Preparing and leveling soil in formerly wooded area for planting (lawn, landscaping)
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My new home has a 3 acre lot - 1.5 acres of which was wooded until spring of 2011, when the previous owner cleared it all. It now is mostly bare land with a few dead weeds (since it's December) and a bunch of holes where stumps were removed. The place looks like a minefield! They didn't even leave any of the woodchips from stump removal, so it's just a bunch of holes, probably almost 100 of them although many are small.
My initial thought was, well, could I have someone come in with a farmer's plow to turn it over and smooth it out? It would cost a LOT to buy enough topsoil or fill dirt to fill these holes.
Is my idea feasible? Would they turn up a bunch of roots (or damage their equipment on them) trying this?
Before anyone asks, the home itself and immediate front half of the yard is gorgeous! That's why we bought it. We're just working on the back half of the lot.
A play area for the kids. Probably box it in and do that rubber playground mulch with a nice playset/swingset. I'll plant a few trees around that for future shade. Some lawn around this area where they can run free.
The rest of the area will be split between a vegetable garden, a few fruit trees, and maybe an island with a couple Japanese maples and some larger growing trees, with low growing groundcovers and maybe some dwarf conifers underneath. I'll plant some grass for lawn areas, but not the entire thing.
So firstly I'd say yes, the area needs to be leveled and smoothed. Maybe a bobcat is a better choice? The job could probably be done in one day with a bobcat.
^^ My thoughts too. A Bobcat or larger front end loader, etc., the size of which should depend on the size of the holes. THEN you could have it plowed and smoothed with a disc, harrow, tiller and/or whatever they use these days, then maybe planted where appropriate. Simply plowing it isn't likely to fill in those holes.
My new home has a 3 acre lot - 1.5 acres of which was wooded until spring of 2011, when the previous owner cleared it all. It now is mostly bare land with a few dead weeds (since it's December) and a bunch of holes where stumps were removed. The place looks like a minefield! They didn't even leave any of the woodchips from stump removal, so it's just a bunch of holes, probably almost 100 of them although many are small.
My initial thought was, well, could I have someone come in with a farmer's plow to turn it over and smooth it out? It would cost a LOT to buy enough topsoil or fill dirt to fill these holes.
Is my idea feasible? Would they turn up a bunch of roots (or damage their equipment on them) trying this?
Before anyone asks, the home itself and immediate front half of the yard is gorgeous! That's why we bought it. We're just working on the back half of the lot.
Thanks!
What I would do is based on what is available to me. That may be different than what is available to you.
- The first thing I would do is take my truck to a local compost/soil source, get some rich topsoil, and fill the holes. I'd scoop the dirt out of the truck by hand, and pile the holes full. It'd be a pain in the butt, but it's what I'd do.
- I'd then try to hire a local farmer to come in with a tractor and disc harrow to till & smooth the entire area. This would avoid him snagging any roots, and leave a nice smooth surface.
- I'd then seed it to grass (unless I wanted to till up part of it for a garden), work in the seed with a thatcher attachment behind my lawn tractor, and start watering it.
Sadly, unless you have a lot of farm equipment, or earth moving equipment, there are no easy shortcuts to this job. However, the end product will be worth the work.
If there's no rocks in this field, then a disc harrow would level it out very quickly, filling in the stump holes with the dirt in the field. You could use a box scraper then to grade and smooth it as desired.
I would not add any ammendments to the soil until you'd leveled and graded the field. If you need to add topsoil, then do it uniformly over the entire surface of the leveled/graded field and rake it in as needed.
A 25HP tractor and a 6'-8' wide double gang disc harrow would make short work of this project, probably not a couple hours to do.
You should be able to rent this type of tilling/landscaping equipment from a local rental yard. IF you can't rent a disc harrow, the box scraper will do the job, although not as quickly. If you don't want to do this yourself, a landscaping contractor would be able to do this.
I have rented a bulldozer twice. Both times I found the controls where very easy to learn. 3 days with a dozer would likely have all of your place graded and fairly smooth.
I have rented a bulldozer twice. Both times I found the controls where very easy to learn. 3 days with a dozer would likely have all of your place graded and fairly smooth.
LOL ... nothing like using a 10lb sledgehammer to swat a fly ...
seriously, a disc harrow and a small tractor will have a small area like this in shape in a couple of hours or less.
Three days is more than enough time for me to go through 100 acres with this small rig, and we've got a hard clay layer inches below the thin topsoil layer in our area. To expedite doing similar work in our fields in less than a day, we use a 120 HP diesel tractor and a 15' double-gang disc harrow ... this is commercial farming equipment on a very small scale, but much larger than landscaping size equipment which is appropriate for an acre or two parcel.
At this point, it might be time well spent for the OP to contact a landscaping company that has the equipment, knowledge, and operator to do the work on their site ... where they can come in and do the work quickly and efficiently for possibly not much more than the rental of the equipment (and the fuel cost) and the delivery and return of the equipment to the rental agency.
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