quote:

Their job entails determining whether or not a septic system design is ok for the environment. Ensuring that it doesn’t pollute ground water and water wells is all they really are concerned about. There might be someone there with personal experience with this matter, but no guarantees. It’ll be a shot in the dark, kinda similar to what I was hoping for when I created this thread.

Universities often have individuals that can address these concerns in some fashion. Environmental engineering I believe. Large corporations such as Dupont, Electic Power companies employ engineers with a high level of level of expertise in many areas. Give it a try. I would think if freezing occured there would be an environmental consequence as well. Good luck.

So the system is done and backfilled. New dirt brought in to cover the areas that needed it. It’s just a matter of raking it out and spreading out in some spots. That’s for where there’s new dirt at least.

Now, over most of the leech field is the soil that was dug up to install it. They backfilled it and then spread it out using a bobcat and most of it is really compacted. I know I need to loosen it up before I lay down seed, but how much do I need to loosen up? Inch or two would be good or do I need to shoot for more? What tools would be suggested? I can’t use a rototiller because I do not want to risk damaging the chambers that are buried. It’s only buried by 6 inches of backfill....so everything is going to have to be done by hand. I started last night and it damn near killed me to do what I was able to get done. So I’m looking for advice on how I can do this and how much soil I need to get loose.

Hard tine rake would be good to loosen the soil 1-2".... Loosen the soil, spread the seed, gently water it in, and cover with straw.

That's how I did mine in the past with success.

Andrew

Was your soil under the 1-2 inches of loose stuff pretty firm and compact? The grass roots able to take hold of it?

Go to your local rental store and take a look at one of their re-seeders. I really don't think those tines will go down more than a few inches so you should be OK. We used one when I planted our lawn and it worked great. Loosens the soil and lays down the seed all in one motion. There is a bit of a learning curve with it though.

quote:

Originally posted by Largefarva:
Was your soil under the 1-2 inches of loose stuff pretty firm and compact? The grass roots able to take hold of it?

Soil was compact to start with …. hard rake loosened up the first 1-2". Good lawn has grown in.

Andrew

Well I figured out what to do for my situation. Turns out that it’s just the very top layer that is compacted. Going it with a rake just wasn’t cutting it so I tried a shovel and it went in pretty easily and I was able to turn the dirt over that way. Wife is going behind me with a manual cultivator to break up the clumps my shoveling is doing. So instead of maybe an inch of loosened dirt like I ended last night with I redid that section and now have a good 3-4 inches in most spots of loosened dirt. So hopefully only another two or three more evenings and that area will be done...and then we will go over and smooth out where they brought in dirt and hopefully we will then be ready to start spreading seed.

So we got done with the prep work last night and this morning we spread a starter fertilizer and then a healthy coating of Scott’s sun and shade mix seed. Used three 20 lb bags....man that stuff is expensive. We then lightly raked in the seed with a regular yard rake. Unfortunately the seed blankets are too expensive and we have too much yard to cover (around 5000 square feet) so we can’t put anything to cover up the seeds.

We set up the sprinklers into 4 zones. Two of the zone are oscillating sprinklers and the other two are impact sprinklers allowed to go in a full 360 degree circle.

We watered about 15 minutes each zone while setting up and positioning earlier...but it was late morning by the time we got done and it looks like most of the moisture evaporated during the day. It was rather sunny and low humidity today, so the seeds didn’t get much moisture unfortunately.

Right now I’m watering for 30 minutes in each zone in hopes that a deeper watering will get better moisture in the soil for the seeds. I’ll follow up with the same early in the morning after we wake up (I’ll start it around 5am) and I’m thinking one more round like this tomorrow night. Then starting on Monday morning I’ll cut it back to around 20 minutes each zone morning and night.

Does this sound about right? Any advice anyone wants to offer? This is my first time starting a lawn from scratch so I’m learning as I go.

I did my lawn with a blown in seed/fertilizer/compost combination that was approximately 4-6 inches deep throughout. I have what could best be described as hard-pan ground underneath that.

Rule number one was to keep it moist at all times until a goodly percentage of the seed has sprouted. Then you can cut back to less frequent watering. But, those seeds need moisture above all else.

If it takes 15 minutes to do that...great. If it takes 30 minutes...do it. Just keep an eye on the ground. If it looks dry, it is.

Mine started sprouting in about 3-4 days and I had a good carpet in about 1 1/2 weeks.

If you can get water to it, you can get grass to grow on anything. A simple hand rake and seed will be more than enough. If you can't water enough it helps to add something on top (hay normally) to retain moisture, but overall your success is 100% on moisture.

That’s going to be the tricky part...keeping moisture on the seeds. For the life of me I cannot source straw in my area. If I could afford the straw blankets I would but we just put 8k into this septic system that we couldn’t afford in the first place. So my biggest battle is keeping moisture...going to difficult while I’m at work. The forecast is calling for cooler temperatures and some rain showers in the next couple of weeks but we all know how accurate forecasts are. My hope is that I can get a decent portion of the yard to start growing so I can concentrate on the spots that didn’t grow as the summer winds down. This was probably the worst time of the year to have to do this....I can blame the engineer who took over a month to design the system.

We did find a place that could sell us some straw but decided to hold off to see what happens with our yard. If we didn’t have any luck and needed to lay down more seed n September then we would get the straw. I’ve read that it can create quite the mess so we held off. But for an update with pics:

Here’s the day after we laid all the seed down


Here’s from the first morning where we could see the first new grass growing mainly just around some of the sprinklers (the stuff growing in the middle was areas between the drain field lines poking through)



One week point



Two week point



Three week point (yesterday morning)





I went out and laid some more seed down yesterday to hopefully fill in all the thin spots, which are hard to see from these pics because the grass is growing decently. I am also going to have to bring in a yard or two of dirt to fill in around the tank where it’s settled on two sides of it. Not too thrilled about that but oh well. At least my grass is coming in decently. Just need it to fill out so I can cut back on the watering and hopefully give the yard back to our dogs. It’s been hell for them not being able to run around back there the last three weeks. Figure another three weeks should do it.

You'll probably have to overseed a couple times and it might be a season or two before the lawn gets established. You should have no problems with winter, my tank is about 18" below grade and the deer love it in the winter. In Buffalo in the middle of January the green grass is often visible above my tank. The deer bed down at night and enjoy fresh greens most of the winter.

I see you have a lot of the wide blade bright green stuff. We have a ton right now after a month of little rain zonked the good grass.

I'll assume your contractor is experienced with septic systems. Have you expressed your concerns with him? No doubt he would be involved in fixing systems that are freezing and causing problems. To further investigate call an outfit that pumps septic they to would have the most direct experience. To be honest I have no idea why a local EPA type would pass on a design that would allow sewage to back up into the environment during a hard freeze.

As far your grass is concerned. Be careful about weed killers for the first year. Leave out the crabgrass preventer, especially if your thinking to fill seed the area. The stuff kills all germinating seeds not just crabgrass.

I contacted the engineer that designed our septic system to get his opinion and he said he’s been designing systems for 30 years and has never had a client call him about frozen pipes in that time. I also called a trusted septic maintenance company (we would have rather these guys do the install but we couldn’t get them soon enough) and they also said that there shouldn’t be any problems in the winter either. So we will see what happens this winter. I told the wife that she’s going to have to do her part to help make sure we don’t freeze up by taking longer hot showers. She says that she will if she must...the sacrifices we sometimes have to make.

As far as the wide blade stuff coming in...I believe it’s the fescue in the seed mix that I bought. I used Scott’s sun and shade mix for all of it. It was pretty cool to see the ryegrass coming up on day 5 like it said. Now I’m just hoping to start seeing some KBG coming up and help filling in.