Landscaping Progress, Day 3

So Wednesday ushered in day three of our quest to have grass. Unlike the other days, the crew showed up in the morning and stayed all day long to basically finish up the job.

First up was grading the land with the bobcat while one of the workers tilled and hand raked/graded the area closest to the house where the bobcat couldn’t reach.

This little attachment kicked up a LOT of dust while grinding down clumps and smoothing out the surface.

I’m glad I wasn’t having to do this work by hand. The weather was in the 80’s and the sun was beating down.

After they went over the soil a couple of times the area basically looked like this:

A zoomed in view of one pass of the bobcat.

A picture of the back yard from the back door. You can definitely see on this area the difference between the area where the bobcat could go and the area where it had to be done by hand.

After that they went around with the wheelbarrow picking up extra thatch and any large rocks that did not get raked out by the bobcat. Then came seed and fertilizer, which was spread by a typical push behind spreader. Another attachment was then used to mix the seed into the top layer of soil and flatten and smoothed the whole thing out some more. Then bales of straw where sat around and distributed by hand.

They were several bales of straw short so today, Thursday, the owner came out and finished the straw job and they are done for now. The owner however said he will be coming out to put some more fertilizer on and will do our first mowing in about 4 weeks. I think he feels bad we are only using a push mower for now and that’s so nice of him. We do plan to buy a riding lawn mower/tractor again but sold our last one rather than pay to store it for a year and didn’t see a point in replacing it until we have a real lawn to mow!

So here are some pictures from the end of day 3. Now we are sprinkler duty. Even with some good sprinklers it is quite a job to water all of this area each day so we’re praying for some rain! ?