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Photo Credit: ©2000 Dolezal Publishing/Reed Estabrook

Large areas of turf should be seeded with a drop spreader. Its flow adjustment should be set to deliver seed evenly at the coverage rate recommended on the seed package.

There are lots of steps to installing the lawn of your dreams, and skipping any can turn your dream into a nightmare. So once you’ve leveled and raked your lawn bed, don’t follow temptation and start installing the lawn itself. If you’ve machine-tilled your soil, simply leveling and raking it smooth doesn’t guarantee a flat, smooth lawn surface no matter how level it appears to the eye.

You see, not only is tilling great for incorporating amendments to ensure your soil will nurture the type of lawn you’ve chosen, it blends a good deal of air below the soil’s surface. If you install a new lawn at this point, the first watering will cause your soil to settle into the air pockets below the surface. This can leave you with a lumpy, bumpy lawn.

Aside from wreaking havoc with your croquet game, this bumpiness can be a particular problem if you’ve seeded your lawn. The seeds will tend to wash down from the high spots and settle into the low ones to create a patchy growth pattern. If you put down sod, an uneven lawn surface may cause the turf to lose contact with the soil surface in spots. And without that contact, sod in those areas will almost surely wilt, dry up, turn brown and die.

To ensure a compact, flat lawn, roll your lawn bed with a water-filled roller after leveling and raking. It’s important to roll as you would mow: first in one direction, up and back – then perpendicular to your original direction, in a cross-hatch pattern. After rolling, take a good hard look at the bed. Use a spirit level or a long, straight-edged board to point out high and low spots. Fill in any low areas with extra soil and roll over them again to compact the spots until they’re firm.

For extra insurance, you may want to topcoat your lawn bed as well. Topcoating involves spreading a thin layer of subsurface mulch (no deeper than 1 inch) across the top of the bed and leveling it out until it’s dispersed uniformly. This mulch can be plain sand (used for most putting greens), which will yield the flattest surface. Or it can be a mix similar to potting soil, composed of organic material mixed with sand. Once you’ve spread your topcoat down, raked it, then smoothed it level (using the back of a rake head), it’s time to roll the bed firm.