I bought this house last year and this year I want to take care of my lawn and get it looking right. I have so many bare spots, gravel everywhere, & what appears to be moss. I want to get rid of the gravel, level the yard, & have a healthy lawn. I just have no idea where to start or what to do. Any suggestions are appreciated as I am new to having a lawn.
Also, I live in north central West Virginia (the state) if that helps.
by GullibleEfficiency19
3 Comments
Are those recent pictures? I’m still brown
Get 5-10 yards of bulk topsoil delivered. Rake it out and fill in all the bald spots. Rake in some seeds and use an oscillating sprinkler or two to keep it wet. I like to use a Bluetooth/wifi timer to really gently sprinkle water every 3 hours during the day
I had a similar gravel situation in my yard when I bought my house
I used a steel rake in the area really aggressively to loosen up the soil the stones were embedded in, then used a regular leaf rake to gather the loose soil and stones into a pile. Shoveled into 5 gal buckets which I dumped through a chicken wire sieve to filter out the stones. Put the soil back and threw down seed
For the rest of my yard which looked similar to yours, I cut my grass as long as possible all summer. In July I sprayed the areas that were weedy and just looked bad to kill it completely, then in the fall I added topsoil for leveling, seeded the entire lawn with extra emphasis on the dead spots, starter fertilizer, and kept everything wet the best I could.
Looked pretty good before going dormant this winter and my retired neighbor with an immaculate lawn complimented it. I think he’s happy my weedy garbage lawn isn’t going to spill into his anymore lol
Money wise wasn’t too bad, most expensive was the grass seed tbh, 4th millennium fescue. Everything else was just putting the effort in. Most difficult is being consistent with the watering, which felt like the most important thing too