My First Experience with a Hoe

Rock hard ground+ 1,800 Sq feet= Bent Hoe.

My back yard is approximatly 1,800 square feet, maybe more with the "side yard" added it. It is great for the dogs, but it is mostly dirt, so they were getting filthy running round. Even without skidding when trying to get the ball, as they ran, little clouds of dirt followed them around.

I bought what I call Magic Grass seed off the Internet. It claims to grow quickly under any or all adverse conditions. I read the instructions and learned I had to cultivate the soil. Didn't much care for the sounds of that, and I liked it even less when I spent my Martin Luther King holiday doing it. In preparation for the cultivation (that sounds like something you do when you join a strange religious group) I went to the "Do It Best Center" and asked a young man who I found there (yes, he was a worker and not just some random guy) what I should use to cultivate the soil. He sold me a hoe. I also asked what he had for scooping up leaves to put them in the trash can. He gave me a look of disbelief and said, "Your hands?" I wanted a large plastic shovel, which I thought would make the process go faster. They didn't sell large plastic shovels, probably because 1) it doesn't snow in So Cal and 2) nobody besides me has ever had the idea that there is more efficient way to scoop up leaves than using your hands. I also bought fertilizer that the same questionable salesman recommended.

I got home and got to work on the yard. This is what I stared with.

There were some leaves and lots of dead grass to be removed. The seed won't germinate (does that word make me sound like I know about planting, and more importantly, growing, grass?) unless it comes into contact with the soil. The dead grass would prevent this so it had to go. It took me some time to rake up all the dead grass and when I was done I was very tired and a lot of my day was gone. This is what it looked like after it was raked. Much more bare.

After the raking, it was time for the cultivating. I got the hoe and got to work. And work it was. The ground didn't give up easily, and neither did I and in the end, it was the hoe that threw in the towel. I was wearing gloves, but they couldn't stand up to my rigorous hoeing, (probably I shouldn't tell too many people I was engaging in rigorous hoeing) and I got blisters on both hands, and sore muscles all over. My handy instructions told me to cultivate to a depth of 4-5 inches, but I'm lucky if I got down an inch. This is what my raked and cultivated soil looked like.

Now it was starting to get dark. I was ready to spread the Magic Grass (not as exciting as some might think and/or hope) seed. I had three bags which was plenty. But I didn't really know how much was enough for one spot, so I ended up running low...

Finally I was ready for the last step- the fertilizer. I intelligently (not to brag) read the instructions on the fertilizer bag first and sadly discovered I needed a fertilizer spreader. Mr. Not So Helpful Salesguy was not only not so helpful, but also maybe somewhat incompetent. Unless you need a spreader for all fertilizer and it is me who is incompetent. I think he should have mentioned the spreader when he recommended the fertilizer to me. Since I didn't have a spreader, I was done for the day. Good thing- I'm not positive my abused body could have taken much more torture, er, yard work.

I was working so hard it made Bloom collapse.

I hope to see some grass as a long term result, but as an added bonus, I got some immediate grassifaction (as Pacific Sod advertises) because I sweat so much water out and became so dehydrated I lost a few pounds in a day!

Now don't be too jealous when I tell you this, but the actual weight was 129.5! It went up when I picked up the camera.

The next day I borrowed a spreader from work (working in CE has some advantages) and used my trailer hitch cargo platform to get it home. I stoped at Home Depot (having given up on the Do It Best Center) and bought some additional grass seed for the areas where it got spread thinly and four 56 pound bags for topping soil. I had been warned I had to cover up the grass seed and since I didn't cultivate deep enough I didn't have anything to rake back over the seeds. I thought the topping soil was just the thing for the job. My tiered muscles protested lugging the 200+ pounds of soil around. Not all at once, of course, but still.

I got home and loaded up the spreader and spread the fertilizer. Then I started to spread the topping soil. You are supposed to put it on 1/4 inch thick, but I knew I didn't have enough, so I spread it just enough to mostly cover the ground. And I still ran out. This is how the yard looked with the topping soil. The little blue beads is the fertilizer.

This was a lot of work and quite a bit of $, but I really want a yard the dogs can play in and not get so dirty that people make comments about their state of cleanliness. I used to have dog envy, when I didn't have my dogs, then I had yard envy, when I didn't have a usable yard. Now I have dogs and a yard, and I have grass envy. It doesn't have to be pretty grass. Just something to cover up the dirt. Most of the grass I have now is crab grass. I purposely did not buy the crab grass preventer fertilizer because crab grass is green, and it isn't dirty, so I'll take it.

One more piece of yard work I have to mention, which I actually did first on Friday was I turned the trees that line the side of my yard from bushes back into trees. You might say I took them back to their roots. I didn't like them as bushes because they were encroaching into my yard and underneath them was piles of leaves and decaying plant material. I couldn't rake under all the branches so the branches had to come out. It used to look like this.

Now it looks like this. Note I even removed the strange mound of dirt. I was happy to find there wasn't anything buried under it. I did find a palm type plant in a really odd pot back there. I used my clippers to chop the plant down and put it into the yard waste barrel. As I picked it up, I discovered it was a fake plant. I felt pretty sheepish as I removed it from the yard waste can and put it into the regular trashcan.

I piled all the clippings on the concrete on the side of my house because I knew I was going to be doing the grass. It sure took up a lot of room!

I had to pay a company to take it away. The first guy quoted me at $185 (!) but the second company did it for $85, which just goes to show you should always get multiple quotes. Something I learned from working in CE.

Writing about all this yard work is making me almost as tired as actually doing it. Almost. Going back to my poor bent hoe... I looked at the Magic Grass seed bag after I was done, and I saw there was drawing of a funny looking guy cultivating the soil...with a shovel. I'm told that is the only way to do it right. The Do It Best Center salesguy didn't do it very well for me. However, he really did do me a favor, because as difficult as it was to hoe, I think trying to dig up my entire yard with a shovel probably would have been even more difficult.

I'm now watering my "lawn" twice a day and examining it for new shoots every two minutes. The dog are not allowed in the back yard and are sad. They are doing their business in the front yard. I am hoping the grass grows quickly and that it doesn't die as soon as gigantic Pie starts running around on it.