Thought I would add to this thread seeing as I have been doing a little mowing of late.
Mostly finished my house however the backyard was a mess:
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Time to get the job done. Poured the footing for the retaining wall:
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Got my hands on a ton of free blocks:
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Retaining wall done:
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Sold off the spare blocks on Ebay.
Sprayed all the grass and weeds, some took a while. That spiky weed that puts out shoots like asparagus and has little potatoes in the roots is near impossible to kill! When the excavator dug it up it peeled away from the ground like carpet - amazing how that stiff spreads out.
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All up, needed 100t of fill:
The little lady was happy to help out where she could
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Pushed the rubbish sandy stuff down the back where I could bury it under the better stuff.
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Got some more fill of better quality and spread that out on the sandy stuff:
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Got some turf underlay and spread that out, mixed in with a heap of aged chook poo from my parents farm.
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First delivery of turf - around 280sqm of Kikuyu grass:
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Wasn't enough :(
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Did the top half the following week - another 250 sqm.
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Came out pretty good... took straight away and did get much die off.
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Time to cut...... The green bin was full, as was several large containers and an old 1t sand bag I had floating around... and I was only half way done. Needed to tip the rest in the trailer.
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Let it grow for a few weeks, then had a ton of rain and sun.... Big mistake.
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Was way too high, so a few days before I mowed I tried to knock it down a bit with the whipper snipper... It sorta worked, but the grass below was dry and woody. Then the dead grass blocked the sun and made it worse...
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I have a self propelled Masport - It did very well considering the size of the yard and the grass height.
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Probably several hundred kg of grass there!
Biggest waste of time was the constant travel to empty the catcher... Would walk 20 metres and it was already full.
Next time I'll park the trailer down the back where I'm mowing.
Still cutting it very high - won't ever leave it to get so long as the brown patches really annoy me.
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After that trailer load I decided a different strategy to try and fit near 550sqm of grass into at least my bin and with a little left over.
I cut the new shoots after 3 days and tipped it into several large tubs I had lying around - but not my bin. Whole yard only took about 1hr and I would have emptied the catcher perhaps 7 times.
Then, every day I would tip those containers up side down into another one so that the sun dries it out. I found when I filled the green bin to the top with damp grass there was nowhere for the moisture to escape even with the lid off. When I took my full bin out last time it had only settled half a foot but the thing weighed easily 100kg - I was worried they were not going to collect it.
Anyway, after 3 more days the clippings were reduced by half and I tipped them into the bin then did another cut and did the same thing with the containers.
After 2 weeks and 2 cuts it all fit in the bin. Not bad.
Granted we have had 2 weeks of hot sun and no rain, I'm sure if it rained heavily my grass will shoot up like before and I will need the trailer again.
Whole job would have only set me back $6-7k including fill, topsoil, grass and the retaining wall. Did all I could myself, got most of the fill for free and paid for the top layer of turf underlay.
Rolled the turf myself with some help. Not a perfect job but it's a whole lot better than before.