Want a flat lawn? Aerating and leveling with sand will help!

thanks to big guys paestum on digit and this is my lunch I must admit beautiful this what a babe in it yeah it's glorious now it's no lie it's been quite the journey to get to this point it's take me almost a year and three months to really transform it but guess what guys we aren't done on my record before we begin let's do a quick walkthrough so you can see what I'm dealing with overall color everything I'm really satisfied it's a little bit richer in color in person that's the good news the bad news is I've been mowing at 1 inch and when we get to this section right here you can see it's scalps City and I've got a few problem areas along that as perimeter edge is where I'm scalping the most now I'll take you around back you can see I've left it really long in the back that's fairly maintenance-free a lot of you guys been wondering why I haven't posted many pictures and it's just because I really haven't had to do much with it it just it looks good it feels good right now the grass is a little bit long I'd say we're probably at about 5 inches right now cuz I have mowed it in about 7 to 10 days fairly maintenance-free so today we're gonna scalp it down and we're gonna do all of it step number one of my process I'm going to scalp the lawn now my backyard is gonna take a beating because I'm gonna take it down from about four inches all the way down to two inches so I'm gonna see some color changes because I'm taking way too much off top it's gonna stress a little bit now on the front yard I'm already less than an inch ideally I want to be at 1/2 inch but I'm just a little concerned that some of these areas are gonna scalp so I might bring down half of the front lawn you know what on second thought I'm gonna scalp it just to show you guys the process well my house officially looks like a train rack Ned don't care haha what are you gonna do well I officially got the top dresser because I'm lazy and I don't know why people want to create wheelbarrows all across the lawn I have my 1/16 screen sand and then I just got some leveling topsoil as well let's take a look at the law and it didn't take as much of a beating as I thought it's actually doing fairly good to make a long story short the colors decent you can see every one of these brown areas is where I scalped with the mower and it's pretty bad and it's all because it's not level now it's pretty amazing to me that it took the lawn from one inch down to 1/2 inch so I'm still remaining color cuz you look in the backyard it took from 5 inches to 2 inches and it looks like a bomb went off now I've had continuing problems with water seeping in from the neighbor's house and my sprinkler over watering so I've got about 2 inches of standing water as you could see I pretty much demolished this area leveling is way off so I'm gonna give it one last effort and Reed level this whole area now there's a couple of these areas I think I'm gonna get a little impatient over the levels got to come up almost two inches over there and then along the sidewalk here I wanted to get it really nice and even I raised it about half an inch about three weeks ago and it still needs an additional two to three inches in that spot and then I've got these areas that are so bad along the fence line which you're gonna see my little shadow here but this whole area it's like four inches poor of my fingers and it's got to come up honestly I think what I'm gonna do is just level it out and then replant grass because I'm too impatient for this and ultimately it's just grass but coming in the back here I'll show you it's even worse it's almost embarrassing but what are you gonna do fix it that's what we're gonna do we're gonna fix it so you can see along the corner here along the entire perimeter edge it's really bad now the only bummer part of this side is I'm gonna end up having to do my neighbor's side as well otherwise the dirts just gonna slough right underneath so he's giving me permission to do that and get her done so I decided that I'm gonna do an era fication that process is aerating the lawn removing the plugs and replacing it with sand and dirt and then I'm going to level right after that now what that's gonna do is that's gonna help out with my continued melting out issue I'm gonna get more air and oxygen through the sand and the soil it's gonna allow a lot of the nutrients to pass a little bit better too in the long run this is a good choice in my opinion for my lawn now I've decided this job it's gonna suck no matter what but you know what that gives me a good idea I'll be right back man what could be worse than leveling a lot and having to put out all this dirt well ruining a brand-new white t-shirt that says Brett sucks on it hey go visit Brett's page Brett's grass Capades he's pretty good at this leveling stuff he's got it down packed go check him out if you've aerated a long before you know this job can suck the machine weighs about 150 to 200 pounds it pulls 3-inch plugs from the ground but the benefits are fantastic now if you have a lawn like mine that is highly dense and thatch aeration might be for you now what it does is it pushes a bunch of turds out of the lawn and provides a lot of space for the grass to grow laterally one aeration is a fantastic way to increase oxygen water and nutrients back into the soil now part of the era fication process I'm going to pick up all these plugs and then I'm going to replace it with sand now traditionally you're not going to do this you're just gonna leave the plugs and allow them to disintegrate and go back to where they came from you don't want to pick them up because it holds a ton of micronutrients you want all that goodness to go back into the soil this sucks but you could almost see the color coming back already just between me aerating and raking it and getting a bunch of that debris out it's already coming back together but got to see the size of these piles this is my thatch pile just friendly reminder out there lawn aeration removes thatch so you could see this big layer right here it's batch and ideally you don't want to remove these plugs I'm gonna be replacing the dirt and that's why I'm doing it but you can see how much thatch we actually have it's just getting a little bit out of hand Brett sucks I get it I get it now collars coming along well so I'm gonna run a recovery service now so that way it'll start growing as soon as I put the dirt on I'm gonna put 50 pounds with the 5-0 pounds of humates with gypsum in it per thousand square feet so I'm gonna do that now and then I'm gonna run a full pound of nitrogen to force a lot of growth so that way we can push the grass up through the dirt that I'm gonna be placing down to make this job suck a little less I was fortunate enough to get the eco lawn top dresser now this machine's pretty awesome you take the dirt you put it in the hopper and it spreads it out for you nice and even now I'm using a combination of 50% topsoil 50% sand along this perimeter edge because it's my lowest spot and I'm gonna be adding a lot more dirt to this area than the other spots in the lawn now if you have access to rent a machine like this I highly recommend it in the springtime and put some fresh dirt out on the lawn there's nothing better for a lawn than some fresh soil loading the dirt really sucks but it sucks less when you got friends and family helping out makes the job go a lot easier now the machines really cool it distributes the sand or soil evenly so as long as you make your passes correctly you're not going get a lot of buildup if you have access to a top dresser I highly recommend it's well worth the money well worth the heartache and it will save your back that machine is rad that just saved me so much time I can't even describe it like unbelievable pretty cool huh but they're watching so cool now we decided to burn the midnight oil just to get her done now one lesson that I learned you might as well just open the chute as far as it goes if you're going to be leveling it makes the job go a lot faster it's officially day two on my Bret sucks journey it's my lon leveling and I'll tell you what man I'm tired I was up late last night Sun went down I kept work for another two hours so I'm kind of anxious to see what I'm dealing with but kids kind of told me to tell sign that mom's not happy because there's sand everywhere and it's part of the journey that's why Brett sucks I'd say considering I couldn't see half of what was going on last night I did pretty pretty good there's a little bit of grass sticking up it's kind of like smearing icing on a cake you know you're just really just trying to get it where it goes I've gotta wait for the Sun to come up give it a couple of hours to really dry out some of the sands so it'll settle a little bit better and then I'll start agitating it now this adds a little bit more dry it's time to use the level on and start pushing the sand down through the grass now I'm gonna cross hatch it I'm gonna go one direction then I'm gonna do the other and just repeat the process over and over and over now making fantastic progress but this sucks now I was trying to figure out how to make the process go a little bit faster so I ended up grabbing my thatch rake to see if I could pull the grass upward a little bit more and that really really sped it up and in the process I got rid of some of the lawn debris that was laying on top at the soil surface as well so I got kind of a two in one it was a little bit of a bonus I am so excited to do the backyard I know this sucks the backyard was a little bit tricky I started out with thatch rake but looking in hindsight I probably should have started with the level on that would have been a better choice the grass was obviously longer being at about two inches as opposed to the front yard half inch and it made it more difficult for well that sucked for sure but looking at under I want to show you my little project I got going on over here welcome to my mud pit um so I've had a lot of problems over here irrigation has been the biggest one and I'm getting a ton of water that's pooling up over there like I've shown you before so what I did is I put probably a full yard or two of sand mixed with topsoil and I just got to get this leveled out I'm back it's day three of my lawn leveling and this sucks it's gonna pay off big-time I'm pretty happy that's pretty much not carrying over here which is awesome and he's enjoying the sand but man there's sand everywhere there's sand at my house and in my undies sand in my butt other places but uh yeah let's go take a look now I'm down to about a yard of dirt and I'm down to less than the yard of sand which is pretty crazy me and Ned today we're focusing on this spot that he's standing in he's my compaction King right there and we've got to figure out how to level this out I'm still debating what I'm gonna do other than the fact that I'm probably just gonna let it let it die off I'm gonna I'm gonna level that all out and then my other focus today is going to be the fence line I'm gonna start mounting up all this dirt right now in preparation of fixing this this is my other water spot but big water spot issues are along this whole area and you can see the giant gap here and that's almost six inches of space between me and the neighbor so it's kind of a big deal now here's where things get a little bit tricky and I made myself a massive mess I have so many elevation changes that this one dose of sand is not gonna do it so I'm gonna have to work on this in the next couple of years and just keep massaging the sand right in to change that spot right there was the worse though I had almost six inches of elevation change and this is also where all the water was pooling and flooding up and so I decided that sand was a really good choice because I get so much shade primarily due to the tree that we have here and just the fact that the house is on the back side it's eastward facing and I just don't get a ton of sunlight so between those two things I think this will solve 50% of my issues and working on getting a separate sprinkler station is the next step some of these areas still have a little bit of dips to them so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use the level on kind of show me where these dips are and then I'm gonna put the dirt right on the level on and then I'm gonna level them individually as it gets caught in the center channel as it falls into the divots making it simple and effective now I really pleased with my purchase of the level on I was a little skeptical at first but it saved me a ton of time is worth every penny now I was able to get the kids out there they thought it was pretty cool too so we had an all-around fun family time [Music] now along the fence line I'm gonna change my approach dramatically I'm gonna end up using the pure topsoil to raise some of these areas up to six inches along the fence line now I did end up going along the other side of the fence of my neighbor's side and kind of filling in some of the gaps that he has on his side too I didn't have access to a roller nor did I want to spend the money so me and the kids did the old-fashioned la Cucaracha dance all over the soil to get it nice and compact and then I just use the level on to level it out now I chose to put a small layer of sand over the top case my kids decide to walk on it and want to track him mud through the house [Music] just be prepared if you have a project like mine you are going to be moving a ton of dirt so you need to make sure you have the right tools for the job the most handy tool I had in a bunch for this section was the bow rake it allowed me to push the dirt really well and then I just use my foot to compact along the fence line I did that over and over and over my final step was using the level on to make sure that it was somewhat level with the rest of the grass in hindsight it may have been easier to rent a bobcat and just scrape the top to make the back even but hey I never backed down from a challenge unfortunately I'm gonna have to do this process a couple of times in the backyard and go very aggressive in order to get it where it needs to be if I really wanted to mow short well it's so much better it's far from complete I'm still gonna have to over seed and put a small top dressing on it but guys I'm pooped and this sucks well those last three days really sucked I'll tell you what you want to level your lawn be prepared it's going to suck hit me up in the comments till next time guys best long digit this is my lawn [Music]

Channel: Pest and Lawn Ginja

Views: 949,983

Rating: 4.725986 out of 5

Keywords: level your lawn, how to level your lawn, top dress lawn, how to level a lawn, how to top dress your lawn, level lawn, level yard, yard is not level, grass is not level, grass is uneven, bumpy lawn, topdressing, aerating, aeration, ecolawn topdresser, ecolawn 250, top dressing your lawn, level your lawn with sand, how to level your lawn with topsoil, leveling lawn, how to top dress lawn, lawn top dressing, leveling lawns, pest and lawn ginja, how to top dress lawn with sand

Id: L6n-Yw2SKgI

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 29 2019