Advice on weird little lawn
Posted: April 19th, 2020, 3:49 pm
The apartment I rent has a gated yard attached containing the scraggliest lawn I have ever seen. It's only accessible to this apartment, and I was told by the property manager that it is "my" yard. As far as I can tell building maintenance is limited to coming through occasionally with leaf blower so I'm going to operate under the assumption that I can dig it out and replant if I want to. Normally I'm not a fan of putting money and work into a property that doesn't belong to me but with the ongoing stay at home order the value of having a pleasant space I can "get out to" has gone up significantly.
I took a time lapse with my phone to see how much sun the lawn gets. Here is the link to the video:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/162QtUW ... jfARP/view
And here is my written assessment of the situation:
My apartment has a little lawn that is awful, I would like to renovate it so the yard is a nice place to be. The drainage is poor and the soil quality is unknown (probably not great), but I can't get a study done because soil labs are not essential businesses. I've read that fall is the time to do renovations but it's not fall and I would like to start now. The entire yard is maybe 200 square feet so there's a lot that could be done with hand tools, this would give me something to do during the quarantine.
My (very) initial plan:
I took a time lapse with my phone to see how much sun the lawn gets. Here is the link to the video:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/162QtUW ... jfARP/view
And here is my written assessment of the situation:
My apartment has a little lawn that is awful, I would like to renovate it so the yard is a nice place to be. The drainage is poor and the soil quality is unknown (probably not great), but I can't get a study done because soil labs are not essential businesses. I've read that fall is the time to do renovations but it's not fall and I would like to start now. The entire yard is maybe 200 square feet so there's a lot that could be done with hand tools, this would give me something to do during the quarantine.
My (very) initial plan:
- Kill what's there by covering it up or using herbicide
- Turn everything over, maybe throw down some compost first
- Put down some grass seed, fertilizing according to instructions
- Is this a ridiculous idea?
- What kind of grass should I use? The research I have done so far is telling me that "rough fescues" are what I want for wet shady areas
- I'd like to remove some of the bark perimeter and have grass going up to the fence, is this a bad idea?
- Any other advice you can share would be appreciated