I'm Aaron Graber with Ventrac and today we're on site with a new home build.
We're going to be using a Ventrac with several attachments to finish grade the property getting
it prepped for seed and a new lawn install. On a lot of home construction sites this process
is actually very easy. You're going to use the power rake and that's probably about it.
There's not a lot of debris in the yard there's not much challenging terrain. There's really
nothing to worry about usually they're pretty flat. This lot is not
that so it's going to be a much more challenging task today. There's a few big hurdles that we have to work around.
First there's a lot of big rocks that were uprooted when they were changing the contour
of the property. It started out as a very steep ravine and they've really built around that.
So there's a few challenges because of it. We've also got a lot of branches in various piles
that we need to relocate and there's a few big dirt piles that we want to use specifically to
fill in some holes in some rougher parts of the property that weren't touched during construction.
The reason we have to do all this is because you want to get to an end goal of having a yard
that's nice and smooth so that once the grass is established you can actually mow it effectively.
Today we have perfect weather, we should have perfect traction it's no issue at all.
For some machines, but even if the weather was a little bit off or in some of the steeper areas
even yet the Ventrac is actually going to be a really good piece to do those areas where a lot
of other equipment would struggle. Doing those areas of this job with standard equipment is
just too risky because it's way too easy to lose control and either damage the structure or put
your operator at risk. The steps we're going to take to do this individual property are a little
bit different than our normal approach. We're actually going to start out with a bucket because
we've got a lot of debris to move and we're going to move dirt piles after that. Get those kind of
staged and pointed where we want to. After that we'll switch to the power rake. We'll start to
do all of the final contouring. We're going to continue to maintain the swales that they've
put in in the rough grade. We're gonna make sure that everything has a smooth glass-like finish.
And then we'll finish it out with the landscape rake and we'll push all of those small rocks
and that little debris out to the edges where it can be cleaned up later and get the area totally
prepped for seed. And as always, my own personal goal here will be to reduce the amount of hand
labor to either nothing or close to nothing because that takes time and time is money so
we're going to give them the best possible results by using the equipment to do all the work.
So now that we got those first two piles moved it's pretty rough in this area but
it's no big deal we'll get that with the power rake later. We're going to move on to the back
side we got some rocks to move. And then we got some stick piles. Once we do that we're going to
get the power rake out and we'll go back over. Probably start here. Get this stuff more level.
This is a lot of like really heavy peat moss clay or something so it should settle really well.
And then once we do that then we should be able to start doing all the really light final grade work.
All right we are officially done. This turned out to be a much more difficult job than it appeared
to be at first. So all of this area most of the dirt was a lot dirtier than we would typically
expect. A lot of just bricks, larger rocks, roots, and stuff from the trees that all got ripped out.
So just a lot more involved of a process to get this done but thankfully to having the
right machine we were able to do it with no real extra effort. Just a little bit extra time. The
first attachment we use on this project like we outlined in the beginning was the bucket. We moved
a lot of dirt around. We also got rid of a lot of rocks, relocated some tree branches and roots.
One of the things we spent extra time on here is thinking about the future of what this property
looks like. So there's a lot of spots where I'm going okay how is this going to be mowed in the
future? There was a big tree up at the top that had some roots that were way exposed to the ground.
Basically impossible to mow around and if you did you probably risk damaging blades.
Maybe taking out a spindle occasionally so we got a lot of dirt filled in there, contoured
it perfectly so you can actually mow around that tree effectively. And there should be no areas on
this property now that throw them any fits into the future. So ultimately the power rake can be
the only tool you use for the grading portion if the dirt is really clean filtered or if the site
has never been touched before and it was an open field or something on this site you definitely
needed the landscape rake to follow up with that power rake. It's important to use the power rake
after the rough grading to get down and give it a loose seed bed so that you actually have something
for the grass seed to take into. But once you do that you do tend to kick up some of the material
that was underneath buried by the bulldozer or skid loader or whatever did the rough grading.
So to get that stuff out of the way get it into piles and get it removed from the site
or pushed off to the edge landscape break is perfect for that and avoids basically all hand
labor. Looking around I can see that maybe right up against the house I'm not sure what they're
doing whether they're doing the flower beds all the way around or not. Right up against the house
maybe for the last six eight inches there might be a little bit of hand work necessary if they're
planting grass all the way to the foundation. I don't know how they're doing it exactly
but i would say total hand work is down to less than 15-20 minutes on this property where if you
didn't have tools like this you could be in the hours getting it wrapped up so that's a good thing.
We are done here today. We're going to load up wrap up this should be ready to go. It's going to
take seed and they are going to move in shortly. As always if you're interested in this equipment
at all the tractor or any of the attachments we used, you can find that information at ventrac.com.
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