Sewing Our Seed

We tackled part two of the backyard project this weekend. (See part 1 here.) Now all we have to do is wait (impatiently) for our grass to sprout and take root.

If you will remember, after the jackhammering from last weekend, we were left with a whole lot of concrete pieces and more unearthed lava rock.

So step one was harvesting said lava rock and concrete pieces. First, we raked up the larger chunks, which unfortunately had to go in the trash, since the concrete was mixed in with quite a bit of dirt. The next step was to pick out the smaller chunks by hand. This took for.ever. (Meaning, about 2 hours of being us crouched down and hunched over.)

Once we got rid of the majority of the lava rocks and concrete chunks, it was time to grade the dirt that was left so we could spread out our 1.6 tons of topsoil.

Then it was time to move and spread out all that black gold, as I like to call it. The muscle behind our dynamic duo shoveled it from the truck bed into the wheelbarrow and dumped it into little mounds, which I then spread out using the flat side of a rake.

(Notice how exciting this project is: Azlan is falling asleep standing up in the background!) And here's what it looked like and hour-and-a-half or so later, once all that black gold had been spread out and tamped down by the very scientific process of us stepping on it.

The last step was to seed the new patch of backyard. (I had to bow out at this point to meet up with the girls to celebrate Meg's last two weeks of singledom.) But my generous husband stayed behind to scatter the seed using a hand-held seed spreader.

He then raked it into the soil and watered. In case you are wondering, we went with Scott's Turf Builder for high traffic areas, which thankfully requires less watering than some of their other varieties and should stand up to two wrestling Rhodesians once it takes root.

The final product - until grass sprouts in 6-10 days, of course! - looks like this.

And here's a close up of all that lovely grass just waiting to sprout. Keep your fingers crossed that it happens this week while I am on spring break so I can protect it from the pups.

And here's a quick cost breakdown. You will remember that breaking up all that concrete ran us $0.00 since we borrowed the jackhammer. The 1.61 tons of topsoil was $69.71 with sales tax, which was a little more than we had planned for, but thankfully we already had the seed on hand, so that was free too. Still, $70 is pretty is pretty good for the cost of getting some much needed grass in the backyard.

What weekend projects did you tackle? I need some serious inspiration to get through my spring break project list. Up at the top of the list is painting the master bedroom and working on refurbishing some planters for the front of the house and the lemon tree in the backyard.