How to prepare the soil for your lawn?
Before breaking up a lawn in the country, you should find the optimal area for it. It should be well lit, be on level ground, water should not stagnate in the ground after rain or melting snow. The best time to start a lawn is late spring, when the weather is warm enough and the soil is still dry.
Site preparation
The selected plot of land should be freed from stones, dry branches and foliage. To avoid stagnation of water, it is necessary to remove depressions and protrusions, and then dig up to a depth of 25 cm. After that, large clods of earth must be broken. If the site is small, then it is better to do it with a rake, and if you need to process a large lawn, then it is preferable to do it with a walk-behind tractor.
If the soil is not fertile, you can improve its quality by applying organic fertilizers. In addition, clay soil must be added to sandy soil, and to heavy black soil it can be diluted with sand. Before preparing the soil for the lawn, you should eradicate weeds: woodlice, clover, daisy, dandelion. After sowing the grass, weed control will be much more difficult.
Mineral fertilizers are introduced a week before sowing, while they are distributed over the site and covered with a rake. Before sowing the seeds, the soil is compacted with a board or hand roller.
Attention: this work must not be performed in wet soil after rain.
It is impossible to move on compacted soil without special devices for the legs, evenly distributing the body weight. A couple of days before sowing seeds, the soil must be moistened.
Sowing seeds and caring for the lawn
Sowing seeds should be done in dry, calm weather. Before sowing, it is necessary to measure the area of the plot and the rate of seed consumption. After that, the amount of seeds indicated for a particular mixture of herbs should be weighed separately for each meter. A large area is first divided into strips, and then each of them is sown along and then across, with a small grasp of the neighboring area. Seeding is done with a fan rake to a depth of 1 cm.
It is necessary to make a protective cover for the crops from birds and excessive evaporation of moisture. Better to build it from lightweight porous material. Crops should be moistened regularly during dry periods.
Important! The soil should be watered carefully using the spreader nozzle. High-pressure watering with a hose will wash the seeds upward and cause uneven grass growth. It is optimal to irrigate with a sprinkler.
Seedling occurs 10-15 days after sowing. After the emergence of 5 cm of shoots, the surface of the plot raised by the sprouts must be compacted with a hand roller. After a while, the crumpled shoots will straighten, and after that a haircut should be performed. The first time the grass is cut when it reaches 10 cm in height, leaving 5 cm. In the future, the grass should be cut weekly, avoiding overgrowth. The more often you cut the grass (but without excessive fanaticism), the smoother and more beautiful the lawn will be.
Caution! Do not mow wet grass, this can lead to pulling it out by the roots, moreover, the haircut will turn out to be uneven.Watering of young grass should be carried out in the morning and evening, so as not to contribute to the formation of burns on the shoots.
It is not advisable to walk on a young lawn, and even more so to admit pets there. This can disrupt the growth of the grass. We must let the young grass grow stronger. Nitrogen fertilizers should be introduced into the soil in early spring, and potash and phosphate fertilizers in summer. It is useful to mulch a young lawn with humus before winter. In the spring, he will provide support for the first seedlings. With proper care, the grass will take effect in a couple of years and cover the surface of the lawn with a dense carpet that is no longer afraid of mechanical stress.
Video: how to prepare and sow a lawn