Leveling Lawns

hey guys it's doc and today we're gonna talk about leveling your lawn you know that bumpy crap that you want to get rid of we're gonna talk about leveling lawns we're gonna talk about it on a large-scale production where you hire a company come in and do it plus I'm also gonna cover when you do it yourself on a small scale so hold on one sec hey guys so before we get started make sure if you haven't done it there's a video on our YouTube channel that says win this it's a real mower we're giving away a $2,000 power reel more true cut top-of-the-line package with all the accessories included that giveaway is going to happen on August 15th and all you have to be as a subscriber to the channel and you have to be just signed up for the email alerts on our website that's all you got to do and if future giveaways you'll automatically be registered we've got another giveaway coming Andersen's is coming out with a new spreader or again and give away 10 bags of the new pgf complete fertilizer and when that hits the market in July so watch that video now critical point about this video inside this video I'm gonna give you one or two tips that are absolutely critical if you're gonna hire someone to come in and do your lawn plus if you're gonna do it a certain way you really need to understand these tips and it sort of applies to combining air waiting and loving your lawn so I want you to listen for those tips so I've been promising this video for two months now but I had to sort of compile it I had to compile it from some old footage from last year some footage from the air rating I had done from the leveling I had done this year and then I wanted to shoot some new additional footage and do some follow up so I've been sort of combining everything so I finally got it ready and here's the video so the first thing I'm going to things I want to get out of the way the first thing is going to be what type of material you level with and number two who do you contact if you want to have your lawn level first let's talk about the contact and I promised the company that I use that I would not give out their contact information it's a small company they have one person in the back office there booked out solid all the way through August so I told him I would knock you about their contact information I'll tell you how to find a leveling company you just go to google and you type in lawn leveling and then your city the results will come up with people in your area and you can contact them and talk to them about pricing now I will tell you that it does vary and I'll give you my math my math was pretty simple so I had my lawn aerated and leveled I did not have it scalped 17,000 square feet of lawn approximately and I paid about $1,200 that was a really good price I've got another quote from another company that was farther away and they wanted closer to $4,000 now they're $4,000 also included the full scalping as well which these people didn't do so you do want to contact and talk to him about what it is that you're gonna do but one of my tips is gonna be that I don't want you to have them do the heir rating process I want you to do that later on and I'm gonna show you why in this video it's pretty important next let's talk about what material is used for leveling if you want to start a bar fight just start talking about leveling material the professionals all the professionals use a leveling mix which is approximately 70 to 80 percent sand and twenty to thirty percent organic matter it's a mix they don't use plain sand people say uh golf courses use plain sand all the time yeah they do I'm come from the golf course that's my background why is this because putting greens are made of what basically sand and they're 80 percent sand twenty percent organic matter so that they can be shaped and formed and sloped fairways fairways are the same thing there's a lot of sand inside fairways so they can put raw sand on there your lawn is different your lawn and my lawn have has a lot my lawn a solid red clay and if I just dump sand on top of it I'm pretty much gonna be making cement also from unit doesn't like to grow into Ross and there's no organic matter to hold the nutrients it just flushes out that's why you have to use or fertilizer on sandy soils than you do clay based soils so you want to have organic matter in there also what is sand it's basically a pile of glass and it gets really hot so if you dump a whole bunch of several inches of sand and a hole what happens the Sun beats on it gets very hot and it sort of pushes away the Bermuda I'm gonna show you examples of that in this video so if you have to fill a big hole let's say you have a big 6-inch hole and you got to put a lot of this mix in there you still need to go back and what I do is I use potting soil because it's there's very little wood inside potting soil and just put about an inch of potting soil on top of these areas if there's deep sand it works really well now that's just for those big holes that you got if you're just talking about you know 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch or 3/4 inches sand it'll be fine that's no problem the the leveling mix the bermuda grows right back into it it's no problem all right so we talked about how you find a company talked a little bit about the price we talked a little bit about the soil that you're gonna mix I've got footage that I'm probably just gonna roll into now and I'm gonna show you the process but one thing I did want to touch on one of the critical points is a lot of these companies including this company well first of all if you're gonna if you're gonna do a large-scale leveling you got to scalp your lawn you cannot have long grass or medium grass and do a lovely you have to scalp it as low as you can the lower you go the better it is and unfortunately I forgot about my appointment and so I panicked the night before and went out here and cut my front lawn down as long as short as I could my lawn my back lawn was ok that was my mistake that was on me so scalp you're scalping your lawn will really really help if you have thick grass that stuff you put on top is just gonna sort of lay it down it's gonna clump up and you got to work it in it's just a mess so you really want to go ahead and scalp down your lawn that's number one number two do not have these companies aerate coir aerate your lawn before they do the leveling unless they're gonna run a mower and scalp it afterwards and here's why especially with clay soils those plugs those aeration plugs they're gonna be sitting on your lawn and what's going to happen next you're gonna have all this equipment running all over your lawn putting out the sand then you're gonna have again equipment running all over your yard leveling out you're gonna have all kinds of stuff and what happens in those plugs they turn into these sandy silver dollars that's seven your lawn and if you've ever taken anything a brick or rock anything set it on your grass for 24 hours when you pick it up what is your perm you to look like or way your lawn look like there's yellow grass there well the same thing happens with these silver dollars and now you've got thousands of them all over your lawn it was a nightmare for me and I'm gonna show you this specifically in here that's my biggest tip in this video is if you're gonna have someone come out love your lawn have them level your lawn come back a week or so later and then aerate your lawn I do not leave aeration plugs I don't care what expert tells you do not leave core aeration plugs on your lawn let them sit on your lawn let them dry up and then run your mower over and chop them up because you don't want to turn into these stupid silver dollars and sit on top because Bermuda is very sensitive to being covered up by anything good example is barb if she freaked out because she brought down a glass-top table and sent it on top of her bare meat ax and she now has a has xx and I was thirty inch circle on her lawn she didn't want to tell me she was all worried I'm so worried I killed it I totally be fine it'll grow back but it was just like yellow circle right in the backyard it's funny it could be poor thing was worried to death so anyways I think what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna go ahead and we're gonna go right out to the main big job I was I'll warn you I was running around helping these people out I was actually doing take stealing sand and putting it in areas that I knew that were deeper and you want to do that when someone shows up if you know you have ruts get a wheelbarrow and steal some of their saying and go out and fill those ruts out that they don't know about specifically and I'm going to show you the tool that I use it's a rake certain rake that you get it Lowe's they do sell a leveling rake but man these leveling rakes are outrageous there are like a hundred to three hundred dollars there's a rake that you can buy at Lowe's or maybe I could find it on Amazon I'll put a link on Amazon in the page below but it's only like I don't know was it 30 to 50 bucks it's a great to have [Music] [Music] [Music] DJ got me to stay liquid got me disdain don't you know [Music] move into it [Music] nobody [Music] okay so we're all done yeah we got a Miss the biggest thing I want to point out here is you'll notice no we have a know we've only owned this house for three years but you can tell even the previous owners you can tell the rut marks from the riding mower year after year after year and those will be the things that are really white again you know this was maybe 1/4 inch to maybe half an inch of leveling mix put on here not a huge amount that's about all you can do in one year so what I'm gonna do now is they are done it they're aerated and level than two hours so now what I'm going to do is get my rake and I'm gonna go touch up some spots that I know we're trying to battle in here okay so as an example I always have a problem on the side of my driveway with water pooling in here because apparently someone must have parked over here because the rut kind of goes all the way down here so you can see I'm trying to bring this up pretty heavy we'll see how this works but I put almost an inch of the leveling soil along here to try and get this to level up to allow this to drain off more okay so here's that same area about six weeks later excuse all these which is a storm but you can see that all that is gone and it's a pretty significant difference from where we were right after the leveling to now which is about six weeks later you can't see any sand and it's fairly well leveled off okay so now now is where the real work begins oh yeah it's hot out here today I think it's gonna be 85 degrees I'm fat old and lazy but now what I have to do is I'll show you this rake you can get this rake at Lowe's I pick one up and Lowe's my lawn because it's so bad and has so much undulation and so many ruts in it I just need a rake that I can just sort of spread sand out let me show you the one I got so this is a cobalt 36 inch rake you get it at Lowe's again if you go in the description I guess I'll put a link to this thing but it has this see this edge right here see that flat edge that's what I want right there don't you really use the teeth on this I use the flat edge and I drag it and I'll put as I drag it I'll show you what I do as I drag you this I sort of put downward pressure on it and drag it along area you found the only piece of shade out here a little tree that's nice you're gonna have to move those because dad's gonna be raking in here a minute so anyways as you rake this big thing if there's a depression in this area the sand will sort of go to it so I sometimes what I'll do is sometimes I'll put my rake at an angle so I'll put my ring at an angle and what ends up happening is the sand travels down that angle so sometimes I'll do it that way but basically I'm just sort of just working it in just like this so see these white spots here that's an old sprinkler head that's a trench mark the new sprinkler head is up over here so you can see that it's filling those in same thing over here see those track marks you can see those track marks from people riding mower over and over you can sort of see this line here this was an old sprinkler head valve that no longer functions and you can see how much sand is in there okay so this is really important what I'm gonna do is some people are gonna say hey Doc you still got these big patches of sand in there why didn't you spread that out let me show you how crappy this lawn is all right let's know the whole point to having a wide 36 inch rake is it takes the guesswork out of leveling so if you'll watch the very bottom I'm gonna try and zoom in here watch the bottom of the rake and you can see that there's even a space where that is I actually need more sand let me do it again so you can see it watch closely now see how I have a space under it basically I inherited a crappy loft this is so bumpy it's so crazy anyways let me get on sweat you all right so here's a good example this is what I'm leaving on my lawn I am basically leaving red clay on my top of my per meter grass and so what ends up happening is when you run them over now when your lawnmower whatever see how it flattens out that thing flattens out and let me show you let me give you an example see here's one here look at it it's flattened out actually that's the whole Linda what are you doing you don't need dirt but every time you ride a mower over at seed though these are plugs and they flattened out and they'll cover up these plugs will cover up growing grass and they're gonna create yellow little spots underneath it so I like to get them crushed up as soon as possible all right so how do we convert this and do a small scale well before we do that let's talk about fertilizing the last thing you do before you put your top dressing on if you're gonna do the large scale one is as you spray with super juice so once you've scalp you got everything ready for the material that come on you're going to want to spray a real strong 14-2 for super juice get the leveling done get all that settled and then put a granular then put pgf down on top of it you don't want to put the grain go down first spray the spray is not gonna move then do the green one so here's a small scale back a place and some potting soil a shovel and a rake I'll do a spot over here that's still not level so I take the the sand and now I'm just going to this and again just a little bit of potting soil inside of that just see you guys basically and so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna level that spot right there that's still after all this work that still is my level so then I can come back if I want since it's so heavy and so thick just dress it up okay so this area had a good six to eight inch depression and you can see that it's taken a lot of material to fill that all in but now she's fairly flat now what was a hole or depression it's fairly level and it has a level of organic matter on the top that the bromine is gonna want to go into so the same thing I think you can get a feel for just how much material is required I mean if you're you're you're putting a large amount of material on these big holes I mean it's a truckload of material to do an entire lawn so you have to do it little by little mainly working on problem areas work on these rough marks again spray your super juice first have a leveling done then put your granular on top if you're gonna top dress just buy some place and some potting soil mix it together maybe a three to one four to one ratio use that to fill any rut marks or or problem areas that you have and then top dress it was a little more potting soil the potting soil on top is is dramatic what it does so again I don't want to discourage you from doing it by hand but let me tell you what it is a workout if you're gonna do if let's say you have a small lot you want to do it yourself you can take a shovel and you can just throw it out with a shovel throw it out with a shovel but I probably would suggest having the leveling soil actually delivered to you and doing it that way it's a it's a it's a real exhausting work out to do this stuff by hand I know people are gonna say man that's a lot of money to have a long level let me tell you what if I did this by hand I guarantee I'd be out here for a week solid I'd probably spend probably about four or five $600 at least just on materials labor wise I'd probably end up in the hospital and that you can on an EKG so $1,200 versus five hundred dollars plus labor man I know it I know it sounds like a lot of money but it was well worth it now I did call them I think what I'm gonna do because I got the new reel mower the same one that we're giving away because I got the new reel mower I'm using the reel mower right now mainly on the front and I really want to try and get that a little more level so I called and talked to Mike again and I said hey why don't we come back and do one more leveling on the front area since it's still so rough it's gonna take several times to do it and he said yeah sure we can do that but it's gonna be late in August so look for that video so that's it guys I hope I promised the leveling value video with this was video was a lot of work a lot of stuff to put together hope I explained it hope it answered a lot of your questions talk to you later [Music]

Channel: How To with Doc

Views: 507,242

Rating: 4.791101 out of 5

Keywords: level a lawn, leveling lawn, lawn leveling, how to level a lawn, leveling yard, how to level my lawn, top dressing lawn, top dressing, how to level lawn with topsoil, leveling yards, prevent scalp marks lawn, diy leveling lawns, lawn is uneven, how to topdress your lawn, lawn top dressing, how to level your lawn, top dressing your lawn, leveling lawns

Id: aQ0hmssW6eM

Length: 22min 52sec (1372 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 10 2019