Lawn Corer

The lawn out the back and in spots out the front is looking pretty daggy - A few weeks back I'd had to spray for bindiis - (last year I'd handpicked them, but this seems to have made them come back with force this year!) so this, coupled with the constant dog trampling and also unloading pavers on a muddy, muddy day have caused it to be very compacted.

Put all this together and you get a pretty crappy looking lawn

So... I've bought a lawn corer - What's a lawn coring? It's a way of aerating the lawn by pulling up "plugs" of compacted dirt. This leaves lots of holes about as thick as your thumb but after a bit, the soil in the area can expand and hence allows more air into the soil and to the roots of the lawn
I was looking at hiring a big motorised one and also thought about welding some bits of pipe to some old wheel rims and driving around the yard. Lisa wouldn't let me do the latter and the former was still quite pricey - so I bought a hand or foot powered one from bunnings for about $50
So after a day of using this thing, my leg is very sore and the yard is quite holey. I've tackled this fro ma few angles too - Coring is only the first step
I've also thatched (used the metal rake to get rid of the dead under growth) and cut the lawn a bit lower than I'd normally have done (more so to try and pickup the remaining loose thatch)
The future step will eventually be to start adding soil a few centimeters at a time to try and build back the top soil. I'd noticed in areas while coring that the top soil is only a few cm deep. I've bought some lawn seed from Bunnings and will try and sprinkle across some barer patches and rope this off from the dogs for a while - oh and also a bag of lawn fertiliser


lets hope it works!