The lawn has been sowed, yeahhhh

Today the lawn in front of the cottage has been sowed with Bermuda grass.

9 Trucks with good and fine soil, without any stones has been added on top of the very bad soil - the remains of the bad coal the mined here. The thickness of the new top layer is 15 cm, but we expect it to compact to around 10. We did not roll it, but for leveling it out as a nice smooth surface we used a heavy piece of steel which I dragged along in all directions, scraping off the higher bits and dropping it in the lower parts. Being less compact may perhaps speed up the rooting of the grass.

Leveling it out took almost 2 days and it's not an easy task. When I had roughly leveled it out it was still far from perfect when I measured the thickness of the layer. So I have been moving around the soil a lot. I remembered how they prepare clay tennis courts. They use a 150 wide flat rake, so I made one from aluminum tubes and this works really well. Again, you need to move it many times in all directions in order to get it shaped smoothly. In fact it's the same technique as plastering a wall.

The result looks spectacular, although you have to imagine the grass.

The sprinkler system is working fine, although I may need to make some adjustments to the duration. It must be kept wet at all times, so I used the maximum number of start times of the controller. Program A has 4 start times, which I use for the daytime, when the sun is shining, so the duration is set longer. Program B has also 4 start times, which are being activated during the night with shorter sprinkle times.

Now it's keeping Borre and the chickens out of the lawn and wait for the grass to come up, which takes 5 to 14 days. I guess it will be closer to 5 days as the weather conditions are almost ideal (day temperature between 25 - 32 / night temperature around 20).