These Lawn Leveling Mistakes Are WAY Too Easy To Make

you guys not that long ago middle of march i started a lawn leveling project i started filming it and the whole point of it was to make my lawn ultra flat kind of show you guys how to do it the thing is i made a whole bunch of mistakes and a lot of errors in judgment i also gambled a little bit and i did not come out on the winning side of any of those gambles i thought about scrapping this project and just not publishing this video even though i spent so much time putting it together but then i realized mistakes videos actually teach probably more than actual how-to videos so with that in mind i want to show you the tutorial on how to make your lawn or how not really how to but how i was planning on making my lawn ultra flat this spring but i'm going to interject throughout the whole thing and show you all of the mistakes errors and judgments all of the things that i did where it didn't turn out the way i expected it to i want you to understand that a lot of this video is really just raw it's truly the journey of me my family here in the lawn you're gonna see my kids a lot a lot of it is kind of goofy and off the cuff a lot of it for me was just trying to have fun with the process quite honestly that's the entire point of maintaining a lawn having fun out in it so with that said let's go take a look at my lawn leveling mistakes video like real deal these are the mistakes i made all right guys this is the time i've been waiting for this for a long time it's march 18th right now this is way too early for most people to be doing this but we've got fantastic weather my grass back there is green and growing a lot of sun i'm gonna make my lawn ultra flat what was i thinking i just said it out loud it was too early in the season to start this process my weather around here always stays cold into march into april last year we had snow in the ground in may so yeah mid-march our weather did look pretty good but i should have understood that bad weather let's call it second winter was coming because it always does right now it's pretty flat some would say that that's about as good as it gets but i can make it better i'm going to show you how i make my lawn flat i'm not going to tell you that this is the best way to do it this is the way that i'm going to do it now because i'm going to get some comments on this i'm not going to make my entire lawn flat because i just don't want it ultra flat i have hill yards around here i have dogs that kick dirt into uh parts of my lawn space all the time deer literally like dig little tufts out of my ground it's never gonna be really flat everywhere so i'm just picking and choosing i'm doing the main play yard for my kids all right here's a ground level perspective of the area that i'm talking about subscribers of this channel saw me wake this patch up in the middle of winter i core aerated in fact i've core aerated it twice i did it manually and then just this week i mechanically core aerated it i removed all of the cores because i want to put down a sandy loam so the sandy loam is going to go into the core spaces that were opened up earlier this week there's a lot of organic matter in the soil that i picked up from my local nursery so that's going to go down into the soil structure and we're going to start filling in the low spots from this perspective you can't see the low spots but i'm going to show you right now how you can identify low spots in a yard regardless of how bad or good it is one of the easiest ways to do this is to grab a long-handled rake or a curtain rod or a really flat 2x4 something something long and flat and bring it over to your space now this is the problem this is what i see as a problem in my lawn when i put that down you'll notice that right there it's touching the ground then there's a gap and then it's touching the ground right there at the sidewalk now what i want to do is kind of trim along the sidewalk line start doing a little bit of edging there but this low spot in the middle is annoying to me when i bring lawn mowers over now you might have a significantly deeper low spot in your line but i have little low spots like this all over the place let me show you now here i've moved the bar into a different orientation you can see that we are on the ground over there then there's a gap and then we're on the ground over there the middle is low you can go around the lawn and find all of the low spots now what i'm going to do is i'm going to find the low spots and i'm going to mark them all right now as you do this this is important your grass needs to be really short so what i've been doing here for the past couple weeks since this grass started growing you see it's still not growing over there but here it certainly is i've cut this i believe it's five times in the past three and a half weeks or so when your grass is growing you need to cut it really short and that's because when we put sand or soil compost or a mixture of all of that stuff down into the low spots the grass needs to be able to grow straight up through it when you leave the grass blades long and you put stuff on top of it they fold over and then they kind of grow and they just kind of get mulched down and a lot of the grass won't ever penetrate through and it will eventually die my grass is as short as i could possibly get it i used a real mower set to the lowest setting possible if you don't have a real mower if you put your rotary mower to the lowest setting possible that will usually work just fine so long as your grass is growing vigorously now not long ago just a few days back i applied a fast release fertilizer to this to push extra growth here in the early part of the spring season right now that was another big honking mistake i put down a spray on application of urea nitrogen so urea yeah it's a fast release but the thing is it still needs to be broken down by microbial life in your soil to make it plant available certainly it's faster than putting down plant and animal nitrogen based sources but it still needs the activity in the lawn that only exists as your soil temperatures are up in the mid 50s or higher although my grass was green and growing it was only about 45 to 50 degrees so the urea probably just went onto the lawn and a lot of it gassed off i should have taken the time to really think that through if i was going to be applying this early in the season when soil temperatures are that low i should have used something synthetic if you're in the mid spring season already you probably don't need to add the extra fertilizer because your grass is probably already growing gangbusters let me show you the spots that i marked for you your lawn might be starting from a much more lumpy scenario or let's call it like rolling hill scenario so what you need to also remember is only the low spot i don't want to add more material to the lawn than i need to i just need to fill in the low spots and one of the best ways to do that is use your eyes and find the high spots there's almost always a low spot next to a high spot take a look at what i got so here's my space there's my daughter playing with her tractor hi are you cute yes you're cute yes you're cute yes all right so if you see here i've got little uh landscape stakes in the ground i didn't put much more what did i put maybe about 15 to 20 of them in the ground and this is a 500 square foot spot so it's not that big and we're starting from a very uh flat starting point anyway but i can guarantee you this entire strip right here is low compared to the grade of the sidewalk compared to this hump right here in the middle so i'm going to i didn't even mark it as a line i just know it this whole area requires extra um extra top dressing to fill in the low spot but everywhere else where it was particularly low i put a marker and that's where i'm going to drop dirt for spreading this is how my daughter thinks that we should level the lawn so how you do it in my opinion you do not need to put dirt everywhere i have multiple videos on this channel about lawn leveling or making your lawn flat or fixing low spots and never once have i ever said you really need to put dirt everywhere on your lawn and spread it around with a leveling rake now i am going to use a leveling rake because i'm dealing with about a 500 square foot spot and i'm dealing with almost a cubic yard of soil but if you're only doing this to one small spot i still contend you don't need a leveling rake maybe a small one but a big push room can usually work just fine for small localized low spots i also want you to fully understand like really fully understand that the lower your spot is the more likely you are going to kill the grass underneath it so another reason why i recommend only doing the low spots first and building them up over time you don't have to win a sprint here this is a merit lawn care is a marathon if you have a very low spot fill it in a little bit at a time over the course of an entire year or two depending on how big the spot is otherwise you've got to fill the whole thing in all the way to grade let it settle top it off and then seed over it which is another viable option why didn't i do this i have no idea i really don't i don't know why i have low spots i could measure them i measured them before i made the video i knew how deep they were why did i think that i could throw down three quarters of an inch or more in some of these tiny little spots to fill in a low spot all at once instead of doing it a little bit at a time over the course of a season dumb always an area of contention is what do you put on the lawn i do a ton of organic work in my lawn organic and natural work so what i chose is from a local nursery i went and i picked up a cubic yard which is a cubic yard they just take two big scoops from their their front loader and stick it in my my regular cheapo trailer but this is a sandy loam mix with a lot of organic matter in there you see that that's a stick now i would not put this on a lawn that i was attempting to cut with a real mower at like a third of an inch i just wouldn't because there's just too much debris in it this is screened but it's screened for large chunks you're still going to get things like this which are over time really going to start damaging a real mower i plan on cutting my grass in that one and a half to two inch range so as it settles down i my lawnmower will never hit any of this stuff if you could reach through your screen and touch this you would feel that it is quite gritty so even though that there is organic matter in here it's kind of composted organic matter it is a sandy loam this is very gritty there's a lot of good sand in here that means that although when i put this on the lawn it might get very very flat as the organic matter breaks down over time and the material settles over time these low spots are not going to be flat anymore but they're going to be more flat than they are now lawn leveling if you watch people that really do a lot of lawn leveling they do it over and over and over over the course of a few years for a reason settling happens even if you're putting straight sand down it will settle into your actual topsoil and depress and compact over time which is why it needs to be redone especially if you're core aerating and removing material from time to time you like the dirt is it good dirt yay where's mickey mouse they're on your shirt right now this was a very obvious lapse in judgment that i had it was very clear in this shot that the sandy soil mixture that i was using was still wet it was still very moist it's not like it was dripping wet mud but it was way too wet to be spreading on the lawn it's heavy it doesn't incorporate it doesn't sink underneath the grass blades quite as easily as it does when it's dry when you go to level it with that rake it actually ends up looking quite flat on top but because it's wet it's not really getting flat on the bottom so the acetylene is going to be far less uniform as it dries out over time not to mention the fact when it is wet and it's sitting up on the top then that's how hydrophobic crusts start forming all right now before i get started with the process i want to show you what i'm talking about here we've got a long lawn leveling rake this style of rake wide this is 42 inches wide i think you can get them up a little bit wider than that also is going to be good for a yard situation that you see here let me zoom out this is a starting point that is very flat to begin with that means our low spots are wide shallow low spots that's when you're gonna want one of these wide ones now this short leveling rate gonna be better for situational like small let's call it a divot in the lawn or a small low spot i'm not sure if you can tell here on the camera but right here i've got a small low spot because my kids swing set leg was sitting here for a long time and we ended up leaving a very large chunk out of the grass right there when we moved it so this spot is low a small leveling rake would work for that and if i was only leveling this small strip by the sidewalk or the patio then the really stubby leveling rake would work perfectly fine now if you go the broom route where you're just doing a very small localized area here we've got a small broom that's what is that i don't know a foot or so wide of course you can get the wider brooms i've used those in past videos but i don't have the wide push broom available here to show you but a push broom will work as an acceptable alternative to these if you're doing only small leveling jobs this is 500 square feet the push broom works fine but the more leveling that you do it simply becomes easier to use a leveling rake personally i have never seen a leveling rake sold in a local store that's not to say that you can't find one in a store near you but i've never seen one so these two leveling rates i purchased with my own money i never really believe that you need to buy the most expensive one uh this short stubby one is one of the cheapest ones i've ever seen uh the wide one was somewhere around a hundred dollars quality wise it's probably lower than some of the bigger ones but i don't think it makes that big of a deal for my purposes today i'm going to use my wide lawn leveling rake this was purchased online i'll link to it down below like i said it was affordable but not the cheapest one this small one i've used in previous videos i'll link to that as well the push broom just go find a push broom go to walmart all right before i go a little bit further this might not pick up on camera but i want you to see where my markers are if i pick it up you can kind of see the low spots tend to be where the grass is a little bit darker and that's because the grass is a little bit longer there because as i cut over it with lawn mowers it doesn't get cut as low because the spot is lower so it ends up looking a little bit darker if you've got a lawn that is in worse shape than this then your low spots may look even more obvious and apparent each one of these dirt piles was on top of one of those markers that i set down they are the low spots and i understand that my lawn is not that low the point here is to make an ultra flat lawn so that's what we're doing here all right looking back on this experience i used approximately half a cubic yard of sand soil mixture but if i could do it over again i would probably only use about half of that so each one of the little mounds that you just saw on the screen i probably would have had much smaller amounts like i don't know half of it because the mounds were big i was actually pushing material onto the higher spots as it kind of tapered out from the low spots so i ended up getting a lot of extra dirt on to the high spots that i didn't actually need and the low spots that i did put the mounds on ended up being buried a little bit too deep especially considering the fact that i put wet soil on it and i wasn't there for the next two weeks to kind of pamper it along these are the low spots i've got help uh this is my friend robbie you've probably seen him in some other videos of mine over his place he's gonna be helping me push dirt around we're just playing like we're just playing in dirt like kids today so you'll see that i've got like i said before a whole bunch of dirt here on the edge because this is the part that bothers me more than anything else so i'm going to be really working this spot hard the other spots are less dramatic so we're going to be pushing them around i'm going to be using the big lawn leveling rake robbie here is going to be using our long uh smaller leveling rake the smaller one is going to be easier to knock these piles down and kind of do some finesse work on some of the deeper spots uh the wider one will be able to distribute stuff basically we're going to taper stuff from the small spots into or in the deeper spots into the higher spots so it'll just kind of taper in you could just haphazardly put dirt everywhere but i feel like in my personal opinion that this is just more efficient and i can guarantee myself that i'm getting dirt on the spots that need it the most now this is only half of the dirt that i have in my uh in my trailer so i'm going to spread this thin i never want to mulch it down too much too deep obviously i put way too much on the shelf on the shallow spots if you're going to be putting this much dirt on your shallow spots expect to kill a lot of that grass off i don't know why i thought it would work out for me when i would never advise what i just did to anyone else so we're going to let this grow in over the next couple weeks and then i'm going to reassess in early april if we need to add some more all right there's a good chance that i'll be using this landscaping rake this thing is called the groundskeeper 2. i don't know i guess there was a groundskeeper one i've never owned that one this must be new and improved this is probably one of the coolest most ridiculously awesome rakes i've ever used in my life i've only owned it since early 2022. i've already used it a ton of times so i might bust this out to knock some piles down we've got all of that dirt spread out pretty thin we can see some green poking through the areas where we don't see green i can tell right now that that spot is still low right there so probably in april i'll probably hit it with a little extra dirt in that area but you see we still have green grass poking through just barely which means everything is going to grow up over the next couple weeks and we're not really going to notice the dirt and debris here on the ground now this is important for those of you people leveling for the purpose of real mowing if you literally want to keep your lawn less than an inch high this stuff right here part of the soil that i just spread on the lawn we got a little dot little rocks lots of little debris little sticks this stuff does not work if you're taking a real mower over it on a very low setting this will damage your reel very very quickly i anticipate cutting this grass at one and a half inches or maybe a little bit more for the majority of the year the majority of it is going to settle into the lawn and it's not going to be an issue so i'm going to let this grow for a couple weeks i'm going to let my kids play in it i might have to might have to flatten it out again after they're done playing with it but once it's uh once the grass starts growing back in all of this stuff is going to continually settling especially with rain and irrigation and then once i start cutting it a little bit taller nobody is ever going to notice that it's here because i'm using a soil mixture a sandy loam mixture with organic matter in it this stuff will settle but it will also decay and lose mass so even if we were able to achieve a perfect ultra flat lawn today it will not be perfectly flat and ultra flat next year as things decay and settle we'll get more low spots the low spots will be smaller but so long as we're not lifting up the material in the high spots everything is going to be better in the long run so later this year i might do some touch-ups to this but this is what you do over and over and over until you achieve the flatness that you can tolerate that you really really want are you doing a dirt angel no angel all right now before you watch the end of this video this is important what i did next after spreading all of the dirt around is i put the sprinkler system on to water it in total mistake because i spread it thin that was actually the best opportunity that i had for the soil sand mixture to dry out that would have helped the little grass blades bust through the crust layer and capture some sun and just keep growing but instead i watered it and it kind of turned into this like wet mat that dried out just enough to become a little crusty hard layer on top that the grass had a hard time busting through now what i also did was i left on vacation for two full weeks i was not at the house in the yard to monitor the situation had i done this project and not left for two weeks i would have noticed the problem instantly within the next like couple days and i would have continually brushed the entire area with those long leveling rates continually working that soil mixture into the turf had i been there for the next two weeks i don't think anything really bad would have happened but i left and things deteriorated all right you can obviously see where all the dirt is sitting on top of the grass i promise you it's gonna look crazy good in a couple weeks like i said this is march 18th in about two weeks is what i expect everything to come through all the way to the point where we can't see any of the dirt at all it's been fertilized it is green it is growing it is now spring by the time you watch this it's spring so there's more daylight hours in the sky than nighttime hours in the sky ultra flat is what i'm going for here but because there's a bunch of organic matter in there i might have to do a touch-up by the fall i'm going to go ahead and put the sprinkler on right now so that i can water that dirt into the grass and let help everything start settling down like i said 17 days we were on vacation we were away from the house it wasn't exactly 17 it was like 15 days of vacation but it's been 17 since i've been in the lawn so i have employed the help of my children to run across all of the dirt to break all up uh break up this crusty layer of dirt and then we're gonna go ahead and pull out the leveling rakes and push it back under the canopy again i guarantee you that this is still going to be ultra flat in the end it just has this weird in-between phase that's not normal for those of you going to level alone you're probably not going to put the mixture on the ground and then walk away for a couple weeks you'll probably be babying it along the whole time come on kids get the yellow grass out from underneath just run over it run over it we gotta make it flat we gotta make it flat guys make it flat all right this i've been i bought these bought them off of amazon these are spike aerator shoe attachments i bought these on a black friday sale in 2021 it's been they've been sitting in my garage for like five months this is not what they're meant for are they safe are they safe well they're spikes they're like little like this is not what they're meant for but i'm going to strap them on and use them for the first time and run over my dirt patches and just kind of scuff everything up missing laces they're supposed to be laces there i forgot the laces silly sauce i'm gonna keep stepping on this patch of grass because this was africa all right what do you think yeah do you think yeah are they hard well once they go way deep in the ground i have to really think about pulling my foot up it so it's gonna be really hard is it really hard to run like tons of water there's no water yeah there's just no water totally unnecessary it's kind of fun though y'all walk around and point it at the ground tell what you see you got to talk buddy what do you see i i see some duck right here died does the grass look ultra flat uh does it look kind of long but what about this one you missed this one too i missed that one you think i should take the leveling rake back over it yeah yeah busy go ahead level this one you're doing a great job as well level that one make it flat i see a little bit less dirt you see a little bit less dirt now yeah now that you've been using the leveling rake yeah well you gotta have the right tool for the job so after goofing off with my kids for a while and trying to tell myself everything was gonna be all right i finally actually got to work with the lawn loveland rake and reworked a lot of that crusty dirt layer back under the grass canopy overnight going into april 4th we got a little bit of rain so that re-moistened everything up and then by the fifth i went outside and started my daily regimen of fluffing the grass up from underneath the soil i used a small little garden fork at times and i used a lot of my groundskeeper 2 rake in the end the groundskeeper 2 rake was actually pretty instrumental in getting me to expose some of the grass that had been fully snuffed out or nearly snuffed out by the excessive layer of dirt that had been sitting on it for two and a half weeks straight by april 5th the lawn was looking fairly healthy and quite yellow and there were a few serious dirt patches that i haven't really been able to recover even to this day all right so i just went and took my groundskeeper to rake over there and kind of scratched up some of these like super yellow spots these yellow spots are where the the deepest layers of sandy loam were put down and it took a while for the grass to grow through it some of the grass never grew through it at all so it's really yellowed out because of lack of sunlight there are still a few patches in here where like you can obviously see dirt but after teasing it with the groundskeeper rake i'm starting to expose some leaf tissue and all of this is going to start greening up again now teasing it has loosened up this layer of soil a little bit it had settled over the past couple weeks and now the top layer of it is still a little bit not settled but there's an awful lot of leveling agent material leveling material underneath the leaf canopy which is what i want so i'm going to go ahead and run the mower over it uh to kind of cut off a little bit of the the tips of the dark green grass and maybe try to suck some of the the yellow grass up a little bit so it's a little bit more upright so it can get more sun i don't want the green grass to get overgrown while i wait for this yellow grass to poke through and start grabbing new sunlight again [Music] now i continued teasing the grass every single day in these dirt spots in the low areas all the way until the 12th of april before then however starting on april 8th i started mowing the grass every single day although the grass didn't appear to be growing hardly at all i was able to take a little bit off of the tips every day and of course the purpose of this was to stimulate natural growth hormones from within the plant itself to get it to start growing and grow out the yellowing as you can see there was notable improvement as the month progressed so today is april 26th it's been i've lost track how many days that this process has been going on but i started on march 18th so that's somewhere in the vicinity of five about six weeks or so as you can see the vast majority of the color has returned a lot of the deep green from the fertilizer treatments most likely has worn off we're kind of coming back to a natural green along with a yellowing coming back up to a natural green as well there's still some dirt patches i've actually started mowing this a little bit higher over the past few days i let it grow so that i could move it up to approximately one and three quarters of an inch this is about the height that i want to have it at for the rest of the year while i talk i'll kind of show you here what we're looking at everything does look pretty good there's actually uh not intentional but there's some minor stripe lines going on here from the from the mower wheel marks you can see these lowest spots right here there's still lots and lots of dirt in here kentucky bluegrass will slowly spread in all of these little blades will get taller and this will become less apparent over time i believe i am very lucky that i don't think i'm going gonna have to reseed any parts uh the worst spot is pretty much there and that looks thick enough for this time of year that i don't think it's gonna be a problem long term uh we got a little bit of a divot here um i might throw a little bit of uh sand and soil into this tiny little spot here to kind of flatten out this little chunk but generally everything is all right here let me throw my bar on the ground so you can see so here's the bar generally the same orientation that i had it six weeks ago the grass is taller so it doesn't look as bad but we're on the ground right there we're on the ground over there and in the middle there is still a gap so despite the fact that i overloaded everything with soil i still have a gap i did not make it ultra flat i could go around i'm not going to but nothing that i did made it ultra flat they're still low spots i will argue that all of the low spots are most likely smaller than they were before so in that regard this is a mild success but nothing that i'm ever going to brag about so let this be a lesson to you i know an awful lot about grass i know an awful lot about lawn care but man i still make mistakes everyone makes mistakes this is a good illustration of how things can go completely not to plan it's just grass though it grows back and everything can be repaired so even if you do make some mistakes don't let them get you down now i also have a video about mistakes not me making them but me talking about the mistakes that a lot of lawn care enthusiasts make unwittingly throughout the season i'm going to link to it up here it's a far shorter video than this one but i really recommend that you watch it because all of these mistakes are basically the same kinds of things that i just did in this leveling project these are the mistakes that we make on accident even when we think we know exactly what we're doing

Channel: Turf Mechanic

Views: 123,440

Keywords: grass, lawncare, gardening, lawnmower, lawn mower, lawn care, thatch

Id: LQUT1caq2jM

Length: 35min 7sec (2107 seconds)

Published: Sun May 01 2022