What about you! Today we're going to be leveling some bumpy areas on the lawn.
Now today I'm just going to be focusing on one area of my lawn, where where it's falling down
around this tree here. The way I cut the grass, because we go around it every time,
there's a couple of passes around it what happens is that it starts to fall away.
So you can see my hand fits comfortably underneath that, it's not much of a hole but it's enough to
make the lawn bumpy, just through there, so this is the area that we're going to concentrate on,
So, whenever you use a line you can see a dip in there, you can clearly see that there's a hole there.
Now there's a few different options for filling holes in. You could use soil, we use sand, and this lawn,
this lawn's actually built out of 70 30 which is a with a 70 sand and 30, 30 soil so we're going to
use sand. I'm going to talk you through the sand and why we use it in a minute. You can see there
if you want to find a dip in your lawn a line's a really good way to do, it just to put it across.
Before we do anything else but, we're going to have to get the grass cut. So let's do that now ............
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So now we have the lawn cut, let's get on and start into the top dressing - I'm going to explain
to you some differences between the sand and soils that you might use. So let's do that now ......
So before we start top dressing the lawn, let's have a quick chat
about the sand. I'm pretty fortunate that we can store the sand in one of the out buildings here, and
it keeps it nice and dry. The benefit behind that is, it makes it really easy to put on. Whenever it
goes on it's just like putting on sugar onto the lawn, but come on, we'll go in here and we'll have
a chat about, we'll have a chat about the sand that we use. So this sand is a, it's a specialist,
this sand here is round in nature. If you were to take if, you were to take a plastering sand,
plastering sand by its nature is angular, and it's designed to bind together. We don't want that on
lawns. Whenever you do that then you might cause more trouble than what you're going to be fixing.
So the sports sands are really good, because they're round in nature, and one of the reasons
how that happens is, whenever they're washing the sand it naturally takes the edges off the lawn
or off the sand - now I have a little tip for you guys, that have come from my Comments. A lot of you have
been recommending me play sand. Now I haven't tried play sand before, but play sand from
the Comments, a lot of you guys have been saying to me because place on it's to meet a certain
specification they double wash it, so as it's safe for kids. That washing process rounds the edges off, so
if you can't get a sports sand because sports sand is ridiculously hard to get in small quantities then,
if you really wanted to use sand on your lawn, you could have a look at the play sands.
Now we have the lawn cut I'm going to do the line quickly again just to show you
the holes will be more pronounced now that the grass has been cut. I don't want our line sitting
up because that's going to throw it off. You can see my hand fits easily underneath that
So that we may, on this occasion not get it up as high as that, but
that's what we're looking to just raise this area up.
Ideally what you want to do with top dressing is always just spread it out
as fine as you can, and then it's going to make getting into the lawn easier.
So you can see I'm coming the end of the pile, and we're getting down near the floor, and a
lot of that stuff's a bit damper, there's a lot of stuff, you can tell because it's a, it's a bit
of a darker colour. It's going to take a wee bit more effort to get warped into the lawn.
Different tools you can use to level out sand
or soil, or whatever material you're going to use I'm just going to talk you through.
So first up we've got a brush. If you didn't have anything at all you could use that brush there.
Not do a great job, But if you didn't have anything else you could use the back of a landscaping
rake, because the straight edge on it is, that will keep it nice and level.
In the past we've used the drag mat. The drag mat's really good, especially for larger areas.
In and around this bed it might be a bit trickier but we're gonna have a go with it.
And then last up, we've got the landscaping lute, that's probably going to be the best
job for, that's going to be the best tool for this, but we're going to try out all the different,
we'll try all the different things, we've got our lute, we've got our homemade mat -
really good for large areas. It's going to be a wee bit tricky for in underneath that tree we'll have
our landscaping rake, and we have just a brush, so we're going to try all those different ways now
So I'm just going to say about this rake, it's maybe, it's maybe had too many birthdays, it's
a bit of an odd shape - but we're gonna, we're gonna have a go with this here but because
it's got this nice straight edge on it we can work off that to level areas.
Something random in our, in our top dressing mix!
You can see with the rake, because the sand's
lovely and dry that the material is getting into the lawn perfectly.
Next up we have the brush. The brush will be my least favorite way. It's going to get the material
in, but it's not going to do any leveling. But we're going to have a go with it now.
If you didn't have any tools, you could use the brush, but it's not going to do as good a job.
As we talked about, it's not really going to any levelling out. So just i'm going to push that down into
what I know to be the lowest bit, I can see with my eye.
The trick about doing top dressing jobs like this is, this is something you would do little
and often. If you put down a lot of sand somewhere like this, then you would smother it quite quickly
and that's not what you want. I'm gonna brush some of this sand over, there's a bit of a ,
you can see naturally there's a bit of a high spot here and I can see there's a bit
of a low area there, so we want to try and push some of this material over to there.
Next up we have our homemade mat. We made this for under 50 pounds, and I know
from the Comments an awful lot of you guys use these here, they're very very good, really good
for larger spaces. For in round the a tree like this guess might be too tight, we're going to have a go.
So I'll leave a Link down in the Video Description if you want to pick one of these up.
This dead, dead simple, we have this rubber mat, I've got a rope and a few cable ties. and it's all
cable tied on. It works really, really well, this is a version that copied off a technique that
we did from a golf course Video. Really, really good, a lot of you guys totally love these things.
But i'm gonna have a go with it just up this section here, nice straight section, easy to do
If you remember one of our top dressings I said this area here,
this sand was a little bit wetter, and I can see that because it's a bit harder to get matted in.
Whenever it's dry it just goes in like sugar, but we'll keep at it.
The good thing about a lawn lute is, it'll pull it off a high area and it'll pull it into the lower
area. I have said in the past that I don't think lawn lutes are a good job, but I think for small
spaces like this here - really hard to beat. I think if you're doing an entire lawn with a
lawn lute, it's really too much hard work, and a hundred percent use the mat all day long, but this
for small areas like this, a lawn lute's really hard to beat. really hard to beat. Let's get on with it.............