Landscaping your yard can be quite expensive, especially when you’re hiring professionals to do it for you. It is true that professionals do a phenomenal job of transforming your yard but not everyone is willing to spend an enormous budget on landscaping. This is why most people just prefer to rent out machinery to landscape their own yards.
A lot of gardeners have recently been asking about how to regrade the yard by hand. If you’re also on a low budget and can’t afford to rent out a Bobcat or a general contractor, then the following method should help.
How To Regrade Yard By Hand?
1. Use a Rake
Even if you don’t have access to heavy machinery, borrowing a tiller might be one of the easiest methods to regrade the yard by hand. However, the regrading project can still be executed even if you don’t have a tiller for your yard. In this situation, all you need is to rake and identify the high spots and low spots in the yard. Point down the uneven spots on a sheet of paper and then use a string level to identify the slope of your yard.
Once the slope has been identified, and you have a mental picture of the high and low spots in your yard, all you have to do is to use the rake to break down the high spots and fill in the dirt into the low spots. Having a leveling rake makes it easier to regrade the lawn after it has been tilled. However, it is still possible to regrade the lawn with a rake when the soil is relatively harder. You will just have to put more effort into this project.
2. Use a Shovel
If you can’t access a tiller to regrade the lawn, then using a shover along with a rake might be a better option. Depending upon the hardness of the soil, it can be quite challenging to break down the high spots in your garden. So, you can use a shovel to dig into the high sections and remove the soil from these parts.
After that, you can use the excess soil from the high sections to fill in the bumps and the lower sections near the foundation of your home. Ideally, you won’t have to purchase any extra topsoil, but if the magnitude of unevenness is high, then you will have to spend some money on topsoil.
3. Fill Low Spots with Topsoil
This method is relatively expensive as you will have to buy a lot of topsoil bags from the market. However, filling in the low spots with topsoil is one of the easiest methods that you can use to regrade the yard by hand. Even though you will still have to break down the high sections, it becomes quite easy to manage the regrading project when you have excess topsoil available.
Depending upon the current situation of your yard, you can use any one of these methods for the regrading project. You should also seek help from neighbors or family members for regarding the yard, as this project can be quite demanding when you don’t have heavy machinery available.