Raking a lawn

session savage

I had my lawn rotavated the other day and I started raking it yesterday. I got one section done no bother but the large lawn seems to have 40% stones.
The top soil itself is pretty shallow in places and I'm a bit concerned about raking it too much as one spot where I tried to rake all the stones out got me down to the slig bedrock underneath the topsoil.
If I just raked out the larger stones could I just roll it. I'm not too concerned with getting a show winning finish, just something I can drive a ride on mower around on.

This is the lawn





This is a close up of the amount of stones






Any advice??
Thanks

bbam

I sowed our front garden last autumn and have just done our rear garden now...
WE only picked stones larger than fist size, about an hour on each for two of us.

Our site is 1.2acres so anything else would be impracticle

Rolled with agricultural ground roller and then spread seed..

Spot treated any weeds that came up, one area had alot of docks but they are gone now

Really happy with result, ride-on runs good on it and I only cut at setting 5 out of 7 height..

I would qualify its a "garden" rather than lawn as we're not after billiard table job, but people are commenting on how well it looks...

King Mallie

I would roll it with a farmer land roller, make sure roller is only half full or else it would be too heavy. That will drive down all the stones and should be sound after that.:rolleyes:

lalorm

That's a large area. What I would do, and this works, is pick any large stones up and remove them. the grould looks nice and level so not much to do to get it really flat. Compaction is what you need to push and keep the stones down. But only lightly compact the soil. I do this by walking over it lightly (only once) and then rake over the surface lightly with a fan shaped rake. that should be enough to get the ground ready. However, if you feel there are too many stones, you could look at getting some topsoil to cover the ground and then lightly compact the soil and rake like mentioned above. Then seed. That's what I did for a neighbour that wanted to reseed his lawn. Turned out great. Now he has a better lawn than me!!:) You can buy topsoil which is already mixed with organic material for around 60 euro a tone, so it's not cheap and for a lawn the size of your one I would just sow the seed on the soil you have. The key is to ensure that the soil is lightly compacted and finely raked on top, otherwise you will notice hollows forming after the soil compacts by itself over time.