The best place for a lawn is in the center of the garden, an open space on the south side of the house, bathed in sun.
In two cases, drainage is necessary: with a standing groundwater close to the surface and with heavy clay soil. Then they prepare a special foundation for the future lawn, digging trenches up to 5 m deep on the site every 1 m and laying drainage pipes with a water collector along them. You can limit yourself to the device of a two-layer (15 cm each) drainage base: the lower one is made of broken brick, large gravel, the upper one is made of fine gravel with sand.
Step 1. Dig, clean
Digging deeper than usual (up to 30 cm) is carried out not with a shovel, but with a pitchfork, with a breakdown of large clods, a complete selection of pebbles, glass, wood residues, perennial grass roots. With the usual dominance of weeds, the selected site has to be dug several times, with an interval of a week or two. It is recommended not to weed, but to completely cut and remove the entire clogged layer of sod along with weeds, replacing it with a mixed sifted earth mixture.
The “Tornado” – a herbicide, a kind of reliable “chemical hoe”, is suitable for helpers. After spraying the leaves and stems with it on a clear day in the morning, the worst weeds die within 2 weeks. For the best effect, when preparing the solution, you just need to use the maximum recommended dose – 75 ml per 3 liters of water. To prevent the roots of weeds from reaching the lawn from adjacent paths and adjacent areas, it is also advisable to process them, again in a short period of time.
Step 2. Align, add, roll
All three operations are equally important to create the most leveled surface possible. On top of the leveled, but insufficiently fertile soil, a layer (10 cm) of loose sifted soil mixture of compost, leaf humus and sand or just garden fertile soil is poured. In clayey areas, the proportion of sand should be greater, and in sandy loamy areas – less.
You can tamp the soil with a special roller, a piece of a heavy turned log or with your own feet in shoes with a wide flat sole, simply walking back and forth in small steps. After rolling the surface, the soil is poured into sagging places, leveled with a rake. They also loosen the most superficial (3-5 cm) layer of soil – the bed for seeds.
After that, the plot is watered with water by sprinkling and kept under steam for a whole week to get rid of the weeds sprouting from the seeds remaining in the soil. Sprouts are removed with a hoe or reused “Tornado”.
After 2 weeks, a special granular fertilizer “Mikromix lawn” (30-50 g per sq. M, depending on the degree of soil fertility) is evenly distributed over the entire area and watered immediately. The paths around the lawn should be raised 4–5 cm.