Organic Lawn DIY

Days 9, 10 and 11 of my organic lawn renovation project were pretty tough. A lot of raking, digging and incorporating compost. I ran into some snags that made it even more difficult but hopefully it will all be worth it when my new lawn comes in.

I was expecting to have seed down by the 10th day but I ran into a few snags. I had the bright idea to do all the work with manual tools since it was only 600 sq ft that I was renovating but it wound up being more tiring than I expected.  This post is a few days late as a result. My whole body was sore and my fingers were too tired to type. It was a pretty good workout though. :)

The first major step was to kill off as much of the existing lawn as I could using two organic herbicides instead of RoundUP. (See BurnOut II vs Nature's Avenger.) That went pretty well and both killed a large majority of the existing grass and weeds. There was some weedy looking tall fescue that was coming back too fast and I decided to dig it up before I went on to amending the soil, leveling the lawn and seeding. Details discussed below.