Redoing the lawn

[Oliver550]

Next week, I'm going to dig into redoing my acre lawn. I live in the Detroit area and between owner neglect and frost, my lawn needs to be leveled out. I've got a box blade and a front end loader.

Seeing as the yard is 12" of topsoil or less with clay underneath, I've got a scheduled drop off of 24 yards of fresh soil to start with for the low spots

First, given some holes and washouts around, how would you folks go about getting a more level surface? I was originally going to just fill in the low spots and tamp them down a bit and call it good. But, then considering how much that soil is going to compact, I thought maybe I should rip up the existing soil with the blade shanks a bit so low spots don't just sink back in. Now I've got half a mind to go pick up a 6' tiller and tear up anything that looks remotely high or low, add material where necessary and box blade it level.

Second, would it be worth my time to pull out the lawn tractor and spring for a lawn roller and try to use that to compact it? I've never used a roller, growing up in the country our idea of a lawn was whatever a truck wasn't parked on.

Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated.

 

[rdln]

how big is your yard? if more than 1/2 acre sounds like 24yds would be spitting in the ocean.

you can try filling in the worst depressions but I believe that repeated passes with a drag harrow and cultipacker followed by seeding with a brillion type seeder does the best job and the wider of those implements the better.

A roller is nice for packing in the seed after broadcasting it. When I was installing lawns, I would use a 24" or 30" for small, tight areas insted of my landpride seeder.

heres an experiment: take two pieces of bread spread peanut butter on one of them with a knife and use a spoon for the other, which one is smoother?
works the same with bondo and dirt.

Lastly, the best results come from good seed, soil tests and corrections, and complete avoidance of old sod clumps (usually done by spraying roundup)