Quest for a green lawn

When we moved into our house in 2002 we had a lawn that only had grass for about 8-10 feet from the road, and the rest of the yard was made “maintenance free” by the previous owners keeping the leaves and pine straw that fell from the trees in the yard. It was literally about 6 inches of leaves compacted solid from a couple of years of not being picked up, and this was very successful at killing everything in the yard that was under it. After about a month of raking up leaves we at last had a clean yard, or rather a strip of grass and solid compacted hard dirt for a yard. During the first few years we tried a few things to get the grass growing and had the beginnings of a lawn, still with many areas that were just so hard that nothing would grow, then came two years of drought and we put the yard on hold until there was somewhat regular rain. That brings us to where we are today, we are attempting again to convert our little patch of dirt into a lush green carpet of grass (would really be happy if the yard just looks green when you drive by our house). This time we are leaving nothing to chance, we had a friend of ours (Carl) bring over his tiller and we plowed up almost our entire yard, we seeded, fertilized and seeded some more. All those rock hard places that nothing would grow are now loose soft soil, if grass doesn’t grow now I think we might just look into astro turf or something.

here is Carl hard at work


and Cameron doing his part


time for some seed