How to TOP DRESS your lawn for a FLAT LEVEL surface

so people ask me all the time how do you get your lawn so flat like that smooth i tell them i put sand on it top dress it so that's what i'm doing today i've got 15 tons of sand right here ready to go i'm going to dump it on the lawn and show you how to level your lawn to make it smooth and flat so let's talk about the driveway first the driveway is reinforced it's got pit run underneath it and it's got gravel so a layer of pit run a layer of four inches of gravel and then it's reinforced with a two by two rebar mat so there's rebar in the concrete and so i know you guys are like well you can't drive that truck on the concrete and i know i i've heard it all before it's okay folks it's okay i put the truck on the driveway several times it didn't crack so here's the loading ticket right here 15.39 tons and yeah it's probably full of water but you know that's just the way she goes so this is a two millimeter screen sand right here some people refer to it as mason sand or mortar sand you want to call your ready mix supplier and ask them for mortar sand this is a coarse sand it's not a play sand play sand is much much finer if you see this stuff it's quite coarse and it's big you can use stuff that's bigger than two millimeters but if you do that you're risking just getting pebbles all over but if you're going to use a cylinder reel mower you want something fine if you've got a rotary mower and you want to do this with a rotary mower then something bigger would be uh just fine so what's the best time of year to do this when the grass is growing strong and for bermuda it's going to be in the dead of heat in the summer for a cool season long you want to do it in the spring or in the fall because the grass gets stunted and it needs time to recover so my season will come to an end about the end of september so i need about a month for this for the lawn to bounce back and recover you wouldn't want to do this in the dead of the summer if you're cool season but if you're warm season like bermuda maybe st augustine you want to do this in the dead of summer when it's growing like gangbusters first thing you want to do when you're leveling the lawn you want to cut it down and scalp it as low as you can mentally handle because the the taller the grass the harder it is to spread the sand so i core aerated this whole section and lifted the plugs so over here i did the core aeration as well but i did not lift the plugs and i'm gonna see about just dumping the sand right on the plugs and i'm pretty sure that is gonna be a bad idea but i'm gonna compare what we got here what we got over there and see the [Music] difference [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so it's the next day i've got the sand pile completely removed the skid stair made nice easy work of that deal it did scratch up my concrete just a little bit in some places but that's okay so in years past i've normally taken this rake right here and just knocked down the piles but i've learned i can use my drag to just drag down and knock the piles down to flatten out all the sand so that's what i'm gonna do is just use the drag behind the four wheeler so you can do this all by hand but i've just learned in the past that it's so much easier with a motorized something uh four-wheeler lawn tractor something to drag the piles and to move the piles and to move the sand and every year i've done this i just make it just a little bit better this sand is wet so i need to get it stretched out or i need to drag it in the drier the sand is the better so in years past i did this process by hand but i've done this three or four times now i've always been looking for a better way to do this and so i created this drag this is a pretty simple piece of equipment this cost me about 50 bucks and my neighbor who is a welder welder weld it for me got c channel on this side angle iron and c channel so basically it's just two lengths of 20 feet of angle iron eighth inch steel and then two two pieces eighth inch c channel by two inches everything's two inches so this next part the dragging just takes time all you do is just drive the four wheeler around like i said you can do this by hand but it's quite quite labor intensive so it's literally just a matter of dragging and dragging and dragging and driving this would be a lot easier to do if i had a top dresser a top dresser it's like a little machine you put the sand in or compost or something and then just kind of flings it out throws it all out for you it would be very nice to have that but i do not have one of those and i called the rental companies and they didn't have one so this way works really well it's just you just have to drag it and drag it and drag it for quite a while until it finally starts to level out it's easy it just takes time [Music] distributing the sand by hand like i did rather than with the top dresser it tends to distribute unevenly so the idea with drag obviously is to try to even it out just smoothly and cleanly everywhere and the more you go over it the uh the easier it gets and the more it gets distributed obviously you want your sand to be dry the drier the sand the better it is and the easier it is to get it to work down to the soil level of the lawn so if you've got low spots or something like that you can't you got to leave the the turf grass exposed just a little bit with cool season grass it's important that you don't completely bury the turf if you completely bury it where there's no grass showing it will not grow back up through it has to get the sunlight so it can grow and do its photosynthesis and all that but if you have bermuda that stuff is like a weed you can just totally bury it with you know an inch or two of sand and it'll just grow right through that sucker i am going to just continue to drag this and drag and drag and drag and then i'll let the sun kind of bake it let it dry out and then keep dragging letting it dry out letting it bake and keep dragging it it's coming along pretty good though i'd say for the most part all the piles are knocked down but it still is heavy in places so i'm pretty well done i just drugged the thing for ever with four wheeler the sand as you can see is pretty well disappeared which is really nice i didn't do much of uh much work at all with the rake or with a broom normally can come out here with the broom and broom it in and really i need to set up my drag for a broom i have a really low spot through here and the sand is probably an inch or two deep in there so using a landscape break like this works really well as well in the hard to reach places or if you don't have some sort of motorized something just use this landscape break like this just spread it out and then also a broom so using a broom like this works very well in addition to the rake to expose the grass blades you have to expose the grass blades and the broom works very well to work the sand down to the soil surface so basically the concept just to run around with the broom make sure that your lowest areas have at least some of the grass blades showing because if they don't then the grass will die and you'll be in a world of hurt between the the rake and the broom you can get the soil or the sand down to the soil level same thing here just want to work it down expose all the grass plates but i'd say it's pretty well good to go there's not a lot else that you need to do except for just rake it out and water it in so why sand and not topsoil so topsoil has organic matter in it and the good stuff for making an awesome lawn but it breaks down over time and you end up with bumps that you're trying to get rid of if you're trying to level out the lawn the sand does not have organic matter in there so it stays flat on the lawn and fills the low so this is easy to do you just got to put in the effort and get it done i promise you you will not be disappointed if you just go for it if you think you've put too much sand on the lawn i promise you you haven't you just got to keep raking it down and raking it down just don't smother the lawn every time i've done this i say oh crap i put too much on sand on the lawn and then i realized it's okay life is going to go on just fine and the grass brings back the last thing you want to do after you put the sand down within a couple days you want to put down some fertilizer i put down a triple 16 mix balanced fertilizer on this so i can get the grass growing gangbusters and then i waited about oh 10 days and i mowed her down so that is gonna do it for this video i hope you learned something thanks for watching and i will see you in the next one take this filter off right here like this holy crap who put that on there so flipping tight seriously people don't put the filter on that tight you need a half or a quarter turn quarter turn at most oh my gosh who did that i go a quarter those don't do anything lock washers don't do anything i watched a video on youtube don't believe everything you hear on youtube

Channel: Connor Ward

Views: 1,106,901

Rating: 4.83601 out of 5

Keywords: level lawn, level yard, leveling lawns, leveling yards, prevent scalp marks lawn, how to level lawn, diy leveling lawns, lawn is uneven, repair uneven lawn, Connor Ward lawn, conner ward lawn, lawn rebel, how to level your lawn, connor ward sand, lawn care tips, fixing ugly lawn, ugly lawn, how to fix an ugly lawn, how to revive a lawn, reviving lawn, reel mower, sand, level lawn with sand, gardening, lawn care, lawn stripes, topdressing, top dressing, verticutting

Id: myqDIifTDEU

Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 26 2020