Lawn Launch

As you know, we moved into a new place. My personal favorite thing about this property is the size of the yard. We share an acre with our duplex neighbors, which we split down the middle. When we moved in, the immediate yard had little patches of grass and weeds, probably about 30% grass, 40% weeds, and 30% dirt. The builder had "planted" grass seed in the spring, but didn't take care of it whatsoever, in fact, I'm sure he drove over it quite a few times.

The way our backyard looked the day we moved in. In the foreground, there is minimal grass with some weeds. In the background, there are much taller weeds, about 2 feet tall.

In the back, behind the first tree, there was no grass seed planted. Just tall weeds growing, and the land was very uneven, with big mounds here and there, and a few small trenches. The further back you go, the thicker the weeds get.

I've always wanted a nice, lush lawn that you can walk around in your bare feet on, and these types of lawns are generally absent in Mass. Not sure why, but most lawns here are pretty patchy and have lots of pebbles and rocks in them. Plus, not many people water their lawn, so in dry seasons they all turn brown. Anyway, I was determined to have a nice lawn.

But first, I will tell you about our apple tree, as that happened before we got started on the lawn. We bought a Grandma Smith apple tree from the local nursery and planted it on the north border of our yard. I picked the absolute hottest day of the summer, 96 degrees and very humid, too. I started digging, and about 2 feet down, right when I was about finished, I hit a rock. There were plenty of other rocks I'd gotten out, but this one was HUGE. I kept digging and digging, and eventually the hole was twice the size of the original hole, and I STILL hadn't gotten the rock out. Finally, we got it loose, but we didn't have the strength to lift it out of the hole. So I took my bike lock, wrapped it around the rock and used the shovel as a lever to get it out. Success! But that sapped my energy for the rest of the day. That was August 2nd.

Things were going pretty well about 2 feet down...

And then I hit the infernal rock. I dug and dug and pried and pried to try to get it loose...

Once I finally got it loose, I had to somehow get it out. Not exactly the easiest thing to get a freakin heavy and awkward rock out of a 2 foot hole. The stone might not look heavy, but afterward we put it on a scale and it turned out to weigh a million pounds. So there.

So I used a "pulley and lever" system to get it out. I took my bike lock and wrapped it around the rock, put the shovel through the hole, and lifted it out with Mel's help. About gave myself a hernia. Now you can all admire my hot bod.

3 weeks later, I spent the evening with my neighbor's weed wacker wacking weeds, piling them up pretty high.

After the weed-wacking. The green is not grass, just the stumps of weeds.

Saturday morning I woke up at 6 AM, got the rototiller from Home Depot, and then started tilling the yard. I figured it would be a one-day job, but we started digging up cables, fuse boxes, scooters, lead pipes, scrap metal, rugs, jackets, and just all sorts of junk the builder buried back there, which explained the big lumps in the yard. We ended up working until we had no more energy, around 6 pm, and only got 3/4 of the yard tilled. We pulled out 2 garbage cans' worth of junk, tons of rocks and wood. This was going to take a lot more than one day.

This about halfway through the day, the trash cans were getting full of trash and junk and you can see the chunks we'd tilled.

This is what we tilled by the end of the day. We got most of it done except the left side there.

I got off early the next Friday, got the tiller from Home Depot at 2 pm, and we worked until 9 pm, tilling and raking. The next morning we got up at 7 and finally finished tilling the yard at 1 pm, then spent the rest of the afternoon raking up debris. We laid down the seed at 8 pm, and I got the sprinklers going at 10 pm. All in all, we were completely pooped. I've never worked so hard in my life.

Mel scooping up debris (weeds, rocks). Melanie worked while I took pictures. I didn't do one gosh-darned thing.

I include this picture to illustrate the long metal pipe we found as well as the Razor scooter. Also note the quality of the lawn on which the car/trash can sit. You will notice this improving later in the post.

Our rock collection. Most of those rocks were already there, but we dug out about 5 of them also. Once again, not a fun task.

Another picture of our awesomely well-groomed dirt.

We laid down the seed and this white carpet stuff that had seed in it. The white carpet was about 45 bucks a package (100 ft by 3 ft), but we got them on clearance for 10 bucks each, so we bought all that Lowe's had to offer. They worked like gangbusters.

After 2 weeks, the lawn was progressing nicely. You can see puddles on the left where the low spots are, we'll probably need to bring in some more dirt to even that out. The grass in the foreground was cut very short and covered with the new dirt. You can also see our neighbor's hydroseed on the very left, it's the bluish-green crud.

We ended up putting the seed and the carpet stuff down the Saturday before Labor Day. Then, 2 weeks later, I had to work on the immediate yard. I call the "immediate" yard that because it's the yard right around the house, as opposed to the back section that we tilled. The builder threw down a bit of cheap grass seed, so it was littered with small patches of grass everywhere, but it mostly had weeds. We'd got quite a lot of rain this summer, so most of the dirt sections were heavily eroded, and now just had pebbles and hard-packed dirt that grass wouldn't root in.

I was tempted to rent some tillers and tear the whole thing up, but I figured a light smattering of dirt everywhere might be enough for the grass to take hold. I calculated that I'd need 3 cubic yards of dirt, so I called up the local nursery and had them deliver it. They came over in a big dump truck and dropped it right on the front lawn. Unfortch, I was not there to watch the dump truck in action (one of my childhood dreams) because I was at work. So instead I came home to a large pile of dirt in my front yard. I was too excited to take pictures of the pile, so just imagine a mound that came up 3 feet high in the middle and spread around a 15 foot diameter.

I mowed the lawn that wasn't covered with the mound of dirt the next morning as short as I could. Then I grabbed the wheelbarrow and filled it with dirt and spread it around the yard, about 1/4 of an inch everywhere. This took me about 5 hours. Then I rented the lawn roller again, put down the seed, rolled it out, and called it a day. The lady at the rentals counter at Home Depot always laughed when she saw me come in, I was there so often.

The immediate yard took a little longer to grow, I think because we started later and the weather was colder. But it started filling in nicely and my neighbors all complimented us, telling us "Your hard work has really paid off!" I can't think of a nicer thing to hear about my lawn.

After the first mow

I mowed the back part for the first time when my parents were here, about 5 weeks after a planted. It looked really nice, although I noticed a lot of bare patches and could definitely tell where the terrain wasn't even. Oh well, it was a marked improvement.

Meanwhile, our neighbors decided to bring in some landscapers to do their side of the yard, as they are pretty busy working overnight and double shifts as cops. They brought in like 3 truckloads of dirt to cover their yard with 6 inches of loam. They made it nice and even with huge bulldozers and other such machinery. They also put in a sprinkler system, which is nice to have, but not so necessary in Massachusetts as it would be in Utah or especially in Arizona. Then they had someone put down hydroseed. Their lawn grew just as fast as ours, but definitely a lot more even. It looks really nice. The price tag? A cool 10,000 bucks. All done in one day. Ours took 5 days of hard work, but I added up our materials and rentals and it was about 700 bucks.

I finally mowed the entire lawn on October 18th, 5 weeks after planting the immediate yard. It's really starting to look like a full lawn, although it's not really that thick yet. Supposedly grass grows up through the roots and it gets thicker that way, so that should fill up my lawn a good amount. It's only a matter of time before I'm frolicking around in my bare feet.

Before:

After:It helps that the fall colors are out and this picture isn't so washed out by the sun. It's like one of those weight loss before/after pictures where the fat lady is wearing ugly fat-person clothes, and then in the after picture they're wearing a stylish business suit. I should've raked the yard first, but I had barely enough time to mow before we took off for the weekend.

Our neighbor (the nice green, raked section to the left) took the time to rake the leaves before he mowed his 10,000 dollar lawn. You can see how nice it looks. And it does look nice, although ours isn't too shabby for 9,300 dollars less.

This is our "immediate yard" which we didn't till, but just raked dirt around. It's considerably fuller than it was before.

From the very back of the lawn.

We threw down some mulch and planted some cheap perennials we bought at Lowe's in the front yard.