After long drought, should I remove many thick Kikuyu vines/runners?

[OnTheGrass]

We definitely have a shorter blade growing in the lawn. The Kikuyu has rebounded back ok but in parts all that is left are vine like runners and mossy turf. Some are very brown and possibly dead. Should these thicker vines be removed?

Kikuyu vine remove?

Ive also noticed a lot of moss around them.

A sorry state of affairs we took over when acquiring the property. Id really like a finer blade for my golf fairway like lawn, but then this appears a very lush green colour where it is healthy. I assume the finer patches are some kind of rye. Id like to dig it all out and start again as I dont think I could overseed Kikuyu with a finer blade variety successfully like a Fine Fescue.

Either way should these stringer type vines be removed?

 

[OnTheGrass]

Because we are based on reactive clay, Im also considering a clay breaker product and over seeding with some fescue in the 100% shadey areas.

 

[bertsmobile1]

What you can do if you can hire one is get a slitter and run this across the grass in both forth south & east west
Some call this device a rotary knife or a zero till plow or rotary scarrifer
This will chop the runners into individual plants.
Every where that has a root will become a fresh runner so you will end up with a finer lawn.
You can also run the slitter over the grass very shallow after over seeding with a different grass.
Clay breaker, sand , compost & charcoal will all go a long way to stabilizing the soil.
Even top dressing with 3" of a soil sand mix will work wonders as the top dressing prevents the clay drying out during drought.
In high rainfall seasons the clay will fully charge with water and remain a source of water for the grass well into a very long drought as it can neither bake nor evaporate.

 

[OnTheGrass]

@bertsmobile1 thanks brother. thats exactly what I wanted to know.

Given the patchy areas are in shade of a massive pine and a big native all year round, only getting dappled light. is Fescue a good choice to overseed this area with?

Currently we have 5" Kikuyu in sunny parts which looks over grown and in other parts some Kikuyu long blades but have fallen over sideways and then other parts we have no grass and some parts some grass of a really fine blade which looks much nicer.

Im a bit afraid to dig up the Kikuyu as Im told you can never get rid of it once its there, but this finer blade grass looks nicer and seems slightly more shade tolerant. Ive inherited a very small 70sqm of contradiction haha. I must say Kikuyu at about 60cm looks nice and dark green just with some rain.

Yes this reactive clay has caused issues with house movement due to the drought. Hopefully this year we dont get another drought.

I feel it drying up so much is the main issue and will be a fight to get the grass back, it may need spot treatment.

A scarifier machine kind of looks like an aerator? It is different machine to a dthatcher?

Also compost, we have a rotary compost bin all our household green waste and egg shells go into along with some green material, can this be used to spread across the lawn?

 

[bertsmobile1]

I bought the very first Osborne Metal Industries compost tumbler back in the 60's and used it till 2005 when the drum finally got beyound repair.
Fast hot composting produced a coarse compost that is great on the garden but not too good on grass.
Get the biggest stationary bin you can get your hands on.
Toss the compost from your tumbler into the bin with a generous hand full of lime plus an equal amount of blood & bone .
After a few months this will break down into a soil like texture and hopefully be full of worms.
Spread this over your grass at least 1" thick.
Only take from the bottom of the bin and only take about 1/2 of it at any one time.
IT will take a long time to cover all of your lawn like this , but it of course cheap.
IF you want to get into compost, then ring around your local lawn mowing services to see if they will drop some clippings off to you.
Then a chook farm for some chook poo.
With a tumbler you can do all grass compost by piling up the grass clippings and mixing the dry ones from the outside of the heap with the wet ones from the middle and turning the tumbler at least 2 times a day.
Microbes do not sleep so you can turn it 3 or 4 times a day.
Since the tumbler dies , I have been using smaller bins ( about 13 gal ) as I can't get a tumbler big enough, the old one was around 60 gallons.
There is 12 bins , all picked up from road side clean ups.
When I mow the grass gets tossed into them with some manure .
Every day I toss each bin into the one next door, starting at the end with an empty one.
With a hay fork, take about 2 to 4 minutes a bin.
When they have cooled down the contents go into a big bin for the final rot.
Right now in winter I am only using 4 bins, in high summer I use all 12.
When they are full, the mower gets set to mulch.
I get about 200 gallons of compost a year like this which gets used to build up the garden soil here which is in a flood plane so is very fine silty soil with no organic matter.
I hve jut started making charcoal from the smaller branches of the fallen trees & am experimenting with different ways of making & processing it.

 

[OnTheGrass]

@bertsmobile1 thank you kindly sir, you are a wealth of knowledge. If im honest we don't really know what we are doing with the compost. Of course our non meat food and waste scraps go in it, but as my John Deere only collects (no mulcher) I had 70 litres of clippings this last time as it it was overdue and I went too low on the kikuyu, it loses that intense green, thats when you know its too low. I think you can get away with 2" at the most. Anyway we are unsure how much grass clippings we should be adding to the tumbler?

But that bin with lime sounds sensational. Does the lime just help break down the grass?

So I have some fescue seeds, I plan to use in the bare shadey areas and oversow the edges of kikuyu with it.

This is our composter, any tips on adding grass and how much and how quickly does grass break down? It is 245l, Was $400 in my country, but its sooooo easy to use vs the bin type composting. In saying that, if the excess grass can still be used Im all for that. I would say 90% of the compost is food and paper waste, only meat like stuff that goes near it is eggs shells. Lots of Espresso grinds and tea leaves along with scrapings of leftover veggies. We see it as a total waste to put this into landfill, in fact its a crime people almost everything in landfill. Batteries being one of the worst. There should be dead battery bins at our super markets as we are a very green focussed nation but some things are hipocracy.

 

[bertsmobile1]

The problems with small tumblers like yours is they tend to roll the contents into balls then no air gets in and it goes rancid.
When that happens the only way out is to run them through a shredder or dig a hole & burry them and let them rot down anerobically.
Note when he empties the bin it is full of nuggets or clusters and not earthy looking compost.
For beginners all you really need to worry about is balancing the wet & dry.
I find that food scraps, coffee grounds & such are better in a worm farm.
Keep the tumbler for clippings , manure shredded leaves & sawdust.
From your high school chemistry days, the finner the particals the faster the reaction
A grass clipping will be fully composted in 2 to 3 weeks
A potato peeing will take better than a full month.
And bannana leaves as shown at the start of the clip will take forever.
Once you learn to read too wet & too dry then start to worry about the alphabet soup ( P:K:N ratios )
The more varied the fill, the easier it will be make compost
So if you have a lot of leaves or shrub clippings , shred them and mix them in about 2 grass to one other ratio
Then start turning.
Turing both morning & night will also speed up the process. In summer I used to turn 4 times a day & have compost in 5 days,
What you are trying to do is get air into the material and distribute moisture
The bacteria need food, air & water.
Organic matter rotting down with plenty of air will be alkaline
Organic matter rotting down without enough air will be acid
The acid kiils the bacteria that create alkaline compost so you toss in some lime to keep the pH high which gives you more wriggle room on aeration .
Your bin is only big enough for about 6 catchers full of material so 4 grass & 2 other and that would be a very small lawn.
So you are going to need some bins to hold the material waiting to go into the tumbler.
When working properly your bin should have a sweet ammonia smell about it and no vinegar flies.
I can get the primary break down in 5 to 7 days but it took a long time to get to that level and lots of stinking foul loads burried in the yard .
I got a worm farm called "Barrel of Worms" , again from the kerbside rubbish collection and 5 rectangular worm farms.
The rectangular ones do not work anywhere near as well as the round ones as it can not get enough air in to keep the worms happy.
For a rough idea, my diet is primarily fruit & veg , mostly home grown and I get 1 bin full of vermipost every 4 years ( the stack has 4 active bins & a drain )
But it produces about 20 gallons of concentrated worm tea and that gets dilluted about 20:1 and then watered onto the veggies & particularly the citrus trees.
Trying to run this stuff through the compost tumbler just caused me untold grief .
I also have black & decker shredded & a Granburg shredder/mill .
If you want fine earth like compost you need to grind the feed stock up fine.
Chainsaw sawdust is excellent feed and you can use ash in place of lime if you have a wood heater.
A little lime on the worm farm works wonders as well.
And using the worm water in the compost tumbler if it needs wetting works wonders as well.

The important thing to keep in mind is you are ding this to recycle lawn clippings and not will "best compost in show " awards.

We have gotton a long way off grass so Iif you want to continue this subject, might be a good idea to start a new thread "using a compost tumble Vs bins "or some thing similar.
I an sure there will be a lots of sob stories about tumbles going horribly wrong.

 

[OnTheGrass]

@bertsmobile1 I really wanted a worm farm and I see how juice is made. But we just dont have the room. We only have 60sqm of Lawn

Strangely ours comes out much darker than his, but we have not used any grass clippings yet, just stufff from the garden. Mostly we have tried to fork it into the bare patches of dried up soil to recondition it. You do not get a lot as you say, but enough for this. Long term it was not for the grass it was for the garden.

On a ratio how much grass clippings per 135l side would be ok? I have 70l bag which she wants to take with a lot of dead plant material and pay somebody at the green waste station. I dont want to be doing that every time I move the lawn.

 

[bertsmobile1]

A worm farm requires 2 square foot of space.
In Toyoko they have them under the kitchen sink.
As for your tumbler the answer is 2/3 full .
I ffed my works all the kitchen scraps, coffee grounds from the local resterunt and spent cropping plants like tomatoe vines & eggplants after harvest.
I also give them weeds like thistles & nettles, in fact anything that is not seeding.