So I got tired of looking at the weeds in my back yard and after few trusted folks told me to just go ahead and seed this year I decided to give it a shot. The last weekend in August I picked up about 800lbs of pelletized lime from lowes and spread it out as per the Rutgers soil test recommendations. I sat on that for a bit then around mid Sept. I had the brilliant idea to dethatch the yard since it probably hadn't been done since the house was built in the 50's. I thought how bad could it be(hint: look at the title), I'd be outside and get a good work out... I picked up this contraption at lowes and got to work.
Wow, sorry for the huge picture
Lisa had the great idea to cut the lawn on the lowest setting possible and bag everything to make the work a bit easier. I worked in about 4-5' rows across the yard, it only took about a week and half to two weeks of raking whenever i had some spare time to finish the lawn. Wherever we had dense areas of creeping charlie and weeds are now bare soil, which is most of the back half of the yard. This cleared out a lot of plant matter. I can pretty clearly see soil just about everywhere now, even in areas that have decent grass growth.
We had our friends from Green Mountain Tree Service stop by Friday to take care of some limbs hanging over our property line. Larry and BJ did a great job and Larry gave me a few pointers about maintaining our trees. Thanks guys!
I picked up some starter fertilizer and we broadcast that down saturday morning then I rented a power seeder and seeded the yard in the afternoon. Its more of a tiller w/ a seed dropper in the front really. I seeded vertically then at a 45* angle to keep from having funky patterns. I didn't think to look in the hopper until i was finished and 90% of the seed was still in there. A quick inspection of bottom of the hopper showed most of the holes had the fertilizer and water absorbing dust from the seeds gunking them up so next to nothing came out. After cleaning them out i went over the yard again, in a opposite pattern, and this time the seeds got into the dirt.
We finished late in the day so i gave the seeds one watering on Saturday and another Sunday morning. I've got a decent sized yard so i had to water in sections to get a good even soak. Each section got 15 minutes of water. It was pretty damp all Sunday and the ground never really dried up. Plus I was hoping it would rain, I probably could have watered it again...
I know the dethatching left all the weed roots and they'll probably grow back in the spring. I'm hoping the exposed soil allows the grass a chance to establish itself before winter so i can hit it with pre-emergent chemicals come march/april. I also should have waited to put down the lime until after dethatching. It sat on the yard for a good 2-3 weeks so hopefully most of it got absorbed. I'll do another application in the spring as well. In a few weeks once I see some grass growing i'll hit it with some 1-1-1 fertilizer per the soil test results and hope it survives the winter.
We're also dedicating a section of the yard to a garden. This is mainly the wifes project but i'm helping out where i can. She marked off the perimeter of the garden and we skimmed off all the grass. We tried using a tarp but it let too much light in and the grass/weeds weren't dying after two weeks of being covered. We did'nt want to use chemicals on this area so we did it the hard way. Once we got the grass removed we spread out some powdered lime and covered the area w/ newspaper, mulched leaves and whatever soil we could find laying around. Then Lisa watered the whole thing to help the lime soak in and hold down the newspapers. Eventually we'll put a tarp over it and add more leaves as they fall.
