My name is Justin Harkey and this is my house.
I like to do things myself here. A good example my dad and I built this house behind me.
And I keep honeybees. I installed this lawn two years ago. I did my own irrigation on it, and today
we're going to be working on a new section of the loan where I grew it in from seed last year and
we're going to be sand leveling it. So we're in southern North Carolina and when I first built
my house we started out growing fescue and it was just a lot of struggles a lot of ups and
downs some years were good some years not so much. The spring and fall took a lot of time, a lot of
money in fungicides, and so I wanted to try to get away from that and go to a less maintenance grass
such as this zoysia. So the zoysia I cut at out about an inch. I don't apply any fungicides or chemicals
to it. It's very tolerant you can actually drag your boot on it and it does not tear up at all.
You can walk on it when it frosts it doesn't leave a footprint. My daughter can get out here
she's about two years old she can get out and run around on it kick a ball on it.
And with the fescue it just was more of a showpiece than it was a usable yard.
So this is the yard that I planted two years ago, and then over here on this side this is about ten
thousand square foot. I planted this last may, and so far the only thing I've done to it is
mowed it. I aerated it one time and I've not I've only sprayed one post-emergent herbicide on it.
So the project we're going to be working on today is in this area it's about 9,000 square feet, and
we're going to be spreading sand on it to help get the scout marks out of it. And my end goal is to
hopefully uh reel mow it and use some pgr to where I don't have to reel mow it quite as frequently.
So on this initial scout there may be a little bit of a dust and debris
type cloud that you'll see is some of it's dead material. I've also got some dirt along the road
where people have been running off the road, so I've been trying to fill that in with
just red dirt. So we're going to get started today. We're going to hook up the mower and
I've got a 60 inch finish deck for my Ventrac and we're going to give this yard a quick mow.
The reason we scalp is to get the canopy low enough to where the sand can actually
fill in on the ground instead of sandwiching the turf in between the sand and the ground.
Sometimes that'll lead to future issues. So now we're going to run the AERA-Vator over. This is
going to open up some holes in the ground for the sand to get down in and get intermixed with the
clay. This is going to help with some drainage issues and water retention. It also gives the
area the roots area to expand into allows it to be more loose than like the hard pan clay.
We're going to be running the elevator without any weights on it because this is an irrigated
section of my yard, so it tends to make pretty decent holes without any weights on it.
All right so the next thing we're going to do we've mowed, we've AERA-Vated, now we're going to spread
this sand. This is 12 cubic yards and I've got 10,000 square feet. We may or may not use it all.
But probably going to we're going to spread the sand out with the power bucket and just
make piles we'll try to spread it out a little bit with the bucket and
and then we'll be set up to drag the drag mat over it.
Quick update on the sand leveling project. This is 9,000 square foot.
We put out about 12 yards of sand six days ago and around this drainage basin it was complete sand.
And we've got a lot of turf popping through it.
Side of the road's looking good. I haven't had anybody run off the roads yet. So that's a bonus. I
haven't had to straighten that out. Have not had to mow yet. I imagine it'd be probably another week or
so before I mow. If you were reel mowing it, you'd already be out here mowing, but for me I'm gonna
cut it about an inch and a half tall. So uh more than likely I won't be mowing for another week.
Put 12 yards of sand on this 9,000 square feet and it leveled it up very nicely.
So we finished up everything we're gonna do up front in terms of the sand leveling. Now we're in
the uh backyard. The side portion of it and we're going to be using the Ventrac power rake to help
smooth up the grade. Planning on planting zoysia seed back here in another month or so
and we just need to get the grade established correctly that way we eliminate all the high
and low spots of the yard and it makes it for a more enjoyable mow and also helps with
dry areas or just the general overall health of the turf.
So that's pretty much going to do it for the projects today. Still got a lot of grading
left to do in the backyard. Got some more prep work to do before we bring in some dirt and
do the final grade on it. In terms of the front yard, we're going to go back up there tomorrow
and give the sand time to dry and then we're going to finish dragging it around with the rake.
Try to get it as level as possible. And then going forward one good thing about owning the Ventrac
is a lot of these projects that you start are multi-day projects so it's
kind of difficult to get a contractor out here or it can get expensive to get a contractor. So
when you own the Ventrac you kind of work around your own schedule. And another good thing about
uh the Ventrac power unit itself is the amount of implements that you can get with it. They've
been able to add in different opportunities in my landscape business such as leaf blowing, aeration,
seeding, so it's giving me an opportunity to expand into doing that as well and get more jobs.
So I the reason I invested in the Ventrac is because I'm again a diy guy. I like to do stuff
myself and I also like the dependability of that I can come out and do it whenever I want to do it.
Instead of trying to find somebody to do it trying to make sure they do it
correctly or up to my standards and then trying to get them here at a decent time.
So in terms of my yard I've got about 35,000 square feet here and I've got zoysia on 25,000
square feet. Plan on doing the rest of it in the back and I've personally done the entire yard.
I've had some grading done on yard but I've done the majority of the grade and I've done all the
irrigation install. And if you were just to have that quoted out by a contractor you may be up in
the 20 or 30 thousand dollars for sod maybe 15,000 for irrigation. So if you're willing to come
out here and do the work, you could justify on and the implements and the power unit and have all the
same end results and you'd have a tractor at the end of the day. So for me it's been a fantastic
investment and I can't speak more more more than good for the Ventrac itself, and I've used a lot
of other tractors in the past with a lot of other implements on it. And hands down this one has the
higher level of detail and controllability than any of the other tractors i've used.
So for never running a stump grinder what'd you think? That was sweet.
That was pretty easy learning curve. Other than whatever happened here I think I just hit maybe
I hit on my knee and it went in float or something but yeah that I really ate through it. You'd have
a hard time getting a regular stump grinder in here. That's pretty nice because our daughter
trips are that pretty much daily. I was going to paint that orange.