Our yard has looked terrible in the past years because the drought like conditions from the previous five years thinned it out and killed off spots, leaving crabgrass and dandelions.
The weather forecast was for a nice slow drizzle followed by 50-60 degree F highs. Strangely, the first thing that came to my mind was, "This is grass-planting weather."
Our little yard is only 500 square feet and there are underground sprinklers, so I elected to forego the more automated (and costly) option of renting a tiller. After all, I didn't want to break off a sprinkler head and I highly value hard work (
http://www.businesscasualbiker.com/the-pleasure-of-hard-work/ ), since my primary occupation does not involve physical labor.
So yesterday afternoon with the rain prescribed for late in the evening, I set forth to my yard with a shovel and a rake. The ground was quite hard and there were tons of roots and rocks so it was much more work than I thought. But before the sun went completely down, I had turned over every inch of the crummy grass and raked through the dirt. The rain set in on schedule and I scattered seed evenly across the freshly raked dirt this morning.
7 hours, $40 worth of seed and fertilizer, 4-8K calories burned, and in two to three weeks we will have some beautiful new Kentucky Bluegrass!
I am quite proud and wanted to share this with you folks. The very easy and more typical route would have been hiring a landscaper and laying saud, which probably would have cost $700-800. A tiller rental for the day probably would have been $100-150.
