Top Dressing and Top Soiling your Lawn

so why do we top dress our lawns well there's a few reasons the first is to level out any little humps and bumps that you have in your moon often where the postman rides his motorbike every day you want to level out that long it's also a great way to feed your lawn and the best time of year to do this is in the spring so say August September October and into early November before it gets too hot so you can feed your lawn you can level up the humps and bumps and many good lawns that you see around the place are the ones that have been top dressed so let's go through the stages of what you need to do to talk to us your lawn so the first thing we're going to do is get Ashley just to mow the lawn very likely not a shade not a really heavy mow just a light mode to take the new growth off so actually run through that and then I'll show you how long the grass really should be so now Ashley has finished the mole but as I said before it's only a light mole we still need some depth to the grass as you can see next to my fingers here because when we do top dress we want the soil particles of the sand particles to drop down between the blades of grass and not bury it as you can see there's still a little bit of depth to the grass which is what we meant with a light moment okay so we've had our soil delivered top crossings here and Trevor is now filling the barrel to distribute it around the lawn in even little piles so that we can spread it out we'd like you to have a look this is the type of material that you want to use for your top crossing very finely screened there's no little low nor large chunks of viable stone in this so we put this to a triple screening process through piano wire which is virtually four to five mil apart so it takes out all the waste material so it's got sand in it it's got manure in it so it will feed your lawn as well as fill out any of those little humps and bumps this is called special blend top dressing and it is our special blend okay so what we've got now is Trev distributing the top dressing around the lawn in small convenient piles not too big because this is all going to be shoveled and spread around so you don't make extra work for yourself so you can see this growing small piles which will make it easier to spread with the rake or the soil leveler that will show you in just a minute so this is how we want it later small little piles around the lawn and maybe don't even do the whole lawn first because your judgment might not be exact so do a section as we've done here and now we'll spread this out and see if there are any gaps or if we've got a little bit too much in some places so that's the first day spreading the soil in small parts now the first piece of equipment that we use is a very high-tech piece called a steel rake but this time I wanted to use it upside down and as travel show you now it's a great way of pushing and pulling the soil around and getting a nice even surface across the grass without ripping into the surface with these pointy edges so already you drove so you can see now we're not this is not the finished surface we're just roughly spreading out the small piles to make sure that we've got the right amount of soil in the areas on the on the lawn okay the next tool that we're going to use is called a soil level which is just like a metal grate on a swivel on the end of a handle and now that Trevor is roughly spread out the piles of soil using the upturn steel rake now we'll show what can happen then when you push this back and forth across the move it hit the weight of the grid helps the soil to rattle down through the blades of grass and give you a tip you see now the soil is dropping through the blades of grass still it in the tops poking the final piece of equipment that you could use when topdressing the lawn is this very glamorous piece of equipment the old plastic garden rake what I find this useful for is around the edges of the lawn where you just want to get a little bit of extra soil bring it right up close to the pavers that way then you can get a perfect finish to your top dressing room so the three tools that you can use in the plastic rake the metal soil leveler and the steel garden rake up to and pushing your soil back and forth around the garden now I've mentioned before how it's important not to top trust too deeply and you can see here where Trevor's been over this law that the grass is poking through if we look over here device all like that yeah but if someone topped us there long like this you can see you can't see the grass and if you just think for a minute if the grass needs sunlight to grow and if you bury it too deeply in a top dressing you'll starve it of sunlight and it will probably die so if you top dressing and it's this deep make it thinner shake it around so that you can see the grass poking through has to have the grass poking so I can't stress that strongly enough don't make the top dressing too deep so the probably the most common question we get asked then is well how much top testing soil do I need obviously that can vary slightly depending on how long your grass is but a great rule of thumb is if you're going to put the top dressing one centimeter deep then you will need one cubic meter for every hundred square meters of law now your grass is a bit longer than that you want to go a little bit deeper order a little bit more but it's a great rule of thumb to work one cubic meter for 100 square meters at 1 centimeter do so once the job is done and you're satisfied that you've got a nice thin level of level of top dressing it's time to give it a water in now here we're fortunate enough to have sprinklers if you use a hose or a manual filter that's fine but water the top dressing in so again it settles it down to the base of the grass and then you'll have the ideal law if you're not going to top dress your lawn it will definitely need a good feed in the springtime ready for that summer growth and one of the best fertilizers that you can use is this one here called eco 88 now this is one that you could even apply before you top dress so if you do have a need to level out some humps and bumps but you feel that your need is a good kickstart for the spring and eco 88 is a great fertilizer to use now what I can show you here if you can see the white speckles in it and also the dark brown ones what that shows you is that this is a blend between an organic fertilizer and a chemical fertilizer the beauty of that is that the white chemicals in there which is mainly nitrogen gives you lawn a quick head of food followed up them by the slowly slow release of them of the organic net so look out for eco 88 a small bag like this will cover nearly 300 square meters so it's quite a neat quite an economical way to feed your lawn ready for the spring and the summer months

Channel: Centenary Landscaping Supplies

Views: 1,586,477

Rating: 4.7047291 out of 5

Keywords: DIY, landscaping, gardening

Id: M77S86Sib1I

Length: 7min 39sec (459 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 21 2012