Question
Hi Brandon. I am looking for an opinion on renovating our lawn. It has many bumps and depressions and dead spots all over it. Trucks driving on it, kids playing on it, and worst of all animals on it. It has many bad features along with weeds. I am thinking about renovating it completely. My only issue is that i would like to know how to loosen the soil. I am going to remove all the grass first of all but i wanna have a loose top soil to move around to make it a nice smooth grade instead of a very jagged crater filled lawn. I am not sure of a way to do this but id like to do it myself without getting something like a backhoe. Thank you very much!

Answer
Depending on the size of your lawn, it may be possible to do it yourself without heavy equipment.  Once you have the grass removed, you'll be able to clearly see what you're working with under there.  You can shovel up high spots and thow the soil into the low spots, roughly moving around the soil with a shovel and wheelbarrow just leaving loose mounds all over the place.  Once it seems that you may have enough loose soil to work with, you use a hard rake to push and pull the piles of loose soil around and begin evening out the grade.  Once it is roughly even, use the back side of the hard rake (not the teeth side, but the smooth medal side) and lights push and pull to top portion of the soil to get the smooth final grade.  If you've had animals urinating in there a lot, I would mix in some lime during the final grade process so it gets raked in.  This will nuetralize the acid in the urine.  Granted, this process will not loosen all the soil in the yard, but once you rake everything over, the loose soil mounds will get spread over the more compacted areas.  Then the important thing is watering.  Go to HomeDepot and get a $35 water timer so that you can just schedule the sprinkler to come on twice a day (morning and around 4pm) for 25 - 30min at a time.  Do this for 2 weeks and your new lawn should be coming in nice and thick.  Watering is the most important part.  After a month and a half of the lawn maturing, you can fertilize it with a nitrogen boost to get it more thick and green.  In the fall I would recommend aerating the lawn, this will further loosen the soil.  Always use mulching blades on your mower instead of bagging the grass clippings.  The clippings have nitrogen and further add nutrients to the lawn.  

If you yard seems to large for this process, I would suggest renting a skid-loader with a "rock hound" attachment from a equipment rentals company if you have one around you.  It can be delivered for you, may cost $180 for a day.  (Of course, you may not have used one before so it could be a little tricky to get used to).  But the rock hound attachment roughs up the top few inches of the soil, while removing rocks, and giving it that final fine grade.  That's how you'd do it with a machine.  You can also rent a sod-cutter to remove up the existing grass (along with 2" of the soil).  They're kind of a beast to operate too.  Probably $75/day on the sod-cutter.

Hope that helps!  You should have a great looking lawn in just a few weeks!  It's quite some work but it will be worth it and rewarding!


Brandon Swisher
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