So my youngest brother Kacy came over two weeks ago and I rented a sod cutter. We used it to cut all of the old junk (mostly weeds, moss, and a lot of dead grass), and then we proceeded to roll it up and throw it into the back of a borrowed pickup. I would say that this was a ton of work, but that would be an understatement. According to the scales at the yard waste place, It ended up being three and a half tons of work. And we only got 3/4ths of the yard done. So the following Monday, I took the day off from work, had my other younger brother Brek come over, and we finished the removal of the old stuff. Then Kacy came over again, and we rented a rototiller. We used the rototiller to till in some horse manure compost, and then got some TAGRO mix fertilizer to put on top.
So it was another huge amount of work, shoveling and spreading all of the horse manure compost and TAGRO mix, but we got it all done by the end of that Monday. I wish I had taken a picture, but I didn't. So you will have to imagine our front yard with nothing but dark brown dirt everywhere. Oh, and for added effect, imagine it smelling like a combination between an old horse manure pile and a sewage treatment plant. Mmmmmm. Yummy. Smells like fertility.
The next step was to find a hydroseeder, which I did for a really decent price. He came on the following Friday and sprayed everything with hydroseed mixture. This helped a little bit to cut down on the smell (since it was all covered in the hydroseed mixture), and it made the lawn look kind of green again, even if that was just the dye in the hydroseed. It was better than the literally poo-brown yard. Here's what it looked like post-hydroseed:
Our main task at this point was to keep the hydroseed moist. And since the weather decided to take this opportunity to become exceedingly hot and dry, that meant watering it three times a day for the next seven to ten days.
This effort was not in vain, however. On day 7, this past Friday, I started to see some growth. So I took these pictures, to show what all of that time, effort, and money had produced:
In this one, you can just barely start to see the first green blades of new grass coming up in the front lawn.
In this one, you can see the same on the front/side yard. It's particularly advanced underneath the left side of the tree in this picture.
But, since it is pretty difficult to see the actual growth in those wide-angle pictures, I took a couple of closer-up views to show the actual growth:
So yeah. Good times. I will do another update in a day or two. There is a marked difference in the visible growth between these pictures on Friday, and what the lawn looks like today, just two days later. You will be able to see a much more impressive result in the pictures I will take tomorrow or Tuesday.
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