Finishing the Lawn
2006.05.29
Today, at last, no more rain, although it was overcast most of the day, with some sun breaks, and temperatures in the 50’s this morning, and 60’s this afternoon. Really, it was an almost perfect day, weatherwise, to finish the lawn.
I started around 8:30 this morning, and began by trying out the lawn roller. Yesterday I filled it up with water (this is what provides the weight, the roller itself doesn’t weigh much). It took quite a while to fill up with the garden hose, my wild estimate is that it holds about 30 gallons. It took some effort to push or pull the roller along. I did a few passes along the back yard, and then did the front. You can see my boot prints in the rolled area, so it doesn’t completely compact the soil, but it does firm it up.
After that, I continued laying out topsoil along the side yard, and then rolling it.
When I was sure I would have enough left to cover the yard (by that point, I’d laid out and rolled topsoil everywhere except where the remaining topsoil pile itself lay), I did some regrading with the rake and put down a little more topsoil in some low spots.
Even with the raking and rolling, it seems impossible to really get a flat, even grade on the lawn. My friends had warned me about this, so I wasn’t too surprised. There are little hills and valleys all throughout the yard, mostly too subtle to be noticed in a photo, but quite evident in person.
With a pile of topsoil still left, I decided to bank the yard up against the planting bed in front as best I could. My original intention for the lawn was to grade it up to the top of the planting bed wall both in the front and along the side, providing good drainage away from the house, and also making it easier to mow next to the planting bed. But time, energy, and money forced me to settle for ordering just enough topsoil to do a flat lawn. However, since I hardly reached a full depth of two inches everywhere, I did have enough topsoil left to raise the grade somewhat.
I had enough topsoil to bring the raised portion around the corner a little ways. Then I pushed down the rest of the pile and graded it flush, before rolling the rest of the side yard.
After all that effort rolling the yard, it might seem odd that my next step was to go over the entire area with the big rake again and rough up the surface. The purpose of this was to provide a softer layer for the seed and fertilizer to sink down into. I think the fertilizer perhaps should have been applied before rolling, but some online sources listed it after rolling, and that’s what I decided to do.
I drained the water from the lawn roller into the storm drain across the street. It seems like such a waste of water, but what else could I have done… filled up 30 milk jugs and watered my house plants for the next two years?
The other day, I purchased a bag of fertilizer and a bag of grass seed. One of my housewarming presents had been a bag of grass seed, but, it has taken me so long to get to this point, it had passed the expiration date. So I had to buy a new bag (sorry Sharon).
I spread the fertilizer first, and then the seed. The seed bag said five pounds per 1000 square feet, so I adjusted the drop spreader until I saw “5″ in the little window. I started rolling along, but, man, there was hardly any seed coming out at all. Uh, had I assumed incorrectly that “5″ meant five pounds per 1000 square feet? I decided to check the instruction sheet that came with the spreader. “Set the feed rate to the number indicated on the back of the Scotts brand product.”, it said (or something similar). Yeah thanks a whole lot for that. So, what, Scotts has their own arbitrary code, coordinated only with their own spreaders, fertilizers, and seed products? That seems a trifle monopolistic.
So I set the number to “10″ and tried another pass. Well, that was better, but still not much coming out. The bag of grass seed said it would cover 1600 square feet, and I think I have about 1400, so I should be using most of the bag.
I set the feed rate as high as it would go, “17 1/2″, and tried again. Ah, now finally it was coming out like I expected. So I made another full pass through the yard. Still lots of seed left though. So I made another pass, perpendicular to the first, to make sure there weren’t any gaps.
I still had more than half of the seed left. There were so many criss-crossed spreader wheel tracks now, I couldn’t tell where I’d been or not. So I started doing diagonal passes. Then in desperation, I did figure-eight’s. No I’m kidding about that.
There is still a fair amount of seed left, but it looked like I had sufficient coverage, so I stopped. Later on, I’ll probably need to overseed some areas that for whatever reason didn’t germinate so well.
I ran over the yard one more time with the roller, but empty this time, in an attempt to press the seed down into the soil a little bit.
Rolling Topsoil