I got Caught taking Black Dirt and he was PISSED!

good morning good evening good afternoon you guys we are up at shangri-la and we got a lot of work to do we got zach in the background getting stuff prepped and ready for us and we're going to be walking you through how the pros prep a yard but we're also going to be teaching you tips and tricks that if you're a homeowner you can duplicate the same results that we use with the regular equipment you can buy from a big box store that we use on a professional level we're going to be talking about how you analyze your soil to make sure that you're amending it properly before you start the grass seed because preparation is 99 of the success of your lawn but we're also going to be dispelling some of those myths that are out there and everybody is saying and talking about what you do want to do and what you don't want to do but we don't want to waste any more time so let's dive right into today's video now before we can plant a lawn we've got to look at what we've got going on on the earth now in this case we've got sandy soils and sandy soils whether you have sandy soils or clay based soils one of the amendment procedures is almost identical you need to have organic material to grow a lawn let me just show you what i'm talking about see this soil right here this is black dirt and if we look straight over we can kind of do a compare and contrast this is what we want let's dispel the first myth everybody says we want four inches of black dirt let's talk about what that actually means because if you just think that you want four inches of black dirt what you may get is soil stratification and what that actually means is if you have soil like this and you want to try to fix it you don't want to just put black dirt slap it straight on top of it because you're going to get layers in the soil and that black dirt is not the most ideal compound for growing grass ideally what grass wants is they want to have enough re-draining material that it doesn't trap moisture for too long but enough clay binder that it has enough time to uptake the water and the nutrients out of the water before it drains away so if you have a high clay soil you've got to amend it using the same materials black dirt but you've got to be you got to take an extra step and you've got to be extra cautious about how you use that black dirt the reason i say that is if you have clay and you put four inches of black dirt on the top of the clay and then it's just clay that those roots of the grass is going to try to grow through that black dirt and it'll hit that clay and it'll be like hitting a brick wall let me just kind of let me let me break this down for you a little bit better here all right so with four inches of black dirt and clay soil the roots will grow through it and as soon as it hits that clay the roots will grow sideways instead of being able to penetrate that clay with the sandy soil the roots tend to penetrate a little bit easier and grow a little bit more but you've got to do one thing for both sandy and clay based soils and you got to take that four inches that myth of four inches of dirt and you've got to incorporate it into the subsoil below it we don't want any soil stratification at all we want to have a very nice even gradient of soil from the top down to about the the depth of the root zone depending on the type of grass you're growing which will be approximately six inches we're going to also next look at a couple different conditions and start to look at what kind of seeds we need for the different kinds of conditions we may encounter so let's dive into that right now so as we look at this tree we want to grow grass below it but you can see what's already happening this is a shady area and not all grass seeds are created equal you want to be able to identify the kind of grass seed for the kind of conditions you have and one of the biggest things that you need to look for is do you have sun do you have partial shade if you have a combination of both don't be afraid to get two different kinds of grass seeds in fact today you're gonna see us using two different kinds of grass seeds as well in an area like this i'm gonna go heavier on the shade mixture but i'm also going to throw some sun mixture into it as well now up in the upper part of the yard it's it's more heavily aligned toward a sunny mixture of grass seed and so i'm going to flip-flop that recipe i'm going to be creating my own unique blend for my own unique conditions and once you guys start to look at what you have in your lawn you may want to grab a bag over here and you may want to grab a bag over there and the next thing we want to do is dispel a few myths about the kind of grass seeds you get so let's go look at two different kinds of grass seeds and talk about that right now you know what before we grab the grassy bag one of the things that i do want to bring up is i want to dispel the myth of chemicals i don't use any chemicals chemicals will help your yard get better results faster but if you have pets animals kids and you don't have a high level of comfort of having them playing different kinds of chemicals you may want to think twice about creating a yard that requires chemicals and you may want to look at the fact that you can achieve almost the same results with your yard by the type of materials that you grow the yard with you're growing medium and what i mean is how are you going to amend your soils and the type of material that you're using to amend your soils we're going to also be discussing that in a moment but i promise you we were going to talk about grass seed so let's go do that next hey zach just set it right down here yeah please and thank you okay you guys one of the things i want to talk about is the kind of grass seed that you pick for your project we have two different grass seeds going on here and we're going to be using both grass seeds in today's video the thing i want you to ignore is the fancy names they're going to come up the fancier the name the more they're going to charge you for it it's the same thing it's the same damn thing now one of the most absolute most important steps that we can take is how we amend the sub soil we're going to use the same material and we're going to use the same procedure but we're going to do it slightly differently let me discuss what i'm talking about we always want to have organic material on the top that's the growing medium for for your grass but when we have a sandy soil we need to incorporate that in to that sandy layer but a sandy soil typically is a little bit more forgiving so if you have sandy soil lucky you because the roots can penetrate through the sand it'll take the nutrients out of the top layer the top soil that you bring in and it this roots will allow it to penetrate and grow down now if you have a clay based soil you can bring in the same material but if you're heavy in clay you may want to amend your black dirt and add sand into your black dirt and then you need to till everything together you need to incorporate instead of having soil stratification and layering you need to incorporate that black dirt into the subsoil as deep as you can possibly go and what i mean is we don't we're not planting a garden not two feet as deep as you can go six inches eight inches is probably getting a little bit deep you don't have to worry if you can hit six or eight inches you're good to go if you can only hit the top four inches that should be the minimum that you incorporate the black dirt into the subsoil but we do want to stress that the deeper you can go up to eight inches is probably ideal you can go too deep though because if you go up two foot one foot or two foot your soil is gonna get soft and it's gonna be unlevel and you're gonna have un you're gonna have differential settlement in your yard down the road and there's no benefit to tilling in two feet of topsoil into the upper layer in fact you can then dilute your topsoil and i know that's a lot of words and i'm trying to spit it all out as fast as i can for you guys so that you can grab it without me blathering on forever and ever but right now we're just going to go over across to the farm and we're going to grab some compost and we're going to show you the material we're using it's going to be legitimately the blackest stuff that we can find right off from the farm we're not going to go buy special pulverized screen material we don't care about the fancy names of the material we're looking at what is it made of what's in it how does it work but before we do that there's something i want to talk to you about and that's jobber jobber is a new sponsor of the channel and i look really long and hard before i take on any channel sponsors and jobber is a software system that i firmly believe can help contractors like you that if you're like me a smaller business and you don't need a really complicated expensive software system jobber is ideal it simplifies your life and it helps you get right to work and what i love about jobber is it's intuitive and easy the learning curve is very small on this and the getting to work curve is very high what i mean is once you sign up for jobber you can tailor the software program to the needs of your company and you can tailor the price range to where your budget fits as well and then once you get dive right into it it'll help you organize your cruise it'll help you organize your jobs it'll help you schedule everything out tim and i started to use jawbread we've already got blaine on boarded onto it he's one of our project foremans and alex is on boarded on to it and this was after a 30-minute phone call with the guys from jobber we were up and we were running and i'm going to tell you right now if you're a small to medium-sized business they also do a lot of great work out in the community they have a program called jobber grants where every year they they give out grants they don't give out loans this is free money to small business owners up to fifteen thousand dollars you just fill out an application tell them what you're doing how you're working and they go through them all and it's just a grant program they do so many good things just for the community and absolutely love it so go check them out what is what is zach up to [Music] look at him cheating all right well while we get this ready we're going to get ready to head over to the farm and that's where we're going to see you next we're going to show you the material we're pulling up to do our job today we're going to show you how we incorporate it into the sub base now if you enjoy videos like this a thumbs up goes a long way and a comment goes a long way but [Music] all right so let's go check out what we got cooking on the farm the reason i'm showing you this soil is because we're not using fancy high-end soils what we're actually using right here is a combination of hay we got some looks like we got some really old manure right i'd say yeah yep oh i'd rather be splattered in animal species than we used to play frisbee with these things chucking them at each other when we were kids so i'm not worried about a little bit of fresh flames so much between you and chris [Laughter] so this material actually is a is it's amazing material came fresh right out of the right out of the uh the farm um and we've been composting it for a year so this is high in organic material high in organic compound really basically what i want to show you is you don't need fancy material but if you do have clay soils back where you're at you want to make sure that you have enough free draining material in it so that when you grab it it doesn't hold together like a wad of clay the last thing you want to do is put black clay on top of brown clay so if you have clay soils you want to have enough organic material in it that you can see how nice light and fluffy this is just beautiful material this is just gorgeous stuff and it pulverizes and this is going to help loosen up any clay soil so if this is going on clay it's perfect it's going on sand it's still perfect let's get a load on and then let's uh let's go get that brought worked into the subsoil you got more college i'm going to go harvest more i'm sorry the barns are clean i i haven't cleaned the barns for two years you tell me you don't have any more no cows there in two years there was cows here last year uncle tom chris there's family yeah they walked in there they walked out in the bathroom there's no there at all all right well that's all i need is one load you tell me i can't go harvest more dirt from around here for you well you're going to have to push it up in a pile there because i'm going to eat these for my pots or my tomatoes well i'm gonna push it up in a pile for you i plan on bringing a loader out here and getting you a nice big fat another load where the hell do you get this trailer that's uh that's the ants trailer i was gonna harvest you some dirt next weekend and bring it over to your house too do you still want that or no who's your favorite nephew who's your favorite nephew uncle tom who's your favorite nephew uncle tom he's dead no i ain't gonna take all your black dirt and i'm planning on getting you some more i'm gonna pull it out of the barn over there push this here back up in the pile for me so i can if i can go there and shovel it in my tubs i gotta get all them tub swole so well how about i how about i have those tubs set to the side and i fill them up for do you want to do that at the house how do you want to do it well i don't know i can't can't lift them then my shoulder is bad okay and i can't lift nothing like a shovel but you know okay i mean if you're just putting this on your yard for long i'm putting one load on for that where that i took that well out oh you got more than enough there already so okay all right uncle tom thanks for yelling at me well god damn somebody got straightened out push this back this way now okay uncle tom according to uncle tom i'm stealing black dirt but we both own the farm equally and i was the one that put it there in the first place maybe some of you guys remember a couple years back where we took the asb into that upper pasture and it started to thunderstorm on us well we were collecting all the hay and the horse crap out of there and this is where this compost pile came from and since then i've been turning it over for the last two years to turn it into something that both he and i could use so sometimes uncle tom just forgets things all right zach so i'm gonna start out and i'm just gonna try to let just an equal amount out but may go a little heavier over here i want to save a little bit for down underneath that tree though as well with a sandy soil actually less can be more it's one of those deals where you don't need a ton ton all right now i'm gonna pull over and move over one swath so this trailer actually comes with a remote controller and what i'm doing is using that to help me lay this black dirt out in the exact spots where i feel like i need to have it since it's a sunnier location we want to have more organic material in the sunnier it is the more organic material you want also high points in your yard that's another thing to note if you have a high point or a hill top of a hill you're going to want to add more black dirt than a low point so how much material you spread i'm going to come in a little bit come in a little bit yup how much material you spread will kind of depend on the conditions that you're dealing with in your area all right so let's and i'm in i'm stuck four wheeled come on four-wheel drive beauty part is i was able to control that entire process right from inside the cab i love this trailer you guys love this freaking trailer not sure it's gonna go to my cruise is that wrong is that wrong of me all right hopefully you guys will be able to hear me in the skid loader as i'm grading this out but i'm going to be using two different machines for two different functions to get this dirt to the point where i feel comfortable before i seed it i'm going to be hopping in the skid loader and using this to grade this dirt out and that basically all i'm doing at this point is getting the dirt where i want it to go as much as i want it to go but that's going to lead to soil stratification so if i just use this this is going to compact the dirt too much it's going to come back this black dirt and it's going to stratify it i'm legitimately at this point just layering the black dirt this is the wrong thing to do but i have a solution that comes up next see it's not deep deep deep we need but we do need to incorporate this black material into that sand below it that's where the myth of four inches actually comes into play and becomes accurate because you want the top four inches loosened up but you don't want four inches of black dirt you want four inches of organic material in the you want organic material all the way through the top four inches i got some chunky chunks there i got to break that up break it up or just get rid of it it doesn't want to break i don't know what that even is that might be a solid chunk of hay or something [Music] yeah that's pure a [Music] all right we won't worry about that we'll break that up just by finessing the rest of the dirt around oops hydraulics are a bit stiff in this one so at this point it's more of a concentration of trying to get the dirt where i need it and then i incorporate it [Music] okay here we go all right you guys i want to show you what exactly this next step is about show them the bucket so this next step isn't about grading it's about tilling and that bar on the back is going to incorporate all of the soil together and that's going to keep the soil from stratifying and this is the this is the step that's the most important now if you don't have a hydra bucket don't worry you don't need one to do this if you do have a hydra bucket well congratulations your life just got a whole lot easier so what we used to do in the in the days before we had the hydra bucket was break it we would hand rake the two soils together so you can see how that's just doing a great job it does do some finish grading well it does a lot of finished grading but the most important step is it's bringing everything back together it's incorporating everything together again so that upper layer and that lower lower layer instead of being stratified as being mixed together [Laughter] [Music] and this is how you keep your soil from getting too compacted and this is where why you don't need four inches of pure black dirt but you do got to get that black dirt down to the four inch mark this is the step that's going to really make a big difference in the overall success long-term success of your lawn because this step helps loosen up and bring that black dirt down so the roots of the grass can grow all the way down [Music] come from the other side too zach [Music] [Laughter] so you may notice that some of that sand is working its way up to the top that's what we want that's telling me that the black dirt is working its way down to the bottom it's not a bad thing that's a good thing all good it's all good and again you can just do this simply with a rake all right guys i think the point with that was to show that even with old farm crap you can make a great seed bed for grass with the proper preparation and let's just take a look at what we got here so you see how we've just brought this all together so that the it's not just pure black dirt anymore and then a layer of sand it's all incorporated together and you can do that just with a hand rake as well but you got to want to make sure that you just get that nice loose fluffy bed for that grass to just start to pop now the next thing we've got to do is we've got to spread the grass seed and there's a couple do's and don'ts with that as well [Music] so [Music] so [Music] all right you…