Lawn care?

We got pretty lucky with our house in that it had a decent lawn starting out. Well, at least until they put in a new septic tank and destroyed the east side of the lawn.

We still don't know what happened to half the earth they dug up :(

We were hoping the "hydroseed" stuff the landscapers put down before we moved in would make it stay pretty...

Hydroseed is awesome!

...but after a month or two the grass was not long for this world. A couple weeks after we hired a local landscaper to give the yard a once-over starter mow, we finally got a lawn mower and took it from there. But that poor east lawn did not age well:

Hydroseed - not awesome :(

We didn't really want to be those crazy nighbors obsessed with their lawns, but I definitely wanted to have some kind of turf/root system on that side of the yard before the snow set in. So I did some research, asked the local garden center some questions about lawn types and basic care, and then with the knowledge gleaned, completely ditched them to get much cheaper lawn care products at Lowes ;)

We also picked up a medium-size Scott's seed spreader and a bag of fertilizer.

After raking the side yard clean (pine needles are the bane of my existence), we aerated it by raking it again with a metal rake and churned up the dirt a bit, then went back and seeded the whole thing.

You know, I love pine trees, but why they gotta be like this?

It was super important to water it at least once a day (twice was recommended), so we finally got around to buying some hose, and automatic timer, and an industrial-grade impulse sprinkler that could cover the entire side of the lawn. These three items made it effortless to keep the new seed healthy!

The power of a hundred super-soakers

We went back (later than we ought to have), and fertilized a couple weeks later using the same seed spreader, and kept on watering until it got too cold out (mid-November). And it worked! The new grass came up healthy and decently thick, and was tall enough to trim with the mower. Huzzah!

2 months later :D