Right on Stu. I do appreciate everyone's feedback, good or bad. A lot of it has been very helpful in making changes along the way and to identify things that should have been done differently/better.
Day 104
Today was a long day working on the yard, from 7am to 7pm, with a brief 20 minute lunch break!
I spent the 1st hour picking up more rocks and roots that I missed yesterday (you will never get them all!). I then connected the spreader I picked up from tsc yesterday to my lawnmower. It holds up to 135 lbs, and it almost holds a 50 lbs bag of seed. I do have a pto spreader, the kind with the articulating arm, but it is buried at the back of my shop, and it needs some work before being fully functional. So I figured I'd give this pull behind a shot.
According the user manual, for seed, I should use a setting of '3'. Well, that didn't result any any seeds being broadcast, so I went straight to '10', and the seeds started flowing at a moderate rate. Even at the max setting, it still took 6 or 7 passes at different angles to get 200 lbs of seed down. I'm quite sure I got good even coverage due to that many passes.
After the seed, I broadcast the starter fertilizer. Here a setting of "10" was way too much, but "7" was just about right. I had 175 lbs of that spread pretty quickly. I then applied 80 lbs of lime is the areas where the soil was very clay/red like.
I decided NOT to rake it again after that based on past experience where that has resulted in the seeds getting clustered together in places. So I went to roll everything next. My little JD lawn mower was not able to pull the ~1000 lbs roller, but the 4wd mower had no problem.
So here's what it looked like after rolling
Turns out the roller had a bad weld. Don't think I'll go through the hassle of trying to take it back to tsc. I think I'll just fill it with sand instead for future uses.
It was now past noon, and still no straw blower. Went back to my house for a quick bite to eat and finally got a hold of the builder/super who told me they had still not completed the other job, but he assured me they would make it over later afternoon to do my job. I then decided to do a quick lookup on-line to see what the official guide was for how many bales it would take to blow just under 1 acre. The results was anywhere from 40 - 100, depending on the origin of the bales. So I figured better be safe than sorry, so since I had some time before they would get there, I went to Lowe's to pick up another 30 bales. Since I had the camera with me, I took another shot of mom's house from the road across the filed. You almost can't see it anymore with all the leaves out.
Back with the spare 30 bales
While waiting for the straw blower, I took the opportunity to to through the yard again, and pick out more rocks and roots that had been exposed from rolling everything.
Finally, around 5pm, the blower finally showed up. The bonus was that it included a crew to operate it since it was so late getting to me. So in about 1 hour, they were done!
I'm VERY glad I went back to Lowe's for the 30 extra bales. We ended up using more than half of them, so the total was about 65 bales or so.
