Wow! It’s been a long time since we posted last…but it’s taken some time to get our yard in order. When we moved here, our real estate agent told us that we’d never have grass in our back yard. I knew I was going to try whether he thought that or not. But when we had our yard sale about a year ago, we talked to someone who knew an older set of owners of the house, and she informed us that those owners had torn the grass out, since their dog was allergic. That gave us some more hope, and at that point we were just waiting for a good time to plant. Unfortunately, last year by the time we were moved in and all settled in, planting grass wasn’t an option. But this year it was.
I spent a good amount of time looking up what to do, since we were essentially starting from a blank slate.
A fresh lawn of dirt to start from.
I got a tiller on Amazon for only $75. It’s electric, but for the cost I was willing to take a chance. I figured I would rarely ever need to use it again after this, but it ended up being cheaper to buy the electric one than if I had to rent a tiller for two days, which allowed us to do the work over a more reasonable amount of time.
I tilled up all of our current lawn, to help aerate the lawn and bring up some better soil from below.
We also bought 15 yards of compost, which turned out to be just a little (like five yards) too much. We covered our current dirt with about an inch and a half of new dirt. Once we covered the whole yard and raked it out even, I went over the entire yard a second time with the tiller, to mix the new compost with our other dirt, since the grass wouldn’t grow in just compost.
(Luckily we also didn’t waste all the excess compost – a bunch of it ended up on the front lawn to help overseed that and make that a little greener too).
Us getting rid of the 15 yards of compost.
After mixing all the dirt together, we put down grass seed as well as starter fertilizer and raked a small amount of dirt over the top of it to cover the seed in about a quarter-inch of dirt. Then we used a lawn roller that we rented to roll over the whole yard, so it would help pack down the ground a little so everything wouldn’t wash away when we started watering or when it rains. After rolling the lawn, we quickly set up our sprinklers and began the watering and waiting process.
After only a few days, grass started to show up, and I was very excited. After waiting and hoping to see grass, worrying that it might never show up, I was excited to see that it was definitely showing up. There was a mix of a little bit of green across the entire dirt area.
Some grass starting to show up!
Of course, I still had to wait a little longer to see what I was really looking for, but by about two weeks, we were already seeing what was basically an entirely full, green lawn.
A full lawn of green!
There’s still some small spots that have not held up as well a most of it since we got a lot of rain, and it ended up knocking down a lot of grass, but I’m hopeful it will all continue to look like this while we live here! It’ll certainly be some work to keep clean of leaves and pine needles, but if that’s what it takes to keep the back yard full of grass rather than dirt, I’d prefer to have to rake the grass over raking the dirt.
Now that it’s been just over six weeks since we seeded, the grass is still doing pretty well, with the exception of all the areas the squirrels keep digging up, but we’ve mowed it, re-fertilized it, and cleared all the leaves off of it, to help it keep growing. I’m very happy with how well the seed we used grew, and it was a little more expensive to get the dense shade kind that we got, Pennington Dense Shade Mix, but I think it was completely worth it.We’re just looking forward to being able to let the dogs onto it to play and being able to walk on it again!