Using Compost As A Top Dressing To Thicken Your Lawn (4K)

Hello I'm Austin Jarrett from Allett Mowers today  we just want to shoot a really quick video on how   you might thicken up your lawn. So there are lawns  just like this we've overseeded this recently and   this lawn area here just really hasn't taken very  well and i want a nice thick lush lawn that mows   really well and really shows up light green dark  green stripes. Now the grass i might have might   be really poor it might be a really old lawn but  by over-seeding this and introducing new cultivars   we're going to be using a 100% ryegrass which  stripes really well and it really establishes   and germinates to a high percentage. So the method  that we're going to use is not going to involve   loads of really expensive equipment but it's going  to involve using what's in these bags here as the   growing medium and that's compost. This compost  has been bought from a supermarket at three pounds   a bag and there's 50 litres in a bag. We've been  doing some experiments as part of another trial   that we're doing more generally about seeds  and you can catch up with that the links below   and we've been growing the grass in tubs as first  part of the experiment and we were testing out   the different cultivars but what we also did was  sew the seed on top of the soil from this garden   and then we topped we put the seed on and then  we topped it off with three different mediums   and what i've got here is on the top of this box  here is we used over the top of the seed compost   and on this section here we used a sand  soil mix predominantly sand 70 percent sand   and 30 percent soil and then on this third of the  box we just used the same soil that we used in the   base from the garden and we were really surprised.  It was very definitely when the grass plants start   to emerge it was coming out of where the compost  was used and then as that's carried on because the   grass plants have had a head start it's thicker  already and this was literally sewn three weeks   ago so we're starting to get a really great  lawn going and so we were convinced that using   compost as a topping over the top of the seed  was going to give us a much better result. Then   I'll show you something else that we did as  part of that development of this technique.   So the second part of the trial was we seeded  this area i levelled it first using the sand   and soil mixture using a lute and then once  i'd done that i then mixed the seed with the   compost at the seed rate i wanted and covered the  whole area but i did something slightly different   with this strip here which you can see is the  width of the compost spreader. I then filled   the compost spreader up with just compost and  i deposited another covering of compost over   the compost and seed mix that i put down to start  off with and we were really surprised to see and   you can still see very significantly this is two  weeks after seeding that what we've got is a see   an establishment rate although still a little bit  patchy because it's still quite young we've got an   establishment rate here that is much higher than  the adjacent runs which just had seed and compost   you can see even now that there's still seed on  the surface here as the compost has broken down   but here there's much less seed and there's much  more grass so that's the method that we're going   to use on our little trial over just across the  way of from the drive. So what we're going to do   is we're going to use this compost spreader which  is a really nice spreader i put the compost inside   there and then when i run that over the ground it  spreads out a reasonably even amount of compost.   What i'm also going to do before i put the compost  in there is i'm going to put the compost in the   wheelbarrow and mix the grass seed up. I've  already worked out that this area here is about   50 square meters i'm going to be using an ideal  over-seeding rate of about 50 grams per metre so   i'm going to need about 250 grams of grass seed in  order to sew this area which i'll mix in with the   top dressing i'll then distribute it and once i've  done all of that i'm then going to use just plain   compost material and i'm going to go over the top  of that again. What i did before i started was   i've irrigated this really well so the ground  is now really moist because i didn't want any   deficit in moisture to occur when i topped it off  then with the compost. So let's get on with it. So that's the first stage done the compost and  the seed mix is now spread around. Now one of   the things i found with the compost spreader you  have these areas of steel and not mesh and it does   leave these strips here where there's no compost  and therefore no seed so the other thing i just   quickly want to do now is to use my trusty lawn  lute and of course every real man has one of these   in his shed a fantastic lawn tool used for so many  different things but what i want to do is to just   make sure now that i've got a full distribution  and i'm not just left with those little   strips there because that's important that  i've got an even distribution of the seed. The other reason i like the compost is that in the  trials that we've done there's been absolutely no   weed seeds whatsoever i've had no weeds come  up in the in the trial plots so as part of   that composting process it must kill off the weed  seeds because there's just no evidence that and   that's the other thing of course i don't want  to be introducing any weed seeds which if i use   topsoil that is a big risk. I want to keep this  this this ryegrass lawn 100 percent ryegrass if i   possibly can with no ingress of weeds whatsoever.  I don't know why the compost has worked so well   on the seeds that we've done whether  it's because during the colder period   in april of this year the darker colour  absorbed more heat or whether it's the nutrients   i actually don't really mind too much  all i want to do is to get a good lawn   so let's get this luted out and  get this seed spread around evenly. So now the grass seed and the compost  is spread evenly after the looting   we've now filled the compost spreader with  just compost so that we can now give the   mixture a coating of just compost over the top  which is what we found to be so successful. So that's it the second coating  of the compost is now done   and actually of course the grass plants  are still showing through so it doesn't   look any worse now actually than it did before  we started so nobody's going to complain about   you trashing the lawn while you're trying to make  this improvement and make a much more dense sward.   We've used three bags to cover the 50 metres to  give two coverings and when i've calibrated it   in order to work out the seed rate then one bag  of 50 litres covers about 30 metress once so if   you want to do a calculation not only for your  seed application rate each mixture that you need   to do for a bag is 30 metres covered therefore  how much grass seed do i need to put in there   to get the application rate that i want but that  gives you a rough idea as well to work out whether   what the cost is going to be to do your lawn as  well. You can buy compost really inexpensively   from little supermarkets and Tesco's and  elsewhere rather than probably going to a   garden centre where they probably charge in the  region of twice that price. So i'll see you again   in a few weeks time and we'll see what this looks  like then. So here we are with an Allett time warp   and we're now four weeks ahead from when we did  the compost over-seeding method on this area here   and i think you can see that the results here are  quite satisfactory some areas it's not quite as   thick as i wanted but this is quite a different  lawn area than it was just a few weeks ago so i   think that's really important. We'll just go and  have a look at the other area that i showed where   we originally established the method as well and  we can see what's happened there. This has had   its first cylinder mow today and you can still  see that the system where we use the seed and   compost mixture topped off has actually been so  much more successful where we just used the seed   and compost mixture on its own without the topping  that's continued to be more of a challenge. So i   think this is a really nice method you can use  the compost to help you spread the seed evenly   and to also to give it an environment where  it's much more likely to thrive especially   when you put that topping over the top and make  sure that all the seed is properly covered.   So i hope that's been useful and please if you've  got any comments please just put them below you.

Channel: ALLETT MOWERS

Views: 136,836

Keywords: allettmowers, allett, cylindermower, reelmower, lawncare, compost, thicken, lawn, grass

Id: 0NG0SdHDKV8

Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 03 2021