Ever since I bought the house I have slowly started to fill in the lawn and add more grass to places that were over grown or needed some TLC. My total lawn size is ~3k sqft, 1.2k for the back and 1.8k for the front, so not really that much. I have completely redone most of the back yard with Jonathan Green Black Beauty and it always turned out well when I did seeding projects. Throughout the 5 years I have always struggled with my front lawn and for some reason it was always thin and some parts always turned yellow during the summer no matter how much I watered or cut high.
This year we decided to replace our paver walkway with concrete and expand our lower patio, so it gave me a reason to kill off the weedy grass and redo it all since it was already mostly dead from all the walking and equipment being on the front lawn during our unusually dry and hot summer this year. After doing a light power rake to get up all the rocks and dead material, 5ish wheel barrels full of material, I got my lawn company to aerator the lawn for the first time ever. My plan was to put down 5 tons of top soil to level off the lawn and raise it up due to the new sidewalk which sounded simple. Little did I know that I had 1.5 inches, or more, of thatch over most of my front, which I found out after checking my cores. I should have taken a picture of it but it was impressive. There was a deceivingly thin layer of soil that covered it up so I never knew about it, it kind of explains why nothing never grew right. In sadness, I got the power rake back out and really went at it. I ended up getting maybe 15ish more loads of dead material out of the ground.
After all of this I got 5 tons of dirt, spread it out and used a leveling rake and roller to smooth it out and hopefully compact it some. I planted the fescue/blue grass mix from Ryan Knorr with a drop seeder and spread some peat moss out on-top of it and used the roller to lightly pack it all together, got all the hoses set up and used the husky smart hose spigot to water throughout the day. I planted on Sept 2nd and it has been the best results yet. I live in Southwestern PA.
The picture dates are August 6th, August 30th, Sept 6th, Sept 10th, Sept 12th, Sept 14th, and the first mow on Sept 19th.
by black_zack
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