making landscaping beautiful and beneficial

Having your yard covered in a carpet of green lawn is a great way to make your yard look attractive and keep the surrounding area cooler during the summer months. Whether your yard is full of weeds, rocks, or a sparse and scraggly lawn that has seen better days, you can restore it to a full lawn with either loose seed, unrolling sod, or applying a hydroseed mixture to your soil. Here are some recommendations to help you install and ensure your new hydroseed lawn is a success on your property.

Do the Preparation Work

Hydroseed is a great solution to a yard without a lawn because it is more affordable than sod, you can select the exact type of lawn seed you want to grow, and the seed will remain stable while it germinates after it has been sprayed onto your property. Hydroseed is applied in a slurry mixture of water, fertilizer, lawn seed, and shredded paper so it forms a hard crust onto the soil. But you need to prepare the ground so it is the right environment for your new lawn to grow.

First, you will need to remove any weeds, weed seeds, rocks, and other vegetation that may be growing in the soil along with about a couple of inches of the existing soil. This levels the area and provides space for a new layer of topsoil combined with fertilizer to boost your lawn's growth. You can also mix in a small amount of lime to the soil to improve the alkalinity and growing environment for the seeds.

Install Irrigation

You may also choose to install your irrigation system before the hydroseed application is completed because you will need to keep your hydroseed layer moist constantly for the first week to ten days to ensure germination. Your landscaping service can help you install an in-ground system, or you can set up an above-ground system that will cover the entire lawn site. Update any manual irrigation sprinklers with a programmable timer that you can have run through the day and night for your lawn's irrigation during germination and as it grows in further.

Hire a Hydroseed Professional

There may be some products you can find online that mimic a hydroseed system, but they won't provide you with the professional hydroseed application you can find from a local service professional. Your exact lawn seed mixture specifications will be combined with the other components of the hydroseed mixture and sprayed out over your yard's prepared soil. Once the mixture dries on your soil, it will be a hard covering that won't rinse or blow away.

Be sure you keep the moisture-absorbing mixture wet for the first week to two weeks and don't let people or pets walk across the site.  Walking on the hydroseed layer will damage the layer and disturb the seeds, leaving you with holes in your lawn once it grows in. Reach out to a hydroseeding contractor in your area for assistance.