TOPDRESSING and LEVELING with SAND // How To Sand Level and Overseed Your Lawn

[Music] and pretty much now i'm gonna go get my equipment to start removing these cores and the reason for that like i said will be that i'm going to be top dressing [Music] with [Music] so i know the first question today is going to be why am i finally putting sand down on my lawn as a top dressing well as you all know i've been real mowing now for a few years and especially on this side renovation here that happened about two years ago i've noticed more and more that things are getting bumpy because of our natural native soil whenever we get a lot of rain or during the winter time when there's frost heaves then the ground changes over time as well as i had irrigation put in last year after the fact and it's never quite been the same since then so i finally decided to move to sand because it has better leveling properties and there's also some other benefits in terms of the top dressing and doing a sand cap on top of your native soil so i finally decided to move to the sand and i think it might have been in that video that i just referenced that someone said i'm not sanding my lawn until ryan does it well the sand's in the driveway so you better order some [Music] why is it that anytime i want to do some work like this it's the absolute windiest day possible to try and film so of course i got all the prep work done the other day last night i went through this and cut it down to around a half an inch maybe slightly lower than that low enough compared to my regular height of cut that i can get the sand down and have it settle in and then hopefully raise that height of cut just slightly more than that and then i won't be digging in directly into the sand when i reel mow here coming up but we're going to see how this process all works let's start over on this side this is pretty much the bumpiest area that i have over here so i'm going to make sure i get this done first this whole side i'll probably move to the front yard and then we'll see how much is left i just ordered eight tons i didn't really know how much i would need so i'm just gonna try to find out as we go [Music] [Music] [Music] so this is mason sand screened to around two millimeters looks to be looks to be fairly good stuff it's a little on the wet side right now it's harder to tell but so this is definitely a lot of work obviously i expected that but every time that you get into these projects it looks like a lot of fun at the beginning and then you start getting to the actual work and of course this 35 year old body here is not exactly 20 anymore so [Music] [Music] i was just thinking in my head how it's nice that i probably won't have any lookie-loos coming around here to ask me what i'm up to and then one just happens to drive by [Music] [Music] so what i found today that works best is to spread out these piles and then some of the sand is slightly wet so i've just been kind of raking those out and letting them dry for a little while and then once that's loose it actually flows into all those aeration holes really well and you want to fill all that up to make sure everything's flat there and then figure out the top part so now that i have this spread out i'm going to find the low spots again and kind of work on those maybe get a little more sand in some of those areas and then i'll start using my level on tool to go over this to fine tune everything and then we're going to the brushing part so that the grass blades are still showing and that way it's not going to kill the grass that you have here if you want a leg workout you can try that now connor told me i would not be capable of doing this yard without having a four-wheeler so i had to prove him wrong of course all right so i made it to day two and i did survive so i want to show you what i got done last night this other side section over here is pretty much ready to go i will be adding some seed on top of there lightly raking that in and then we'll start the process of growing in that seed but i found this the most important part has been actually just using a broom brushing the sand into the canopy layer i think that's probably something that you should focus on it's not the most fun work in the world for sure but it's something that if you want to keep the grass that you have there you need to make sure that it's not smothered so actually brushing that in has been extremely important in terms of getting the sand down into that canopy and making sure you still have some leaves showing on the other side the other thing today that you might think is that sand gets really really hot so you're gonna have a problem with that and for the most part i can feel the sun really warm on my skin right now and when you actually feel the sand down in here really not much warmer than usual in terms of just when the soil was there of course this will all be pretty much covered up with grass sort of thick grass on top of there too so that's something to think about that the sand won't really always be exposed like it is right now day three today i'm definitely a tired man at this point gotta get this thing finished and now move to the backyard so most of the front yard is completely done for the most part i think there's a few areas that i need just some tweaking and fine-tuning now i have some sand left and i wasn't really planning to move to the backyard but i've got it i've got to get it out of the driveway so this backyard is definitely bumpy so we're just gonna move to this but i had left the cores on this section out here which i wasn't planning to bring the sand out so now i got to get these cores off of here clean it up mow it down a little bit and then get some sand move from the front to the back look what kind of fun we're having over here [Music] [Applause] [Music] moles [Music] all right so the scarifier has been run through this thing probably six or seven times now and it's finally looking thinned out so do not worry about this on bluegrass if you've got bluegrass and by the time you get some more fertilizer going by the time you keep mowing consistently here in the fall you will be surprised how quickly that bluegrass is going to come back so it depends on what you're dealing with i wanted to get this thing really cleaned out then after all of that sand spreading by hand and all that work the last couple days i found out that i actually had a machine locally here to me that i could have rented so for today and going to the backyard i'm not messing around anymore got this [Music] thing well i don't need the agitation you keep making it worse and now we got a situation you always take the heart away to learn [Music] i'm gonna let it until there's nothing left you're right though we would have had two and a half now we don't have a pile of sand before our shovels in exactly [Music] [Music] [Music] so i was running out of daylight here today to get all that portion done so i have to talk to you here about what i was actually doing so the first thing that i was doing today was doing an overseed now i'm using the same perennial ryegrass that i've been using for the last couple years and i'm putting that over top of the sand here so after i put that sand down there's some thinner areas of the lawn so i want to overseed everything which is essentially just putting the seed on top of here and then i wanted to go ahead and rake all of that stuff in so whenever i'm doing these seeding projects i find that these metal rakes with the tines just lightly put the seed underneath the soil or just make sure that there's good seed to soil contact there now i may decide to roll this yet i'm not really sure what i would do in the past was i would rake all this stuff in and then i would roll it so that i made sure that i was pushing that seed lightly into the soil or in this case the sand and that way i have good seed to soil contact and that's how you get the seed to grow the best so i may do that in the morning yet we'll see if i get to that but otherwise usually once that perennial rye grass is on there as long as it's touching the soil it does a pretty good job of rooting itself into the soil so i'll get you the results here later on as well so make sure you stay tuned for that but then i just went ahead with a balanced fertilizer i ended up finding just a cheap 10 10 10 at home depot now these don't really even have any settings on the back of the bag as far as lawns go so i just knew that 10 pounds would be one pound of nitrogen on the ground and i wanted to put down about a half a pound right now so this is a 40 pound bag and i have about 4 000 square feet so cut that in half i would just do half of the bag so i put that in there i put that in the spreader i spread that evenly over the yard and that's just kind of how i came up with that so that's pretty much the process of overseeding this existing yard that i have here today all right so the interesting thing about actually doing the video and having that sort of cliffhanger at the end is that i can kind of look at some of the comments here and also answer them here on this next part of the video so today i want to talk about a few of those questions that i saw down in the comments as well as what happened with the sand how that's all going at this point and kind of give you some updates there as well so i saw this question quite a bit it was why are you removing the cores and why would you not leave them there i thought you're supposed to leave them on the lawn now if you have what i would call a traditional lawn then you would usually leave these cores on there to just break down naturally but for me when i have low cut turf specifically here under an inch it's cut at three quarters of an inch and then down to a half inch before i did the actual sanding then the whole point of this process that i'm doing is to do some sand capping which will add a sand layer on top but also it's to smooth out all of the surface so i wouldn't want to leave all those cores up on top of there because that's just going to leave a bumpy surface so if you have a normal yard and you do mow a little lower after you do the aeration sometimes the mower will chop those up for you and it'll start to drop that back on top of the yard but otherwise if you do have that yard and you're leaving the cores on there or if you have some wet weather then specifically just try to stay off of it for a little while so you're not smashing down all those cores and just making a bunch of bumpy areas on your yard but they will probably break down in around two weeks time or if you use your mower to chop them up then it should go quicker probably the next question that i got was why are you not using topsoil anymore you used to be talking about topsoil and leveling with that for a long time and yes but you can't learn anything you can't learn new processes if you don't try new things so i've been wanting to try the sand thing for a while it levels better you've got more space in between those particles than my heavier soil so you can grow some better roots into there and the reason that most sports fields are grown on sand or a sand cap preferably would be for those exact reasons so i'm trying to replicate the same thing this has gone on on golf courses and different things for over a hundred years the sand capping system but also i wanted to do that aeration so i'm incorporating the sand into the layer of soil that i have there now looking at this i still believe that my sifted soil that i was using for a couple years did a pretty good job i'd say about 90 there in terms of leveling work if i stand on that lawn for maybe 5-10 minutes you will actually feel an imprint down in the soil i have pretty soft soil and especially when it gets wet then it doesn't stay as level over time so if you're wanting to do some leveling but you don't want to go down the sand route you don't want to get into that then just go ahead and do that topsoil it's not going to hurt you by any means it just may not stay completely perfectly level over time and you're going to have to do some repeat applications if you're okay with that it's still a system that i've used like i said for many years here pretty happy with my results from it but i wanted to have the most level lawn possible that's why i'm trying this sand route to see how it goes if you can find a usga sand around you then that's going to have basically the highest spec that you can find now the cost comes with that as well i could not find anything around me that had anything like that and most of the places that i talked to unfortunately didn't really have much information for me on what the particle sizes were the analysis of everything so what i could do was take that sand that i actually wanted to use and get a sample of it and send it off to a lab and have it analyzed i was running out of time this year so i have a few friends in the industry especially my co-host on the podcast ryan who's done a lot of work with this and sports turf consulting so i showed him a couple pictures of what things were looking like and he said from the visual test of his experience it looked decent and so that's what i went with so i found some mason sand had that delivered and that's what i'm going with now the importance of things going forward is that once you go down with the sand you cannot stop the system so that's why i said there's really no going back and if you still feel more comfortable with topsoil then you can stick with that system for now once you go with sand you can't pull those cores out next year and leave them on top the yard or you can't go digging an area put a bunch of topsoil back on top of that sand because the coarse material which is the sand needs to stay on top at all times now that you've created that sand layer you don't want to put things back over top of it or you'll end up with some layering problems so i need to continue with core aeration probably once or twice a year remove those cores and then i'll be top dressing sand again just i wanted to make sure you understand that going forward this is a system that needs to aeration once a year need to remove those cores and you need to continue top dressing so that's going to keep your surface level also is going to help dilute any organic matter that actually builds up in that sand itself so like i said this is a whole experiment for me it's not like i'm the first one doing this by any means but for me personally learning and making sure i do things properly it's important going forward to let you know how that's going as well and we should be back to normal here in a few weeks at least i'm crossing my fingers we get some better weather and things look better but time will tell here i can already tell recovery is starting to happen but it does feel a little scary at the beginning i hope you'll stick around here to see what goes on with the sand as we get into the fall thanks so much for watching see you next time you

Channel: Ryan Knorr Lawn Care

Views: 464,276

Rating: 4.8691912 out of 5

Keywords: lawn, lawn care, how to level your lawn, lawn leveling, how can I make my lawn flat, my lawn is bumpy, leveling lawn with sand, soil vs sand for lawn leveling, level lawn, lawn leveling tool, Overseeding lawn, how to overseed lawn, add seed on top of lawn, overseeding after leveling lawn, overseeding sand, lawn care tips, sand leveling lawn, Ryan Knorr leveling, Ryan Knorr lawn care, lawn tips, cool season grass

Id: TbNwgafG4qI

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020