Lawn Renovation Services
Grading/Topdressing/Seeding/Sodding
We Renovate & Improve Lawns
Whether your lawn needs a complete renovation, regrading to improve drainage or leveling to get rid of bumpy spots, KG Landscape can help. We know how to solve problems and fix up your lawn once and for all.
Lawn Grading, Yard Leveling, and Regrading Services
When it comes to grading for improved yard drainage, such as creating drainage swales and grading with proper slope to ensure your lawn drains correctly, KG Landscape knows how to get the job done the right way.
For those of you thinking, “Let’s just rip it all up and start over,” we can do that. Depending on your goals, budget and the current state of your yard, regrading and adding new topsoil or other soil amendments, might be your best option. However, we also have several other options outlined below below worth considering when it comes to fixing up, smoothing out and generally improving your lawn.
The 3 Reasons to Consider Regrading Your Yard
Drainage Problems
If sections of your yard are draining toward the house or low spots are pooling in the yard is often necessary to correct these problems. However, there may be other drainage solutions worth considering as well. Improving your grading can create flat, usable lawn spaces and fix wet mushy areas in the lawn.
Bumpy / Uneven Lawn
No one likes walking or mowing a bumpy lawn. Re-grading an existing lawn might be necessary to smooth out uneven lawns to finally get the flat backyard most people want. These fixes will destroy your existing lawn and will require starting over with new seed or sod.
Poor / Bad Soil
If your soil is heavy clay or almost pure sand, the quality of your turf will be benefit greatly from the addition of new soil heavy in organic matter, such as a rich top soil mix. Adding 2" of top soil will greatly improve the ability of your lawn to retain the water and nutrients your grass needs. There are many options for soil amendments.
Benefits of Aerating and Overseeding Your Lawn
Reduce Soil Compaction and Fix Up Your Lawn
All lawns are prone to compaction issues, caused by normal mowing practices and lawn usage. Compacted soils cause major problems when it comes to growing a healthy lawn. Compaction and prevents the water, air, and fertilizer needed by grasses from penetrating into the soil where they can be consumed by the grass roots. Clay soils are the most prone to compaction issues, but mot soil type can have compaction issues.
We use the core aeration method to reduce compaction and often times aerate and over-seed at the same time, which is a very effective way to increase turf density. The cores removed by the aeration process open the soil allowing the new grass seed to get the seed-to- soil contact it needs to germinate. The core’s themselves will break up and fill in the holes on their own in about 4 weeks through to rain and mowing. However they fill in the holes created by the core aeration with less compacted soil, which is exactly what we want!
Before and After Pictures of a Double Aerated and Overseeded Lawn in Minnetonka, MN
Improve Your Lawn by Over-Seeding With New Grass Varieties
By over-seeding, we mean applying new grass seed to an existing lawn as opposed to seeding a new lawn from scratch. Thin lawns will benefit greatly from aeration and over seeding. Over-seeding without aerating or otherwise breaking up the soil is not effective, as little to no seed will germinate. Seeds need seed-to-soil contact to germinate, which is what core aeration provides. We typically double aerate, meaning we run the aerator over the entire lawn 2 times in order to provide twice as many places (holes) for new seed to grow.
Using the best possible blend of grass seed for your lawn is very important. We use customized mixtures of the highest quality new varieties of grass seed to ensure your lawn looks great in the sunny areas as well as in full shade. Our Minnesota lawns are made up of 3 different types of grass: Kentucky bluegrass, perennial ryegrass, and fine fescues. Fine fescues perform best in shade, Kentucky bluegrass creates the densest turf, and perennial ryegrass germinates the fastest. These are all considered cool season grasses, which means they perform best in cool weather between 60-80 degrees.
Cool season grasses have evolved to drop their seeds in mid-summer, germinate late summer to early fall, and then spend the fall getting strong enough to survive their first winter. This is why we highly recommend aerating in the fall for best results, although we do have an effective method to achieve great results in the spring if you just can’t wait. Check out our detailed article on Everything you need to know about Seeding and Best Timing for Seeding in MN
The biggest challenge to successfully overseeding in the springtime is that the pre-emergent crabgrass application in spring prevents not just crabgrass, but most seeds from germinating for about 10-12 weeks. Because of this, seeding in the spring needs to be done very early in the spring, prior to applying crabgrass preventer. Another option for spring seeding, is to use a specialty pre-emergent crabgrass preventer product called Tupersan, that will stop the crabgrass seeds from growing, but won’t prevent cool season seeds from germinating.
Topdressing Services to Improve Your Lawn
Topdressing Can Help Smooth Out Bumpy Lawns without Regrading
Topdressing - One of the Best Options for Renovating Your Lawn
Top dressing is a great way to smooth out a bumpy lawn and can also be used to improve sandy or clay heavy soils, without harming any the existing turf. What is topdressing? Top-dressing is the process of spreading 1/8" -1/2" of soil over existing turf. We use different soil mixes, depending on your goals. If you are a golfer, you've noticed that all golf courses in MN top-dress their greens every fall with a golf course topdressing mix, to ensure a smooth and firm putting surface on the greens. Topdressing can provide a number of additional benefits as well, including improved drainage.
When the goal it to help level a lawn and improve drainage, we also use a golf course top dressing mix consisting of roughly 80% sand and 20% peat/compost mix. These sandy mixes were developed for golf courses and are ideal for leveling lawns, because this sandy soil stay firm after being applied (think of the firm and smooth sand at a beaches surf zone). Sand doesn't settle much either, unlike black dirt, which is not nearly as firm, settles much more and becomes mucky when wet (drains poorly comparted to sand).
Our Topdressing with Double Aeration and Overseeding Service
Top dressing is most effective when done at the same time as aerating and over seeding. This is because core aerating allows the soil amendments to penetrate into the soil instead of resting on the top layer. Another huge benefit, is that seed germination rates when overseeding are greatly increased after topdressing, because all of the new seed in covered with soil, allowing the vast majority of the seed applied to germinate, not just the seed resting in the core aeration holes. We do a lot of top dressing in Edina, Minnetonka, Medina, Mendota Heights, Minneapolis and Plymouth, as well as many other cities in the metro area because of either heavy clay soils or pure sand in certain areas.
This service is one of our most effective and highly recommended lawn renovation service options, which includes the (5) step process outlined below.
1) A Double lawn aeration (aerating you entire lawn 2 times during the same visit)
2) Overseeding with a blend of premium new sun and shade seed varieties
3) Starting Fertilizer application
4) Topdressing with 1/4" of golf course topdressing mix or topsoil/compost mix depending on your goals
5) Dragging your lawn with a leveling screen (metal mesh leveling tool/lawn drag) to pull the applied material into low spots in the lawn, helping to smooth out small undulations in the yard.
Sodding Your Lawn
Sodding is the best way to instantly achieve a thick and green lawn. Sodding your lawn is more expensive than seeding, but comes with some obvious advantages. The first advantage is not waiting; your lawn is instantly green. Compared to seeding, sodding is more family friend in the sense that kids and pets can generally start using a sodded lawn within a week or two of installation. A seeded lawn can take about 8 weeks to come in (try keeping your kids and dogs off for 3 months!). If your lawn is seeded, you will have bare soil that will constantly be wet from watering, which can be a mess if your lawn in used during that period.
Some of our customers have us sod the front yard and seed the backyard to keep costs down. Another area where sodding makes a lot of sense is on hills and sloped lawn areas, where erosion can be a problem when trying to establish seed. Sod staples also help prevent sod installed on slopes from sliding down the hill.
Does Sod Grow Well in the Shade?
The types of grass used to grow sod are sun loving varieties, consisting of primary of Kentucky bluegrass. For this reason, we recommend using sod in full sun to partial shade areas of your lawn and not in heavily shaded areas.
Sod installed in full shade with deteriorate within a year or two, as the sun loving varieties die off in the shade. To avoid this result, we recommend seeding any sections of your lawn that are heavily shaded, with a shade tolerant seed mix instead of sodding in those areas. If you do wish to sod the shaded areas, that's ok too, just plan on doing some overseeding in those areas as needed in the future with shade tolerant grasses. Our shade seed mixtures consist of primarily fine fescue seed varieties.
Proper Fertilization
Lawns can thin out due to a number of reasons, but almost always the #1 culprit is a lack of nutrients. No MN native soils naturally contain enough nitrogen to support high quality turf indefinitely. So fertilizing is a must to give your lawn the 3 lbs. of Nitrogen it needs to thrive every year.
If you’d like to learn more about out fertilizer and weed control programs, visit our Fertilizer & Weed Control Page.
Weed Control
Weeds must be removed to establish high quality turf. Our conventional lawn treatment packages include a crabgrass pre-emergent application in the spring and two broadleaf applications each year (spring and fall) to make sure your weeds don’t stand a chance.
Preventing and removing lawn weeds is an important part of maintaining high quality turf, especially when over-seeding to increase turf quality, because killing the weeds prior to over seeding will provide voids in the lawn once taken up by the weeds, where new seedlings can establish and fill in. Check out our blogs on when to apply crabgrass preventer and everything you need to know about overseeding
