An artificial lawn provides easy maintenance. So why shouldn’t the install be easy too? When you know the right tips, tools, and supplies, the job goes faster and smoother. Check out these 3 artificial lawn supplies to make your install go easier.
Organic Weed Killer
Often, people replace natural turf with an artificial lawn because the grass just won’t grow. But when it comes time to take that “dead” grass out, you find out it’s hardier than you think.
Plan your project and project timeline carefully. And include treating the existing grass with an organic weed killer about 2 weeks before you plan to start site prep. Spray with the right weed killer and when you start site prep, the vegetation will come out easier.
Why Organic?
Just because you want to kill the grass doesn’t mean you want to kill everything else in the area. An organic broadleaf, post-emergent weed killer kills the grass and not your trees or cats. You kill safely without a toxic chemical residue.
Products like Dr. Kircherner’s Natural Weed & Grass Killer kill with salt and vinegar. Sounds like a great potato chip combination, but they are both deadly to grass.
Plate Compactor
After the grass comes out, you’ll check drainage, and then start preparing the substrate.
This can be really back-breaking work.
Or you can plan ahead and include in the budget a plate compactor rental.
Most of the big box stores rent heavy tools. And since you won’t need the compactor all day, it probably won’t cost you more than $50 bucks or so. And it’s well worth it when you consider the alternative.
Do you want to walk behind this:
Or do you want to spend hours manually tamping the sand and gravel down flat with this:
Before you answer, keep in mind that the manual tamper weighs 28 pounds. Is that plate compactor rental starting to look like the best $50 you might spend? If it saves on backbreaking labor, it’s worth it.
Turf Nails Hold Wonder Edge in Place
Wonder Edge
And speaking of avoiding back-breaking labor, ditch the bender board. If a website tells you to install a bender board as your edging, click away. Click fast.
Bender board edging requires digging a deep trench to properly install the material. Hard and rocky soil make a hard job even harder. And if you don’t get the trench deep enough, the edging creeps, and the artificial turf install fails.
Wonder Edge artificial turf border requires no digging and no trenching. Installing Wonder Edge is the easiest part of the job. Just nail it in place with your turf nails. Wonder Edge goes down before the artificial turf.
Smooth lines and a clean finish. Easy too.
Artificial Lawn Supplies Green and Not Grief
The goal of your artificial lawn is to get easy-care green without all that grief. And save a little green on irrigation and fertilization.
Get the right plan and the right supplies and even a DIY’er can install an artificial lawn.
