Leveling Bumpy Lawn

hey guys there's a big difference between leveling your lawn with a little bit of sand versus fixing large rut marks on it and that's what we're going to talk about today so hold on one sec [Music] hey guys I think most people know about leveling using a sand or a sand mix majority of leveling mixes for golf courses or 80/20 mix eighty percent sand twenty percent peat that's what a professional golf course is used for leveling unless it's on something like a green if it's on a golf green and they're gonna use extremely fine pure sand because golf greens are made of what mostly saying so but your lawn is made up of clay so when you level you want an 8020 mix but when you do deep leveling and I'm talking one two three inches you cannot put plain sand to fix those ruts we've done it for years and years and whenever we use plain sand you're the the Sun is gonna hit it and it's gonna get up to about two hundred and forty degrees and it's gonna bake that spot and the Bermuda is gonna retreat from that spot versus wanting to go into it and that's why we do what we're doing today which is a 50/50 mix of some kind of potting soil or garden soil mix with fine place and so that's I'm going to show you today now let me give you an example on my lawn which is the average lawn we bought this house what three and a half year four years ago it's a horribly pumping laws so we're out here doing some big rut fixes let me give you an example I'm talking about so leveling is a lot different if you're just gonna level I'll probably have my leveling guy come by brings the truck spreads a quarter of an inch of sand everywhere maybe half an inch of saying that's not what I'm talking about let me give you an example so while my lawn may look level I'm gonna show you okay so I've got an eight foot timber and what do you see what you see is you see a big gap right there see it that's like an inch and a half and I've got gaps on my lawn that are two and three inches that need to be fixed what I don't want to do is I don't want to fill that with pure sand let me show you another gap over here okay so we're even here and we're even here and now look at that big old gap in there so sometimes it's hard to identify exactly where these spots are it's kind of back-breaking to go down so let me show you a little trick you'll need a 2 by 4 by 8 pressure treated piece of wood that's straight so when you buy it make sure it's straight and lay it down on the garage and store it on the crack rod floor two little eyelets and a piece of rope that's clean what I have here now is a little level dragging so I just got eyelets here with some rope and now what I'm gonna do is I can just drag this and I can watch for these spots and this is a now I can inspect my whole yard very quickly like this so I'm just watching and I'm watching for spaces I'm watching for anything that's abnormal I could come over here as an example okay and look see what I got over there so something's going on weird here look at that so sometimes where there look at that okay so I'm flying on the ground here look at there that's a that's a full two-inch gap that's what I'm talking about hey guys so yesterday Jacob and I are out here doing this we did some on the back I'll show you some of that video but let me show you exactly what we're using everything here is from Lowe's we should grab that rake just so they can see it just sort of stay there and holding up actually get a view of it so that's the leveling rake you get that at Lowe's I guess I'll I'll link to it the description it's pretty cheap but we use the flat edge when we do this we actually use this flat edge right here so we're not using the teeth but we're using the flat I've had this for several years now it's a cobalt the next thing is we had we built a screen we actually have this at our shop we use it for other stuff there's just two by fours with some quarter inch mesh on it and just simple no-brainer screen and what we're doing is we're taking our leftover garden soil you can you can use potting soil which I like better because it doesn't have any wood chunks we're having a screen this material because garden soil comes with big chunks of peat and sticks inside of it so we're having a screen it which is kind of a pain in the butt but we might also use it and then we're just using regular all-purpose place and which is very fine and we're doing it at a 50 we're doing it at a 50/50 ratio so half sand and half potting soil or or soil let me show you there it is so we're just mixing this as we go and then you know if you want a hand it's easier to do this level by level and if you just want to sort of hand mix it while it's here it just makes it easier just to mix it a little bit as you go about like that and then put more on so now you can put more soil more sand and then we'll remix it up to a high quality point in a minute here so now you can see what we're left with here the left little big clumps of peat and sticks and what I'm doing is is I'm putting these over in our garden over here ok so let me show you what I want you to get it to look like that's what I want it to look like right there that's it right there perfect mix fifty-fifty just to press it down because this piece is really light well leave that pile of dirt down there so now you can see the bottom of the rake and the rake is smooth all the way across where there was an inch and a half now we've got it filled up again this especially in the spring this will actually encourage growth because it's really nice soil in there now and you can only do so much at a time because you want the excess dirt you want to be able to pick up the excess dirt and you'll get too much dirt on your rake so there you go now leave that dirt pile there and now just pull that perfect and what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to get rid of the excess dirt that's along the sides so now you can just gently just walk along it and just sort of tamp it down and we don't want to put a whole bunch more dirt down there so now we've done this big area which doesn't really have it defined rut there's more of a dip in here so we took the rake and we spread it all out now we're gonna check our work and one way to do that that's pretty damn good okay so yesterday we started working on the back two and you can see this line right here now this line apparently was an old irrigation trench that had gone down an inch and a half and you can see that line there and then this line here there was a sprinkler head out here some idiot installed a sprinkler head here so we moved it back to here and again that soil settled again about an inch and a half and then down here you can also see another irrigation line that was settling so all in all we still have quite a bit more to go there's some ruts down there that we're gonna do as well too but I have I have learned I can't tell you how much that if you're gonna level quarter to half an inch you're gonna do leveling that's fine you can use plain saying or you can use a leveling mix use whatever you want but when you start to get deep you've got to make this kind of a mixture now I warn you I do like to Pat it down and then the night after I'll do a light work mist on it and I'll do another light mist on it and I want to do this at a time where I'm not gonna have rain hopefully for about four or five days because I want the grass to try and grow up through this and I'm gonna keep watering a little bit if you put this down and you get heavy rains you will get some movement so be prepared to adjust it because you're putting a lot of this lighter peat and soil in there so you may get some movement on it but it's okay just come back and fix it with the right just be aware of that so important news I do want to let you guys know that I talked to Andersons and the good news is next week they're gonna be doing the human char run and they're probably have two truckloads go up but I do want to warn you that it'll probably sell out in 24 hours and I'll probably put up a notice to let you guys know and that's available what are you barking at Linda so click Subscribe make sure you subscribe we got a bunch more videos to do much more work back here we got some we got some landscaping stones coming in we're gonna do some landscaping stones and reduce more leveling work you got a whole bunch of stuff we got to do so talk to you later doc [Music]

Channel: How To with Doc

Views: 790,014

Rating: 4.873343 out of 5

Keywords: leveling lawn, lawn leveling, fix bumpy lawn, fix ruts in lawn, how to level lawn, leveling lawn sand, leveling ruts lawn, how to level a lawn, level lawn, how to level your lawn, uneven lawn, leveling lawns, level a lawn, leveling yard, how to level a lawn with sand

Id: qAzaAWFYz6A

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020