Saturday, August 30, 2014

Grass paint for Brown Spots

     If you do your own lawncare, maybe one you'll have the misfortune of killing off some portion of your green lawn inadvertently due to a fertilizer spill, or mistakenly spraying your weeds with grass killer.  Dog urine can also cause yellow spots.
  What is the inventive DIY'er to do?  Grass Paint, aka Grass Dye. This will keep you and your second-in-command happy, and avoid the neighborhood stigma of being a yard n00b.
 
   Well, that happened to me recently due to a mistakenly mislabeled bottle of weed killer (don't ask). Within 48 hours the spots appeared by the dozen at the locations I had sprayed.   I ordered an 8 Oz bottle of grass paint off of Amazon, which came to nearly twenty bucks with shipping.  It is diluted 7:1 with water (21 Oz water: 3 Oz of paint) in a spray bottle. 

  It is a thick paint, but stains dead, dry grass relatively well.  One coat gives about 85% "greener" effect, and a second coat a day later from an opposite angle gives 100% coverage. It is green from the street, which is all that matters!  I'd estimate one 8oz bottle diluted 7:1 covers about 100 sq feet.

Now, after seeing the water-based paint first hand, I deduced it was a bottle of plain green acrylic paint.  I went to the craft store Michael's, and an exact bottle of green acrylic paint had the same bottle, size, color and consistency of the more expensive Amazon grass paint.  Diluted up it was identical in action for 1/8th the price.

 I've bought a couple bottles for only $2.50 each, to touch up a couple spots that were a little light, forgotten on the first pass, or which might crop up in the future.
Good luck with your own DIY grass paint job!