Adventures in Grass Planting

For some silly reason I was thinking I'd have tons of time to blog now that the kids are in school. Right! I'm hoping it gets better, but the last few days have been nuts!  What have we been doing?

Saturday we got a lot of lingering projects finished, such as organizing our storage units so we can condense from TWO to one by the end of the month.  It took several hours, but we're almost there. After that, we headed to our neighbor's hog roast, which was really fun.  The kids had a blast and I finally got to meet the neighbors for more than two minutes.  Turns out, they're really nice!  They've got two boys, ages 2 and 1 - so Jacob will have some playmates around here as he gets older.  SCORE! Oh and the big thing about that evening is the motivation Ben came away with to PLANT OUR OWN GRASS. 

Normally, planting grass wouldn't be too bad of a job, but we're going to put in roughly three acres of grass, and it's pretty slopey - so we had just automatically called a couple landscapers for bids. Oh my holy lord! We really had no idea what to expect for a price, but certainly we thought the bids would be less than NINE and TWELVE THOUSAND bucks!   Hence, the decision to do it ourselves...

Both our neighbor (who planted his own yard) and a farmer down the road (who's done it a bunch of times) reassured us we COULD DO IT! Ben has the tractors, and the farmer said he'd loan us a seed spreader and some other thing... a cultimulcher. The farmer dropped the seeder over on Sunday - it was pretty small, but better than nothing - and Ben set to work on discing and leveling out some areas that had been washed away by the many rains. 

Monday, after the boys headed to school, we headed to the seed store.  After talking to the lady at the counter who knew everything under the sun about grass, we loaded up the entire back of the truck with seed, fertilizer and straw blanketing.  FULL.  HEAPING. 1,000 lbs!  We hauled it home, and Ben set to readying the ground for the fertilizer. Later that afternoon, Ben met the farmer over at their place to pick up the cultimulcher... but it wasn't there! Turns out a cousin had borrowed it without telling anyone and was using it that very day. Great. The farmer sent us home with something else to work with (a drag), and said his cousin would bring the cultimulcher over that night when he was done.

Charlie hauling the wagon for rock-picking-upping

Will tilling around the edges

Grandma spreading fertilizer - see the tiny spreader?

With the tiny spreader, we finally got the fertilizer down, but started to have doubts about the seed. We had TWO kinds, meaning we'd have to go over the whole thing twice... with this tiny seeder... and we still had to use the cultimulcher... and we were soon going to be running out of daylight.  It could definitely be done, but it meant Ben was probably going to have to take more time off work. Reluctantly, we called one of the landscapers to see if he could drill the seed in the morning for us. He said he'd work it in for $350. Sounds good.  OK.

At about 7:30 that evening, up the driveway comes the 'cousin' with the borrowed equipment behind his tractor. Turns out, he's a  neighbor as well - two houses down (which is also a little over a mile away, but who's counting?).  Ben noticed a giant spreader on the back of the tractor and the conversation went something like this:

Ben:  'Man, that's what I need'. 

Cousin: 'Why, what are you using?'

Ben points over to the tiny spreader. Cousin laughs...

Cousin: 'You can't use that! You want me to just do it?'

Ben: 'Are you serious?'

Cousin: 'Sure. We do this all the time."

Ben:'....... well, OK'

After Ben gave the 'OK', Cousin started dumping seed in his spreader and zipping around our yard like an animal! I could tell this wasn't his first rodeo. In about an hour and a half, with Cousin seeding, and Ben pulling the cultimulcher with his tractor - they planted all the grass! Cousin didn't want anything for his time - he felt bad to have had the equipment which was promised to us - and just seemed happy to help us out.  WOW.

Tuesday we laid the straw blankets where necessary and Ben spent the rest of the day staring out the window waiting for rain. It didn't rain all day... but it POURED last night.  Of course, we got four freakin' inches overnight. *sigh* We now have several new gulleys all over the place - and it's raining again.  

A few of the many new gullies

However, with that much ground to cover, I suppose it's unrealistic to expect it all to turn out perfectly. I'm sure we are going to have to do patching and re-seeding in areas, but that's okay. We are both feeling pretty good about the savings and the satisfaction of doing it ourselves. Now we just have to sit back and watch the grass grow.  Come on already! :-)