How to Topdress & Level Your Lawn Using Sand or TopSoil? Beginners DIY Guide

today's video is all about top dressing your lawn I'm going to talk about the benefits the things that you want to watch out for and all about the materials tools and techniques to get the job done but some of the information I'm going to tell you about today might just surprise you so keep watching and I'll tell you why [Music] a beautiful lawn that's level and it just looks great so part of the way that you get there is with top dressing so the first thing we need to think about what top dressing is what kind of materials can we use and there's a lot of choices out there and the most common is going to be just plain topsoil it can be screened anything like that but basic topsoil is the building block from most topdressing jobs another popular material for top dressing is sand this has really become popular in the past few years now you can also use things like compost and peat picking the right material is not that easy but the basic school of thought is going to be that you want to top dress with a material that's compatible with what you've already got our first research comes from dr. Brian unruhe now he's a turf grass scientist for the University of Florida and this is his specialty his statement is that it is recommended that you only top dress with a rich fine compost instead of sand sand particles cannot retain any nutrients so applying a layer of sand year after year to lawns actually causes lawns to lose their fertility golf courses are built on sandy soil and specialized turf grasses that can thrive in those sandy conditions now that you've picky material we've got to figure out how to put it down and it doesn't have to be hard you can use tools like this that you've already got on hand throw the material with your shovel and use your wheel barrel to get it into position you can also use a rake and this works pretty well for a smaller area now what you seen here is a specialized tool called a level on this is designed for a medium sized area and it really can make quick work of spreading that dirt and this is me using the level on and again I use this for a pretty large area and if you don't want to spend a lot of money and you want to buy a tool that you can keep for the future this is a great option it takes a little bit of effort but this tool still glides almost effortlessly across the lawn and as you go back and forth it's going to help the grass blades spring back up so you'll work that dirt into the soil ideally this is going to be the best tool if you're leveling small divots and areas you wouldn't want to be able to do a whole lawn with this it's just too much work now here's how they do it on a golf course of course they have all kinds of money so they've got a big machine and look at how it can spread that material right across the entire putting green but that's not realistic for a homeowner but this might be this is a small machine called an eco lawn and you can see how it works just like the golf course machine but in a more compact package and what this machine can do is it'll spread top soil sand peat whatever you want and it does a great job and if you look you can hardly see where the operator is leaving the material because it's being spread so evenly and it's going right into the grass so this machine is still way too expensive to buy but they rent these all over the place now so this is a great option if you're trying to do a big area and you just can't do it by hand let's recap what we've seen so we know that top dressing is a great thing for your lawn but the scientific evidence that I could find in information online all pointed to top soil and compost as being the two best mediums for doing it now Sam can make sense to me if you had a situation where you had very soggy soil or maybe a needed to improve the firmness of soil but that's not usually what people have and if you have clay soil what I read was even more upsetting because if you add sand to clay soil essentially what people said was that you are making concrete so be careful about use for a material because it really can cause more harm than good but I don't expect you to take my word for it continue to do research ask around and look for real examples where it has worked in a long-term situation so I hope this video was helpful to you gave you a little bit more information about topdressing and all the choices and application methods that are available to you please leave me a comment below to let me know what you think tell me how you top dress your lawn or just share your thoughts I'd love to hear from you and I'd really appreciate it if you give me a thumbs up on this video subscribe to my channel if you're not already for more upcoming videos [Music]

Channel: Silver Cymbal

Views: 1,381,413

Keywords: lawn, top dressing your lawn, lawn care, lawn care tips, how to top dress lawn, top dress lawn, how to level a lawn using topsoil, top dressing lawn, lawn top dressing, how to level a lawn, how to top dress your lawn, how to top dress lawn with sand, how to level your lawn, how to level your lawn area, how to topdress, how to topdress a lawn, how to topdress your lawn, using sand, topsoil, soil, topdressing, topdress, your lawn, #silvercymbal

Id: MLbQKfldvdw

Length: 4min 47sec (287 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2019