Tips on How to Level Rough Ground by Hand
Having a beautiful yard takes a great deal of work. If you have ever tried to level rough ground by hand in order to make your yard both more visually appealing and easier to walk through without falling flat on your face, you know how difficult a task this can be. In addition, it isn’t always possible to get your hands on a Bobcat or some other piece of equipment in order to level your yard. As such, you are sometimes forced to level it by hand. This might feel like an overwhelming task, but rest assured that it is possible to level your yard by hand. It all starts with following a few basic tips that can make the process easier and more efficient. It might seem frustrating at first, but it’s the fastest way to get to your goal of having a beautiful yard if you are forced to level off the grounds without any special equipment. Check out the tips listed below to make the job go as quickly as possible.
Remove Obstacles
If you need to level the ground in your yard, the first thing you will have to do is remove everything that could potentially get in your way. That means removing water hoses, plants, bird baths, and anything else that could potentially complicate matters for you when you start the process of leveling the ground. In short, if it’s something that could get in your way and it’s possible for you to move it without giving yourself a hernia, go ahead and get it out of the area until you have leveled the yard. Once you are finished, you can always bring it back. On the other hand, if you’re talking about something that is either so big or so heavy that you could potentially hurt yourself by trying to move it, it’s probably best to work around it. That said, the process is likely to go much more quickly if you don’t have a lot of these types of things that you have to work around in the first place. This is not a situation that requires weeding the garden or taking on tasks like that as these issues can be easily removed during the process of leveling.
Know Where You Want to Work
This might sound like it should go without explaining, but you would be surprised how many people decide to level the ground in their yard, only to become confused about where they should start and stop their work. If you need to level the ground in your yard by hand, you would be doing yourself a favor to stake the area off so you know exactly where you need to work. The best way to do this is to get someone to help you so that you can drive stakes into the ground and then wrap string around those stakes in order to create a perimeter. It’s also crucial that you ensure that your lines are straight during this process. Otherwise, you are likely to have a yard that looks uneven because it goes at all angles instead of making a perfect square. Staking the area off not only gives you a very clear idea of where the work needs to be done, but also provides you with your starting and stopping points. Last but not least, it’s a great way to keep yourself in check when it comes to knowing exactly how much of that yard you plan on leveling off by hand. It’s easy to get it in your head that you can level a lot more ground than you can realistically take care of by hand. Staking everything off gives you an opportunity to take a step back and look at it in order to decide if this is really a project that you want to tackle by hand or if you want to downsize things in order to keep whatever sanity you might potentially have left.
Break Up the Ground
Once you have everything ready to go, break up the ground with a hoe. This is crucial, especially if you live in a rather arid climate where the ground has a tendency to be harder than in some other areas. It isn’t going to do any good to start shoveling with the intent of removing some soil if it feels more like you are pile driving into concrete than anything else. Use the hoe to break up the ground and then use a shovel to remove large amounts of soil as needed. Be careful not to create a larger problem than you already have by getting carried away with the shovel. It’s easy to end up with all kinds of peaks and valleys in your yard that come as a direct result of getting overzealous with the shovel in some areas and not being ambitious enough with it in others.
Use a Finishing Touch
If you genuinely want your yard to be more level, you will remove excess soil as needed and then as your last step, use a rake to blend everything together and make sure that you haven’t forgotten anything that needs to be leveled off. Of course, it’s also important to haul off the excess soil that you removed unless you needed to use it to fill in other areas. Once you have everything raked and smoothed out, you can then remove the stakes and begin moving all of the items that you removed at the beginning of the process back into their desired locations. As you can see, it is possible to level your yard by hand. You don’t have to invest in expensive equipment in order to get the job done. As long as you are willing to put in the time and the effort required to do it by hand, it’s a goal that is very much attainable. You might not be able to do the entire project in a day, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t do it over the course of several days or even a couple of weeks. It all depends on how big your particular project is and how much effort needs to be put into getting it leveled off in the first place. The next project involves figure out how to plant, flower, and landscape your new yard.
