Coach Batch's Bermuda Leveling Project

[CoachBatch]

Hey everyone. I have been following most of you leveling projects over the last several years and finally decided to jump in head first. I have a 6k Bermuda lawn in the Raleigh NC area. The house as brand new when we bought it in 2015 with your typical heavily compacted clay soil. I have taken several soil samples and stayed consistent with my micro apps for the last couple years. (I'm overdue for a new soil test, but wanted to wait will after this project to realign my micro program for 2020).

Here is my baseline and an overview of where I am when I started this. To be upfront, I have been addressing my yard with 70/30 mix for the last 2 years and so the process has been slowly evolving over the last 2 years.

We, like most of us, had a very mild winter with a fair amount of precipitation. I missed my fall application of Prodiamine which was a terrible mistake given the winter that we have had here. Lots of winter weeds said hello to my lawn and I kicked myself for missing that application. However, I attacked the whole lawn with 2 applications of the red label Image post emergent. First application of the Image was mid February and followed with another in late March. I will spot treat as needed for the remainder of the season. Scalping was next on the schedule for March 29th.

I am fortunate to have a 17" McLane Reel and changed out the front tires for a reel roller (highly suggest that to anyone with a reel). This reel allows me to get a much closer cut than the standard wheels McLane's come with. McLane basically affords their owner's to get a really low cut and I can scalp to about 1/4". This scalping is a massive overhaul and takes about half a day since I need to follow up with an old rotary to bag up the clippings. This is the only time I bag my clippings during the growing season.

I have a facility nearby that offers the Soil3 compost mixes and I ordered 2 bags this year. Normally I only get 2 bags of the 70/30 compost mixes. However, this year I split my 2 bags between their 70/30 compost mix and their 30/70 leveling mix. My focus this year was just the front yard for leveling and a few small spots that I want to address in the back yard.

So..here are some pics to back up this novel I have already started you off with.

Here are the first images of my front yard. You can see that I am only leveling the right side of the house. You can see here I dumped one load just to get an idea of how much I was getting myself into.

[CoachBatch]

o give an idea to everyone I am putting down about 1/4" of sand and spreading it with a 3' leveling rake. I cut an old green garden hose and covered the flat edge to help spread the sand and not tare up the existing turf. Here are the two rakes that I used for the project. I also have access to the field drag which makes this much easier (see below for pics of that tool). These drags can be rather expensive so I am fortunate to have access to this drag thanks to being a high school coach.



Here are pictures of progress I made spreading each load. It was me and my buddy working on this and it took about 2:15 from start to finish with both of us working. I suggest working this in pairs and the timing works out with 1 guys loading and dumping and the other spreading and leveling with a rake.

[CoachBatch]

[trussin]

Do you have an update?

What are the soil ratios that you refer to (i.e. 30/70)? I have a forced leveling coming up within the next week (feral hog damage).

[Dchall_San_Antonio]

trussin, soil ratios, whatever those are, have nothing to do with leveling. I would suggest you search the entire forum for soil leveling topics. This post doesn't explain anything. It's just a bunch of pictures showing coach going through some of the steps. Once you've read your fill of those posts, then if you have any questions, start a new topic with your particulars.

What I would do for hog damage is simply rake as much of the soil back where it belongs, water it, and let it settle by itself.

As an aside, there's a lady in Medina county who made wild hogs a profit center on the side of her normal cattle business. She had a trailer made with hog cages made with openings on each end. She created a maze on a farm trailer so the hogs have to walk through the cages to get out the other end. In the evening she tosses deer corn into the cages and allows the hogs to wander in, go all the way through, and walk out. Once she has the hogs trained to go through the maze, one night she'll lock the gate at the end of the maze. I'm not sure how she springs the trap so they can't back out, but that morning she drives a couple thousand pounds of hogs to the abattoir for sale. There are still plenty of hogs left all trained up to walk through the maze, so she has a pretty good side business going.