they're well versed in what needs to happen. It's like the guys that whose uncle tells them to how handle their lawn or first home buyers or just people that aren't really familiar. Even within the lawn care community, there are people that don't quite understand. It's not so much about the time. It's about the amount. Right. So I heard the other day, and this is actually really important from my understanding. 1 second. All right, so it takes roughly 325,851 gallons to water an acre of land to a depth of 1ft. That's wild. So the idea here is that you want to go that deep. It's deep, but infrequent this is a better one here. So if this one is more applicable to how we as DIYers would water our lawn. So if you're trying to go to the depth of 1ft, that's a tremendous amount of water, a tremendous amount of water. 3250 gallons to cover one acre to a depth of 1ft. So it's equivalent to 43,560 cubic feet for 325, 851 gallons. Wow. But we're not thinking like that, right? We're not going down twelve inches. That's really not feasible for most people. You'd be running your sprinklers twenty four, seven, plus you have some kind of massive sprinkler equipment. It's going to be very difficult to run that much water to be able to get that deep of watering. Now, that'd be great if you could. Absolutely. It's a ton of water. It's going back into your soil. It's going to give you beautiful grass. But that's really like, if you're going to establish sod on like a football field, right, this is more appropriate. So it takes 27,154 gallons of water to irrigate one acre of land with an inch of water. All right. That's something I can work with, because we talk about irrigation a lot, and we talk about how much water needs to go down in terms of quantity, not in terms of time. However much time it takes to put down one quarter of inch of water every time you rain or every time you irrigate is more important than sitting on your sprinklers for 4 hours, 2 hours or 1 hour or 10 hours. Right. I don't know how much water your sprinkler puts out. I don't know the gallons per minute that your hoses can provide, but I do know how much water it takes in order to properly irrigate that land. Right. It takes 27,154 gallons of water to irrigate one acre of land with an inch of water. So for me, if I was going to do that, I got to figure out so it's one inch of water, 27,150, 51, four divided by four. I need about 6700 gallons of water to do a quarter of an inch. That's important because that's a very light watering. 6500 gallons is a very light watering. Sometimes if you're going to be doing a certain application of, say, grub control, you don't want a quarter of an inch. But if you want something very small, you maybe get a spray that's going to require you to come in and just basically wet it so that you don't have it burn on the leaf tissue. Right. Something you would do as a hose end sprayer you choose to do in your backpack sprayer instead. Then you're going to do a quarter of an inch of water just to water it in. You know what I mean? Different products require different amounts of watering, so it's important to understand where you're at in that quarter of a gallon or a quarter of an inch. So for me, for one acre would be 6700 gallons. So then I start to think, what do I need in order to do a quarter of an acre or a quarter of an inch? If I need 6700 gallons, I should probably have 10,000 gallons, right? Just to be safe, maybe I want to do a half inch. But I would need more than that. I would need 27 154 divided by 467.88.5 times two. So I would need about 13,500 gallons of water to do a half inch on one acre. Now you got to think too, I'm not just on one acre. I'm on five acres. And I'm not planning on irrigating everything. But man, I'd really love to get, like, the one acre that's in front of my house and maybe some of the acreage that's in my septic field. But that's really not my main focus. My main focus is the one acre, the west pasture. That's Dad's pasture. So I'm using that one acre as my benchmark, right? So I should probably have like, 15,000 gallon storage if I want to just hit the lawn with half an inch to three quarters of an inch of water to water something in. If I want to be able to do that, that's how much water I need. It's a tremendous amount of water. And a 5000 gallon tank is like five grand from certain places. So, again, if there's anybody out there that knows who to talk to to get better rates and get better deals I'm new to this industry. I'm very interested. I need to get big pumps. I need two inch hoses. I've been looking up like, Big Sprinkler and trying to figure out how I can get in touch with them, too. So this is an exciting area for me that I'm kind of just plowing my way through into right now. And it's just been tricky because I was hopeful to use my regular well system because everyone talks like, hey, when you're on well, you got a limited amount of water, right? But you're limited by your pump and you're limited by your wellbeing or whatever it's called and like, the pressure that you're able to have on your hoses. So different things that I'm learning as I'm living here and moving through the process of owning this type of property, it's definitely a challenge and love some help in a few areas. If there's people out there that are familiar with well systems, that are familiar with irrigation on large properties, if you're familiar with big sprinkler equipment, by all means reach out to me at Grass Stationpodcast Instagram. It's the Grass Station podcast on Instagram or on Facebook at Grass Stationpod while TikTok twitter all that stuff. Excited about Segway here. Excited about being able to soon release some more detail on our coaching program? The Grasstationpodcast.com is going to be kind of a central hub for some of what you're looking for in terms of that coaching. I'm going to have a bunch of my episodes listed up there. We're working on building that out right now. And then if you wanted to be able to get my time and kind of sign up for coaching calls or be able to sign up for some kind of regular coaching. There'll be an option for you guys to do that too. At The Grasstationpodcast.com is not live right now, but it is in development, so stay tuned for that. I'll definitely post something once it goes live and you guys will be able to jump on there. Probably have a discount code on a couple of things just to get the party started on there. So very cool to say that things are moving forward in that direction. It's been wild. It's been a wild ride and that's why things have been so busy here. I haven't had the chance to just sit down and talk about what's been happening. I've had analysis paralysis, right? I'm over here trying to figure out my sprinklers. Ultimately, I haven't irrigated anything because I can't get them to work to the way that I want them to work. So nothing's being irrigated, right? And that's ultimately what happens, right? You start to overthink things and you start to be like, well, nothing works. And instead of taking action, what I should have been doing is working with what I have to kind of make do with a certain area in my yard. I was really focused on getting my west acre up and running. I thought right away, one acre, I'm going to upgrade from my 10,000 square foot to an acre and we'll be fine. I've done it before. I know what I'm doing. I didn't. I bit off more than I could chew with thinking that I could just jump into that larger space because I would have been ready if the property was different. It was a different type of property where it was already an established one acre lawn, already had sidewalks, already had trees edged out. All these things that currently are holding me back. Now at my property, there's a lot of not just upkeep, but things that need to be repaired and maintained and upgraded at my property that have held me back, right? So it's not like a very fair comparison from where I was at. It a pristine 10,000 sq ft. Perfectly solid lawn where everything was cleanly edged and it was completely finished. Right now, I not only need to maintain what exists, I need to upgrade and repair. So that's been holding me back too, right? Like, why waste money and product on something that I know that I'm going to need to repair? So that's been a hard place for me. And again, analysis paralysis, I'm like, oh, I got to repair the whole acre. What if we have we're going to get more animals. Instead of taking action, I'm thinking about ten different things, twelve different things, and ultimately doing nothing. You have to be careful. It's very easy in this industry to overthink and underdo. It's also easy to overdo and underthink. You've got to find that balance of what is important and what's necessary versus what you want to do and what needs to be done. And everyone's going to kind of teeter that line of what needs to happen now. And that's where we really come into play. I know that I've got analysis paralysis on my property, but I'm very good at walking people through their conditions and finding ways to solve their problems. Right? It's one of my favorite things to do really is creative problem solving is kind of like the core of everything that I'm good at with my job, with the lawn, with all my interests, everything that I do is about creative problem solving. It's kind of like one of the core elements of who I am as a person. And when I hear about the problems that you're having, it really excites me. It does. And I find ways to help you through it because when I see you succeed, that's when I feel like I've succeeded. It's very like primal for me. When I see some people that I'm working through their programs and then see their lawns, I'm just incredibly proud for allowing that passion to come through. And it's just something that brings me joy. Right? So if you need help, if you know somebody that needs help them through this podcast, tell a friend that has a struggle to jump onto the podcast and start to listen. Maybe jump on the Instagram page and ask some questions because I'm available to that. I'm less and less available now that things are growing in other areas. But that's why I'm really excited to be soon launching this new platform and a new Facebook group and a couple of other things too, that are going to be a lot of fun for us to be able to develop a community around the grass station. So there's a lot of things that are just moving in very fast paced directions. The property is a ton to be managing right now. Just look, I've spent what, for eight weeks since I've had an episode put out. I'm growing thin in a few areas, but I definitely want to maintain this as the show that I put out to you guys for free always. And having a little bit of my time available to people that have more specific questions is something I'm really interested in starting up. So back to where I'm at with the property in terms of analysis paralysis. Some of the things that you guys are going to be experiencing right now is some of that very similar irrigation issues. Right? Get your irrigation set up. If you got questions, reach out to us. Fertilizer. What do you do with your fert right now? People in the middle of summer are like, hey, my grass looks like really brown. I need to throw a heavy fertilizer on it to clean it up. And this is something that couldn't be worse, really couldn't. Like if you've got a brown dormant lawn, it couldn't be worse right now for you to be throwing down heavy amounts of fertilizer, especially if you're not irrigating. Now, if you're irrigating regularly and your lawn is still showing up brown, then you could have some other things going on. Now, keep in mind, watering is not meant to replace. It's meant to be an additive to mother nature. So from that perspective, if you are in a super dry spell and you're still irrigating, you may need to up your irrigation. It may just not be as effective as it was when it was getting some rain. But if you are getting rain, if you are putting down water and you do still have extensive brown spots, you have a couple of things that could be happening. It could be insects, right? It could be grubs or it could be a disease. Brown patch right now is running rampant. Rice Octonia. Such a fancy name, right? Rice Octonia. But no, the brown patch is definitely something that can decimate your lawn. There's a good guy on one of the instagram pages, ambitious lawn that I follow. And the poor guy made his whole backyard getting eaten up by this brown patch. Feel bad for him. But he's done it though. He's got the right idea. What you do in this circumstance is you want to use some propyconosal and Zoxystroben if you can. So Scott's Disease x product. You can get it at Home Depot. Throwing that down and hoping for the best, right? Sometimes these things will happen. I got a disease last year I was so mad. So mad. Just destroyed a section of my front lawn. But it was my fault. I didn't have my irrigation tuned up to the point that I realized I was putting out way too much water in one little section. The head was not the right head for that particular spot. And that was really ultimately it was on my irrigation company. But I should have replaced that head after having done extensive walkthroughs and monitoring of my system that I was getting too much water. My house would block it from getting sunlight for the majority of the day. So it just sit there wet. I got like 2 hours of full sun on that one section. So it just really destroyed it. And that's not uncommon, right? People that are like, oh, it's super hot, super hot. I've got a water water. And that's usually the right case. But if your humidity levels are not right, then you're really looking at this kind of storm of fungus.

If your humidity is like 60 or 70% going into like nine or 10: 27:48

00, you're in trouble. There's a formula for it. I got to look back and find out exactly what it is. But there's a dew point formula that will help identify what your problem zones would be. And I check it now. Like when I'm weather app, like dew point never made any sense to me, but basically it's when the moisture. In the air will turn into water droplets and that will sit wet on your lawn all night and that's going to help contribute to that fungus issue, especially if you're overwatering than in the morning. One of the things you can do to prevent that is to, in the mornings, strip the yard of dew by irrigating or by doing some kind of brush off some of the greenskeepers. And golf guys, they use like rope, like ATVs on two sides and the carts or whatnot. And they'll be dragging a rope to beat off all of the don't say that as a family podcast. Don't beat it off the water, off of the greens, through using this rope and they'll just kind of drag it from one side to the other. And that's an option too. But that's definitely a pro tip for you guys if you can get out there, especially if you have like a smaller lawn to be able to just brush off that morning dew. The morning dew is filled with sugars and all sorts of stuff that is not super great for your lawn to be sitting on the leaves. You want to brush it off and give it a chance to kind of settle down into the soil so that the plant can use it as moisture. So I can't stress enough the importance of making sure that your irrigation is on point right now. For those of you that are looking for some kind of like in between above ground, below ground option, there's these rain bird click in and I don't know if you've seen them, but I know there's like Amazon Prime days coming up and Home Depot typically has these on clearance for some reason. They're awesome. I think Jake the lawn Katie did a video on this the other day. They're popping up in my Home Depot all over the place right now. I'm not sure, obviously because it's July and people are selling irrigation equipment because it's hot out, but yeah, definitely these are really cool. You like bury them and then all you have to do is come in and click your hose into them. So you got like quick connects, right? You got to just throw on a quick connect in there and you don't have to calibrate the sprinkler at all. You just set it and forget it. And you obviously pull out the sprinkler when you're done before you mow and everything like that and it settles back down just like an ingredient sprinkler would. It's a great option for people that are looking for some kind of irrigation this year. Of course, I always like to use the tripods. I feel like getting it up higher is something that helps. I've just had good luck and good success with that. So something I continue to use. But now I'm definitely going to upgrade into the big sprinkler world and I got to get bigger pumps and I've got to get things rolling. So get your irrigation on point, get yourself out there, test it out with the tunican or the Solo Cup, whatever you got, and just try and figure out your best strategy for watering right now. Keep it alive. But if you can't keep it alive, let it go dormant. I know it hurts. It hurts so bad, let it go dormant. If you can't keep up with the watering, let it go dormant. If you can't afford the water bill right now, let it go dormant. If you're worried that the grass isn't going to come back and it's going to die because you didn't water it, let it go dormant. It'll be fine. Grass does what grass does. It really is grass grows through a crack on the highway. It's really resilient as a plant. And I know everyone is super worried, oh, you got to water it just to keep the crowns wet. And yeah, that'd be great. It would be. But there's nothing more sad to me than watering a dormant lawn. That's awful. It's absolutely terrible. You're spending money for something that's ultimately going to get done by Mother Nature. Comefall I know it prolongs the whole process of getting your lawn back, but if you've already gotten to the point of allowing your yard to go dormant, let it go dormant. Let it stay. Let it sleep. Don't stress it out even more by letting it kind of like half sleep and then come back to life just because you want it to be green. Doesn't work that way. Life happens. And unfortunately, watering our lawns is a luxury, especially when gas prices are over 550 for a gallon of gas. Jeez, it's like, what is it, 595 right now? It's absolutely insane what gas prices are, but that's not the point. We're not talking about that. But it's important. It's something we need to be considering. We need to always be aware of what our budget is. And this is where some people have massive analysis paralysis. Right? Keeping to the theme, you talk about budget. I'm in a position that my budget is completely screwed. I don't even have a budget. I don't know what we need to spend in order to get it done, because I've never renovated something this big before. It's going to be huge. It's going to be massively expensive. But I'm going to have to do it in stages and we will. We're going to do the full acre. It's probably going to take me two years to renovate the full acre. I want to do some things this year, but be working towards a goal and always have like, a two, three year program. You got to be thinking about multiple years because one season isn't enough. I used to tell people when I would take them on for coaching, we got to do this for a full year, right? We can't willy nilly this. We can't work together for a couple of weeks and think that we're going to get you where we need to get you because you need the full year commitment. You need to look at your lawn care program as an entire season. Things that happen in the spring are not happening in the summer. Things that are happening in the summer are certainly not happening in the winter. Things are happening in the winter, not happening the fall or the spring. Right. Your spring and your fall weather is similar, but they're just still different. And it's important to carry your season all the way through because it's not just about what's happening right now for the next six weeks. It's what's happening six weeks after that, what's happening six weeks after that, and what's happening six weeks after that. It's important to always be thinking about what the journey is for your lawn care. It's never stopping, it's always moving, and you're always taking steps, trying to improve that next stage of development. Right? So you've got to be thorough with it. You've got to go for multiple seasons. You got to think multiple seasons out. And that's something you have to really think about with your budget. Right. If you know you're going to do certain things in the yard and you don't want to renovate right away or whatever the case may be, you have to spread those things out so that you can manage them appropriately. And that's where we're at right now with some of what we're doing here. So I've been focusing, wow, I really want to level things out. Like, if I want to get 50 cubic yards of sand and soil to be able to do that, it's going to cost me a lot of money. Right. And I'm probably going to need a lot more than that for the improvement that I'm trying to make. I'm going to need a significant amount of earth, so I've opted not to do that quite yet. We'll get there and it's going to take some time. But what are some strategies that I could do? What are some things that I could do that are not massively expensive, that are still going to help me get in the right direction, that are still going to help me achieve my goal, but maybe not as quickly. It'd be way better for me to get a skid steer and a team out there, strip the hole on, level it out, get everything out, throw a new seed. But then I got to pay a crew, I got to rent a skid steer, I got to get seed, I got to get soil, I got to get sand. I also have to irrigate. I don't have an irrigation set up to be able to irrigate an entire acre of freshly seeded lawn. Right. So I'm going to have to oversee, period. There's no option. I'm going to have to wait for the Mother nature to take that seed into fruition this year. It's just not an option for me to kill it off if it were a smaller space, it's dead. I'm killing it or restarting. But what's my strategy? What can I do to the guys that are like, trying to stretch their budget? This is where, again, I feel like we really are good at finding the solution for the specific situation that you're in. I have friends that have recommended things where I would not do it that way. Right. But it's how it works for them and it's how it works for their budget and it's how it works for their time commitment and how it works for their family. Right? So what's the solution here? I heavily considered getting a steamroller on the property. And this is going to do a couple of things. It's going to level out all of the horse indentations from the prior owner. Like I've told you guys, anyone that's been listening to my show knows that the prior owner had horses. So prior owner had horses and she had this little section that she would practice in one acre. It's almost like a big triangle. And I can totally see every single run that she did throughout the property. It's not terrible, but in this one section is really bad. It's really invented in the triangle space where she would practice jumps and she would do all sorts of things, right. So I've got to clear that out and I need to add soil and sand in that area in order to make that right. But I'm not doing a full scale repair like you would like you'd see out on a golf course with guys and they're leveling rakes and they're putting in sand and soil mixtures everywhere. I can't do that yet. It's just too expensive. So I'm thinking about doing a steamroller on a day where maybe it's a day after a light rain and the ground is not completely hardened. It will be a good opportunity for me to go out and level out as much as I can. And yes, this is absolutely going to compact the lawn 1000%. But what I'm going to do after that is I'm going to come back over it and I'm going to aerate the heck out of it and just pull those plugs because that's going to help give me that seed to soil contact for being able to throw seed down. So I'm doing a lot of different things there. And I already own the aerator. I don't have to rent an aerator. I will have to rent the steamroller. But the steamroller is going to get all of those really big horse hooves out, right? And then we're going to evenly compact the entire property because that's the difference. Right now. I have sections that are heavily compacted in certain areas which need to be repaired, but the whole entity of the lawn is incohesive. Right? There are certain areas that are better. There are certain areas that are worse. So by taking the steamroller and literally flattening the land, I'm evenly compressing the soil level. And that's going to help me out tremendously. I mean, the bumps I've had to replace like the tire. My front zero turn tire, six times, seven times, it keeps coming off. Sends a funny meme to my buddy about it. It's like three of your mower tires will be fine and then one will just be totally wonky. And that's really happening to me. My front left tire on the zero turn keeps just rolling off the rim. And it's because of all these bumps and undulations that I have on the property. It's not meant for the amount of work that I'm putting it through. I'm really beating the hell out of it. And it's definitely taking more than I think it should. It's a 42 inch coral time cutter cutting five acres a week. I'm putting about 6 hours a week on it. So she's a workhorse right now. She's definitely doing some serious work. Heavy lifting, putting her through her paces. And I'm also using her to drag liquids. I'm using her to drag the aerator. So she's getting put some work on. Definitely. The ground has been hard and it's just not ideal situation for her. It's not the best mower for my property. I need a bigger mower. I need bigger tires. And I'm thinking about doing the Titan. Max. I think that's what I want to go with. I also need to have a whole I need to test a whole bunch of them. I need to figure out exactly what I want. It's another paralysis situation for me, right? It's so many different options of lawnmower. So many are so expensive. What do I want? More. Do I want to level the lawn? Do I want to buy that 72 inch lawn mower this year? Do I want to irrigate my lawn? Or do I want to buy groceries and fuel today? You really need to balance a lot of things. If you're struggling with your budget, the loan almost always comes last. But there are certain things that you've got to make sure that you're doing in order to have a healthy lawn. And if you're someone that wants that healthy lawn here in the middle of July and you have the money to be able to run your sprinklers and you've got the ability to be able to have a beautiful lawn, hey, go for it. That's what we're here for. That's what I'm here to help you do. But if you also want to do what you can to get to that next stage, we have that solution for you as well. Customs, how we work. We help you through your specific problems so that you can solve whatever it is that you're going through. Right? We all have different properties. We all have different situations. We all have different schedules. We all have different budgets. There's no way that one lawn care program works for every single person out there. There's no way that it works for half of the people out there. Everyone's got a different situation going on. Let us help you. If you need help, reach out to us. Like I said, it's going to be up on our website, The Grasstationpodcast.com. For now, the best place to reach me is at the Instagram page at the Grass Station podcast. So the theme that we had for everything so far has been this analysis paralysis, right? You're overthinking things and you're not doing what needs to get done. We talked about not having any spraying done. We talked about not having the chemicals down. We didn't do any herbicide, we didn't do anything. And again, I've only put down in a couple of spaces, but I'm getting there, right? I realized that we had this analysis paralysis and I went ahead and I did my front area. I said, forget it. I'm going to focus on my 10,000 sqft in the front of the house. That's it. And that's what I did. I put down some herbicide, I put down some fertilizer, and I'm working on that space. We're irrigating it a little bit. I've taken a little bit of extra time to focus on that space and say, I'll get to the acre when I get to the acre. You got to break the cycle. You can't continue to do nothing. At least I can't. Some people, they're fine and they don't want to do it and they'll wait until things pick back up in the fall and that's fine. But I needed to break the cycle. So I decided that the front area is where I'm going to focus on right now and we're going to get that area taken care of. And you know what? It got me out there. I attached our lawnmower, our lawn sprayer to the lawnmower. I hooked it up, I put 30 gallons of liquid into it and we got rolling, right? I put another bit of fertilizer down on the one full acre because I'm still kind of working on that area. And you do what you can. You do the best you can with what you've got. If you've got time to do it, make it happen, right? I'm going to let you guys off just with this thought of do as much as you can with what you have. It's important that you are still present in your family's life. It's important that you're still present in your kids life and your work life and all the things that you have going on. It's important that you do as much as you can with what you have and you're not jeopardizing all the other things you have in your life. It's very easy to say, I need to spend as many hours out there as possible. I need to do all this research. But at the end of the day, your backyards for your kids. Don't stress too hard about what's going on. Don't give yourself anxiety over all the things that need to get done that you don't ultimately end up doing anything. That happens far too often, and I see it all the time, and it's happened to me. It's happening to me, right? And you have to make sure that you're not causing yourself the anxiety to the point that you're not taking action. You've got to take action. Always take action. When in doubt, mow it out, right? I think there are several people in the industry that said, if that's copywritten, I apologize. I know. Alan says it. I think John Perry said it, but it's true. Like, at the end of the day, you just get out there, you mow the lawn, right? If you mow a dormant lawn, it's okay, it's okay. It's going to be fine. It's going to be fine. Maybe not the best thing for it. Maybe it's not going to recover perfectly until the following season, but he'll be fine. He'll be fine. You can't do nothing. It's better to make a mistake than to do nothing, in my opinion, because you can always repair it. At the end of the day, something doesn't work out right, you can chop it up, you can throw down some sod you can throw down some more seed. Grass can be fixed. The memories that you have with your kids are going to be more important, right? Do I put down a slip and slide? And you start thinking about all the things that can happen. You guys in your lawn groups are saying, oh, they know it's going to kill the grass. It's going to do this or that. Do the slip and slide. Give the kids the time, but be smart about it. Don't leave it for two or three days, because then it's going to burn. When they're done using it, you take it up, let them have the pool, but when they're done with the pool, it's gone. There's got to be the give and the take. There's got to be the compromise. There's got to be the ability to have the fun, to use the yard for what it's meant to be used for. Otherwise, it's just you looking at some pretty grass, and there's a time, and there's a place for it, and there's also, hopefully, a space in your lawn for just that. Right? That's my west acre. Stay out of the west pasture. Stay out of the out of the west pasture. They had space eventually, and we know that. That's how it works. A lot of people have their front lawns are for them. The back lawns are for the kids. They're thinking, oh, I got to rope off the back. I got an area I got to see. I got to keep the dogs off, I got to keep the kids off. And ultimately, nothing happens in your yard. Looks like garbage. You've got to take action. So do that. Go outside, inspect your lawn, walk your land, and figure out what it is that it needs right now. Find out where it's calling out your name to say, hey, I need something. Because July is going to tell you, right, this is the time. July is going to tell you what your lawn needs. If there's low spots in your area, if there's something buried into the lawn, you're not doing irrigation, it's going to brown out quicker. Maybe you got crumbs somewhere. The grass is going to pull right out because they're eating the weeds or eating the roots. And it's going to be easy to identify that here in the summer. So I just want everybody to go out, see what your lawn needs. Don't be terrified. It's probably not going to look the best that it's ever looked, but it'll tell you. And then you get to make the choice as to what you want to do and what you need to do. If you need any help with that, please feel free to reach out to us at the Grand Station Podcast. Stay tuned for when we go live on the website. I'm letting people know the website will be coming. It's the Grass Stationpodcast.com and it'll be just a fun place for us to hopefully build a community and get some things down into a more formalized area where you can go back and listen to episodes that will be more readily available to you versus in the Instagram format. And I know other people have been asking me for the ability to direct them to a place where they can get some more information. So the Grass stationpodcastcom as well as Instagram station podcast. Until next time, guys. Take care, stay safe, stay hydrated out there. Stay cool. It's going to be hot for the next couple of weeks and very soon we need to start thinking about our full programs. Get your seed, get everything that you need kind of lined up for the next stage of that fall phase. Start to think about what's going to need. Like I said, walk your properties, get out there, have fun. Until the next one. We'll see you. The Grass Station Podcast provides weekly updates, tips, product reviews, and coaching on cool season residential loan programs, helping you save time, effort, and money all season long.