How to Grow a Lawn From Scratch (DIY Guide + Lessons Learned)

What's up everybody! This barren wasteland that you're seeing now is footage of my backyard from around one year ago. This video is going to show you the steps I took to grow a brand new lawn completely from scratch. Be sure to watch till the end because I'm going to go through some of the lessons learned and things I would have done differently if I was doing this project again today. And I want to give a huge shout out to Ironite for sponsoring this project. With all that said let's get into the video. So here's where the project starts and step one is just want to basically get it so you're starting with a clean slate. After cleaning up the yard I'm going to hop in my car real quick and head over to my local big box store where I can rent an either aerator or a tiller. And for this project I rented a pretty large tiller just because I'm doing the whole yard but obviously grab something that's suitable for your project application. Getting this thing loaded up in the truck was the hardest part and even that wasn't too bad. Then we brought it home and got it started up. Tilling your yard before planting grass seed is really important if you have compacted or clay soils which is what I'm dealing with. The soil is very compact it's very hard and the seed really wouldn't be able to germinate or blend into the soil very well unless I tilled it. Additionally if you end up testing your soil and find that you need to add things like lime or fertilizer in order to get an optimal soil to plant seed you're going to want to till it to blend everything together. This tiller kind of had a mind of its own sometimes but overall it was pretty easy to control. After tilling the soil go back and remove any dirt debris or roots that you might have uprooted as part of the tilling process. And here's a quick look at our yard fully tilled and ready for the next step. Because I wasn't exactly convinced that my native soil was super super healthy and nutrient dense I ordered some topsoil from a local landscape supply company and I wanted to mix that in with the native soil to give my seed the best chance of survival. So we loaded all of this topsoil into a wheelbarrow and we distributed it all around the yard. This was pretty labor intensive took a lot of wheelbarrow runs but we were able to get it done. And no this is not a transition we just ran out of daylight. So we had to come back the next day and finish up distributing the topsoil around the yard. Again we just put a bunch of wheelbarrow loads and then used a rake to mix it in with the native soil as you're seeing now. So after tilling the soil it's time to actually plant the grass seed and to do that we're going to need the grass seed obviously and also a seed spreader. The type of grass seed you use will depend a lot on your climate and application but for my yard I went with a sudden shade mix since there's a lot of shade in my yard. For the seed spreader pick one that works for your needs. I went with one that you can actually spread by walking behind. Follow the grass seed manufacturer's instructions for setting the spreader rate for your broadcast spreader. For mine I had to adjust it to nine and a half which you can adjust by just changing the dial like you're seeing now. And what that's going to do is going to regulate how much seed actually comes out of the hopper here. So obviously if you increase that to 15 or so this would be a larger opening and if you reduced it it would be smaller. So this is what we want let's go. So after adjusting our seed spreading rate it's time to actually load up the spreader with grass seed. So after filling up the seed spreader it's time to actually apply grass seed to the yard and to do this you're going to walk back and forth in a uniform pattern follow the manufacturer's instructions and you typically want to walk with a little bit of an overlap so there's not a gap in between each row where the seeds actually land. Now I use the edge guard to prevent seed from going anywhere that it doesn't belong like gardens or on the patio and then you're basically just going to walk back and forth until you've applied grass seed to the entire application area. After applying the grass seed I recommend that you take a rake and you lightly rake the seed into the soil. The objective here is not to bury the grass seed super deep it's just to mix the grass seed into the soil a little bit to give it a little bit of the protection from direct sunlight. So here I am mixing that all in and once that's done it's time to water. When planting new grass seed you want to make sure that it's watered a minimum of twice a day. The idea is not to flood the new grass seed but to keep the soil moist until the seeds germinate. Don't sleep on this because seeds drying out is the main reason that your new lawn will fail. All right so we got our seed down a couple lumps here and there but not too bad we immediately started watering so we'll see how we do. Now it typically takes between 7 and 21 days for the grass seed to germinate and here after two weeks we had a little bit of growth but we mostly had a disaster. Okay so as you can see things aren't looking so good it's very patchy this is about two weeks in so I'm going to do some overseeding to see if we can't help this lawn out a little bit. It looks okay I guess if you come down here but it's just real patchy it's actually pretty bad. Now before I show you how I resolve this issue I want to talk about today's video sponsor Ironite. Ironite is an iron-based mineral supplement and fertilizer that you apply to your lawn just like grass seed. Adjust the spreader setting based on the manufacturer's instructions and apply it to your lawn just like you would grass seed. This product can really help to restore a pale yellow looking lawn by giving it that rich vibrant green color that I know that everyone watching this video is going for. Ironite is specifically formulated to overcome any nutrient deficiencies that are causing your lawn to be yellow and pale and this product is going to help you to maintain a beautiful green lawn all season long. For more information on Ironite and how it can help to benefit your lawn check the link in the description. So back to the lawn it's patchy we got to do something. So I hopped in my car and drove back to Home Depot so I could pick up some topsoil and then I filled in all the areas that were pretty barren. I just dumped out the topsoil wherever it was needed and then used a rake to distribute it evenly. Also shout out to my girlfriend for the caffeination delivery. After filling in the barren areas with topsoil I performed something called overseeding which is where you just apply additional grass seed over an initial layer that you planted previously. And after overseeding I watered and then I waded and then I watered some more and I did some more wading and after about a month here's what the grass was looking like. Obviously much much better but still some areas that are not so good and I had not cut the grass at all so at this point this is a month of growth but as you can see here still some sparse areas and then there were a lot of weeds that grew through and I'm going to talk about this more in the lessons learned because this is something I would definitely do different in the future. So obviously after cutting the lawn things were looking better and over the course of the next two weeks I overseeded the sparse areas and here is the final result. So although the results were okay there are definitely some lessons learned and things that I would do differently if I was doing this again today. One I would have bought a soil tester to tell me the pH and the nutrient levels in my soil. Personally I think my soil is a little unhealthy which is why the grass didn't grow super great. Two I had a weed problem I didn't want to use a chemical weed killer like Roundup and as a result I had weeds growing up and choking out my grass all over the place. So definitely think about how you're going to contend with the weeds and mitigate those when you plant grass. And finally just make sure that you plant your grass on a time that's conducive for grass growth. They have charts online that'll tell you when the best time to plant grass is based on where you live so just pay attention to that because it's very hard to you know plant grass in the middle of the summer the seeds just going to dry out. Now this was the first lawn I ever tried to grow from scratch and I don't claim to be an expert by any means. I literally made like every mistake in the book but maybe I did one or two things right. So hopefully you can learn from my mistakes take a couple tips and tricks and get a lawn that you are proud of. Here's an awkward outro. Thank you guys so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video please drop a like down below and consider subscribing if you like DIY content like this. If you want to see how I renovated the entire backyard I'll leave a link to that time lapse video right there and if not that's fine I'll catch you on the next one. Thanks for watching.