How to finish it?

[DaleW]

IMHO I would forget the tiller as the ground looks fairly good with some small rocks. Just get enough topsoil to cover the existing ground to a depth of 1 1/2 to 2 inches, rake it smooth to blend with the existing grass, seed and most important put down a good starter fertilizer. Rake the seeded and fertilized area slightly to cover some of the seed, water every day and in about 10 days to 2 weeks you'll have a green haze over the whole area.
I have always used a cover of mulch hay to hold in the moisture and it decomposes in about a year like it was never there. As for seed, I have had good luck with Agway's fall seeding mixture (Fescue blend) and Lofts Tri-Plex (Perennial Rye blend) sometimes mixing them together 50/50.
The real secret is getting the starter fertilizer on when the seed is put down. As it was explained to me many years ago, the fertilizer stimulates the seed to germinate more rapidly than if you used seed by itself.
Good luck with the project

Dale

 

[theboman]

Gordon mentioned the ol' box springs. I've dragged many a ballfield with those. An excellent and most the time FREE drag that can smooth and leave the rocks on top the surface of the land is a good ol' wooden pallet that stuffies are shipped on (you can find pallets all over the place). Just attach a chain, keep the most boarded side down and drag away. If it hops around just at a concrete block or 2 or 3.
This is how us poor folks do it.

Bluegrass, Pick It Up!

 

[Rowski]

Well, I know is a little late but I'll post the results. I did rent the Woods GHT60 tiller. The tiller was more than enough for the tractor. I could have easily handles the 72" size. The soil was very very rocky. The tiller shook the NH2120 quite a few times due to the rocky nature of the soil. The slip clutch worked really well. I had gotten 3 rocks wedged in bad enough so I had to shut down the tractor and get the rock out. I set the skip shoes really high to only till a few inches of the top to break up the sod and loosen what little topsoil there was. Someone did mention using the box spring method or just the york rake. But we wanted it to look really nice because we look at the little brook all the time. Someone else mentioned a pulverizer. I did look into one after the project was done. It should have been the way to go. The tiller did make a lot more work for us, in two ways. The first was by pulling up all the rocks, I mean ALL the rocks/w3tcompact/icons/shocked.gif! This made a lot of rock picking. The second was when trying to york rake. The sod did get chopped up pretty good, I did multiple passes in opposite directions. But the sod was not flowing through the york rake. The rake basically acted like a blade. The gauge wheels didn't help much because they are behind the rake. The ground was too uneven to try to go slow and use the position control. Even draft control did help, I didn't think it would but what the heck. So after fooling around with it I noticed that the rake was working better where the tractor had packed down the soil. I the drove over a small area to pack it down and then tried to rake it. I worked a lot better that way. So I packed everything down and then rake it. I came out pretty good. We did this work on that really hot and humid weekend in the early part September before 9/11. Included seeding, and mulching with hay. We used basically a 50% annual 50% perennial rye mix and a straight 100% winter rye. Rolled it after seeding and again after mulching.

Thanks for all the ideas! I post some pictures.

 

[Rowski]

This picture is of the rocks we HAND picked /w3tcompact/icons/sad.gif/w3tcompact/icons/mad.gif. We had another truck load and a half (in addition to the rocks hand picked) from york raking. I really do think the pulverizer would have helped avoid this extra labor..

 

[Rowski]

A view after the tilling before york raking.

 

[Rowski]

A view from the pond up stream.

 

[Rowski]

This a little pool or sediment pool. It was not there originally. Nice place to soak the hot tired feet at the end of the day.

 

[Rowski]

A little waterfall about half way. We're hoping that the trout can spawn past this waterfall. Trout used to spawn before we started the work on the brook.

 

[Rowski]

Finally, the grass is growing /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif.

 

[HR_Mutt]

Rowski
Wow!All that hard work paid off. Looks Great/w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif
regards
Mutt