can of worms

arcitek – posted 26 March 2006 12:50

Well, I feel like I have myself into a position where I opened up a can of worms. I have been doing some research and reading of this forum and I’m wondering if I am in over my head. The question I have to ask is one that has probably been asked a thousand times on here so I feel like a pain asking it again. I belong to several other forums where I am usually giving advice so I know how I can sometimes feel when “newbies” come on and ask the same question over. However, I will say, I have been reading posts on this forum but, call me dumb, some of it is just not sticking with me. Here it goes.

We live in the SE portion of Pennsylvania and bought a house one year ago where the yard was never maintained. To top things off, I found out the hardway this past summer that we have shale in the soil and alot of bedrock. This past summer was pretty rough with alot of nutgrass, drought, and some type of grub. With the deck and patio done, we are ready to focus on plantings and the yard. All I want to accomplish is to have a decent yard in the end, nothing extreme, but at least a yard with mostly good grass. The rear yard has a southern exposure with no trees. What I wound up doing is having 8 big truckloads of topsoil brought over from a jobsite of ours. It’s not screened, but it has a great consistency and very few rocks or debri. I paid a 100 dollars per 16 cu yds, so I could not pass it up. Anyway, my question is the follwing. It is March 26 and I want to kill the grass (with what product?) to till the soil and move some of the topsoil around to create the planting mounds. The next step is to begin moving the topsoil piles arond the rear of the yard and work our way to the side of the house. I have enough soil to result in roughly 6 inches of topsoil over the rear/ side yard where the grass did not fair well at all. I ‘ll be moving/ grading the dirt myself with a skidloader. The problem is, after this step, I am pretty much clueless on what to do. I did not have time to kill the plant growth before we received the topsoil. Since it will be about 3 or 4 weeks until these piles of soil are spread out in the yard, we figured the grass would die under the topsoil piles. It was probably a stupid move on my part, but I had a limited window on having this topsoil delivered and short notice on its availablility. Could someone please outline for me the steps I need to take to go from the topsoil into developing a hearty yard? Also, if I go with a different seed on this new topsoil, how does the exisitng grass work with the new grass? The one side and front yard seems have faired much better than the one side and rear, so we are planning on just restoring the health of this existing grass through treatment. Any help would be appreciated and the only thing I can offer in return is advice relatred to architecture. Thanks in advance.