Buried wire killed grass?

[jzawacki]

I buried my wire the grass outside and inside my wire right nearby died which well caused it's own issues

Wow.. that is weird!  Could the process of cutting the slot for the wire damaged the roots?

[evblazer]

If that was from my post somewhere it might be my grass or my method. Let me know so if I expand I can avoid doing it wrong again.
Method: Manual edger that half moon thing on a pole and some with an electric driveway metal tipped edger. Both seemingly same results.
Grass: St. Augustine and some Bermuda lots of green stuff which may or may not be grass 
Lawn: beaten up. probably under watered and in full texas sun burning it up.

I think I killed it really. My lawn has these thick overlapping horizontal root systems and then runners on top all interconnected. To even get to the dirt around the edge I need to use edger or other tool just to cut through the grass.

[jzawacki]

Sorry, I should have put your name with the quote.

Anyway, for the life of me, I can't seem to find this tool on homedepot.com or lowes.com, but here is a picture of the tool I used.



It works perfect for this, step on it, give a tiny wiggle to make the slot big enough for the wire, stuff the wire in, and give it a good stamp with your foot and you can't even tell it's there.

[evblazer]

That does look a bit more efficient then the one I was using which was more like so

How far down did you go? When I pushed down my edger and wiggled it you could hear it tearing through the roots and if I looked down in the split section I could see the maze of roots and shoots going back and forth that I just severed.  The grass died away leaving un reinforced clay and/or sand which causes the lawnbott to spin and dig and pull up the wire and maybe cut it.

Someone once mentioned chicken wire to lay down at the borders to help the robot turn and not dig up the wire and help the grass recover and it did sound like a good idea but I never tried it. I may give it a go in some other sections that the pine needles have killed off that are outside the border. Rake them up plug or seed them and eventually move the lawnbot back to that section to mow it.

[jzawacki]

if I looked down in the split section I could see the maze of roots and shoots going back and forth that I just severed

Ouch.. must be the grass type.  My grass (I'm not into this stuff really, so I have no idea what it is) is like sod.  If I cut a section out, I can roll it up without problems.  I even cut a section out when I was building our play center and moved it to another section without having any issues.  One of my suggestions for leveling the lawn was to cut a section out, back fill it with dirt, and set the section down.  Apparently, not a good idea for your grass.


As for the chicken wire, it was noted for the bottom of hills to keep the bot from sliding out of bounds when hitting the parameter wire at the bottom.  I guess it can't hurt to try.

[toolbelt]

Bermuda grass is the grass from H.  It has runners above ground and below ground.  At the end of each runner is something that looks like the beak of a bird and is really sharp.  It can go through Asphalt, ground cloth -- like it's not there-- and even up and over bushes.  Your lawn may have grass that actually came from the neighbor 3 doors over. 

You have to be very careful when trying to fine pegged wires (buried are even worst as you have two layers to go through) as the grass runners are the same size as the perimeter wire and just about as strong. 

One nice thing about it that it can withstand the heat.  Of course it goes brown come Winter....  You can mow it very low without killing it off.  In fact if you let it grow too high you can trip over the stupid runners.