Leveling My Lawn Before Renovation and Seeding / Soil vs Sand??

now begins really the real work of moving all that soil back to here and starting to work on the leveling part so okay day two here's where we're at I kind of left off last night by finishing up just a little section here well it's not really finished yet put down some of the soil on this section and started using my leveling tool and I'll explain all this coming up here on the portion that we're gonna work on today but I got probably about a third of it done and then it got dark so I had to go inside I think I'm actually wearing the exact same shirt today as I was in my last renovation video from last year so maybe that's a sign of something I don't really know what but okay let's get to work get ourselves all sweaty again and move a bunch of soil of course probably the first question that most people are going to have is what type of soil to use if you're going to do leveling work here and also why am i using soil versus maybe sand or some other material like that so let's go over that really quickly so my native soil is of course a clay type lomi mix so that's a good base to start with here for me in general because it holds a lot of nutrients holds a lot of moisture and all those things so if we're just talking about wanting to level the yard then actually we can use sand to do that and it would probably be the best option if we were only going to do leveling the first time we'd want to do that we'd likely want to come core aerate then sand overtop of that despite having seen many opinions about that online about that creating concrete in your yard I'll post a link down below to an article from Michigan State University on the sand capping method that you can do on native soil and how they've been doing this for years and years on golf courses and also on sports fields and things like that so that research there is going to tell us that that layer of sand up on top is not going to indeed create concrete but it will be okay there and does give some benefits in terms of other things when it comes to high end turf so do you want to get into that in your home yard that's a question you have to ask yourself because it's sort of a point of once you get that sand going down you have to kind of maintain it you have to do certain things with aeration and over time if you do some sort of project you're not going to really want to dump a whole bunch more topsoil on top of that sand layer because then you're creating layers in the soil so it gets sort of complicated quickly and it's why I've been really considering when to use sand in my yard and or if I'm going to use sand and I think for levelling purposes in the future I will be but this brings us all the way back to what are we using when we're going to level but also seed and that's a major difference there so there's leveling you can do in your yard but you're also going to be seeding as in this project I've been doing here topsoil is going to be much more forgiving for that new seed it's going to have nutrients in the soil it's not going to dry out as quickly I prefer soil and I think in any homeowners yard it makes more sense unless you have a very good grasp of how to grow it in sand how to keep up with the watering how to add nutrients appropriately and so it's just much more forgiving for us to use some topsoil [Music] I also told myself this year that I was going to get some kind of machine to move all the soil around and guess what didn't happen [Music] [Music] [Music] all right I told you we were gonna get sweaty so after I move soil into place here's where I start I just take a regular garden rake and start to move these piles out a little bit just to make it easier to spread with our leveling tool now you don't really have to do this you could just come in with the leveling tool but I found that if you spread it out first it just works a little bit better with that leveling tool so now comes this leveling tool that I'm talking about this tool has been amazingly useful in my lawn renovations in terms of leveling I bought this thing last year before I did my whole side renovation and it turned out great and I'm using this thing again this year and it's still working fabulous so I have the 30 inch version of this rake basically what it does is just helps to smooth everything out all in one motion and you just move around in different directions you keep moving the soil until things get pretty flat and even and when you're moving across the surface with the rake you just kind of feel like everything is looking pretty flat it's not really dragging soil one way or the other any more as I get to the end of using this tool I usually kind of just very lightly am skimming the top when I first start out I'm kind of putting some pressure into it working the soil down into the kind of dead grass that's still there but once you get done this also is nice at the end you can just kind of skim over things and you're just gonna have to keep working on this over and over in multiple areas depending on how your indentations are here I have some that are probably close to an inch and a half two inches so you want to stay on the high side of that drag the soil into the low areas and then just kind of keep working it until it's looking pretty good from there we're going to use a roller to come in roll down the soil that we just put down and try to flatten it a little bit after you roll you'll be able to kind of tell where you still need to put a little more soil and use your leveling tool again roll it again until you're feeling like things are pretty nice and even alright here's where we're at so far so we have one initial round of soil down on the whole area and rolled in and then right now I'm just going back I'm starting at this beginning part here and going piece by piece little by little finding the low spots putting a little more soil in there dragging it a little bit more rolling it in and that's really the whole process so you can kind of take as much time as you want to on that part of it and just kind of take your time like I said you can also just kind of say whenever you feel like it's done it's done and so it's up to you but I like to go through this part here pretty meticulously just to make sure that on this first round I'd spend as much time as I possibly can to make it as level as I can before I get the seat on there I've got a high spot here I spot here so the width of it allows you to come through the middle now is even with the other pieces and once I roll that in I'll see if it needs just a little bit more but let's the benefit of using a wide tool like that it works really well [Music] I have no idea why they designed this this way but if you look at this roller these edges have a lip on them that are taller than the middle part makes absolutely no sense and I wish I would have figured that out before I bought that thing but so what happens as you move along and then you'll see this line right in here going all the way down that's from the edge of it because it's not completely flat so I have no idea why they would have designed it that way but if you're gonna get a roller pay attention to make sure it's flat all the way across all right so it's mid-afternoon now and here's the problem with having a perfectionist personality is I'm still working on this thing because I walk away I come back and look and then I see something that I obviously think I need to change or make better so I've just been doing my best here to kind of try to not nitpick the whole thing but it's kind of usually what happens so then I will probably I might look at just watering it down just a touch see if we can get some of this to kind of stick together and hold together and then we will be moving on to the next steps so it's a good pretty good chunk out of here as far as how much I use this was 5 yards of topsoil and if I had to guess I'd say I probably used maybe close to half of it or maybe a little bit less than half gives you idea a little bit of how much I used and what you might need for your area if you have some pretty decent leveling to do now if you were just top dressing and kind of putting like a quarter of an inch on to or half an inch on your soil or something then you probably would not need nearly this much but I had some pretty large areas to cover so that's why I use what I use [Music] you know what that's doing in there another project going on on the inside definitely don't want to show this old carpet on video [Music]

Channel: Ryan Knorr Lawn Care

Views: 652,333

Keywords: lawn, how to level your lawn, level lawn before seeding, lawn renovation, soil vs sand, how to level a lawn, how to level your lawn area, how to level a lawn using topsoil, lawn renovation steps, how to topdress a lawn, top dressing your lawn, lawn care, lawn care tips, how to top dress lawn, top dress lawn, lawn top dressing, how to top dress lawn with sand, how to topdress your lawn, using sand, topsoil, grass seed, lawn renovation leveling, what to do before seeding grass

Id: IKoEf1VBlQ4

Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 18 2019