Rolling out the ruts!

I have no idea if this is possible or completely stupid or what...

I've made a pretty decent wreck of my yard via driving the backhoe around. I've got ruts galore and my yard is literally my yard, covered in grass that'd be nice to keep in decent shape. When I go to mow, with my beefy, but still smallish, yard tractor, a Husqvarna GTH52XLS, I often have to go very slow over the ruts or it'll break me in pieces. I wouldn't mind having a zero-turn but the benefit of speed with one would currently be lost due to all the bumpiness.

All that being said I don't think that a standard yard roller will be anywhere close to heavy enough to roll smooth the ruts I have. I could drag something or borrow a neighbors tractor and drag it but grass seed is too expensive to buy my whole yard's worth if I were to yank it all up with a drag.

I'm not sure what made me think of it but would it be a terrible idea to rent a real roller, like this or this? I don't know how well they do on unflat (hillyish, nothing major but not level either) terrain? Do you think it would work? Are there better options?

I was thinking of maybe attempting to fabricate a 2 55 gallon drum roller also, but I'm not real sure that'd work either. I don't really plan to stop using the backhoe in the yard so maybe this is all a dumb question but I'm getting to a point where I think I can be more precise about where my ruts end up.

The padfoot and smooth drum roller will not do what you want it to do. A roller compacts the soil directly underneath it, so if the surface is rough before compacting it will still be rough afterwards just compacted. The soil would have to be wet enough to manipulate which would rut under the weight of the roller.

Rollers like this don't work like a rolling pin and the soil doesn't work like dough. Just like tailgating stone from a dump truck, it won't fill the pothole just give an even coat of stone over the surface.

Well, malarkey. I guess this doesn't surprise me but I was hoping for an easyish (even if expensive!) solution.

Is sand readily available in your area? You can use sand to fill in the ruts overtime. A bonus is if you have heavy clay soils the sand will help the grass grow.

Ya know, I didn't think about that... That could work and is much easier to use as a fill than random dirt.

probably not an option for you but what I use on the sports field where I work is an aeravator. It loosens up the top 6 inches then go over it with a roller and its nice and flat

https://www.turf-care.com/new-models/1st-products-2018-aera-vator-c4179130b

Top dress with sand or sandy loam topsoil. Then rig up a drag from old chain link fence or some type of steel beam or angle. Pull the drag over everything to smooth out the top dressing material. Some places have nice cheap mulch/ soil available at the city landfill. They make it out of ground up wood composted with treated solids. Great nitrogen content.

A small disc does a decent job on smoothing ruts and my grass still seems to grow back to fast in them areas. A bed spring drag smooths out the top and seems to spread the grass around to take root again.

Was going to post about top dressing. ^
Nothing you can do to prevent this short of keeping the backhoe off the lawn
You equipment guys would have yard envy here. I have that little bit of soil that is in the woods, and serious glacial till underneath. i dozed and rolled it and put just a skiff of screened soil on it.
Still holds grass, but it holds a loaded dump truck too

old-iron-habit said:

A small disc does a decent job on smoothing ruts and my grass still seems to grow back to fast in them areas. A bed spring drag smooths out the top and seems to spread the grass around to take root again.

Click to expand...

Was thinking same, need to break up the compacted ruts and get the soil back to workable soft.

Thanks guys, I'll see if I can't borrow "N"s tractor sometime, I think he's get a discer too!

A Harley rake is the perfect machine. They are expensive to buy, I don't know if they can be rented. They make one for a skid steer, another three point hitch for a tractor.

Another thought is a power tamper. Making ruts means you squished the soil to the side, up under the sod each side of the rut. Might a walk behind tamper pound down the higher soil beside?

I saw a guy spread a tandem load of sand on his lawn, then drag one of those chain drags for horse arenas around using a four wheeler.

Ooh! I like the idea of a power tamper!

In my area there are landscapers with harley rakes. I hired one to do a large area in my yard and hydro-seed it.
He did an awesome job.
But you said that you don't want to buy any grass seed.
How deep are the ruts ?
I have a 5 foot section of heavy wall pipe filled with concrete. It is the basis of a home made lawn roller I made.
I pull it 4 or 5 times a season to smooth out my lawn. It does a pretty fair job. I pull it while I am mowing.
I too have rutted my lawn with my T/L/B. It takes two years of winter freezes and the help of the roller to get the soil surface back to normal.
Sunbelt Rentals and some other rental company's have harley rakes, if you have a machine to put them on.
https://www.sunbeltrentals.com/equipment/detail/1403/0510014/harley-power-rake-landscape-tractor/

A standard lawn roller is roughly barrel shaped and filled with water to be towed behind a lawn tractor in the spring when the ground is soft and lumpy from the frost. That would help some, but the ground would have to be saturated to work the best. You will not COMPACT saturated ground with a lawn tractor and roller, the water fills the spaces so it would have to press the water out of the soil to compact, it will only smooth the surface if it's saturated. You could do the same thing with a plate compactor, especially if you put a bigger plate on it. Could rent a "self propelled" one. Don't try a jumping jack, just don't

Thanks @Tinkerer the harley rake looks interesting and probably pretty destructive and nothing to run it with at my place, paying someone to do it isn't out of the question eventually.

I'm thinking of going the cheap, home made roller route, just to try, as I think that could be a relatively inexpensive venture. @Delmer , maybe 2 55 gallon drums welded together and filled with gravel, water, or concrete? I don't know what it'd take to pull such a thing. My ruts, for the most part are only a few inches deep, mostly. Maybe 5" for the deep ones. It just makes a rough go on the mower and when I'm tearing around the yard on the go-kart.

I also need to see what "N" has laying around his yard. He lent me his tractor and a blade for my roller coaster driveway and even with my inexperience in driving the tractor and operating the blade it worked pretty well. I now understand the benefit of angled blades when trying to smooth out some gravel. Anyway, he's told me anytime I need to borrow anything he has that I'm welcome to it. He likely has something useful there, even if I have to do some seeding.

The other part that kind of sucks is I'm still planning to work on making my little pond hold water properly and be what I want it to be and with that will inevitably be more yard destruction...

aighead;
Keep in mind that repeated freezing and thawing will really help the lawn to self heal with the help of a roller.
I have witnessed it ever since I started driving my T/L/B on my lawn.
55 gallon barrel walls are kinda thin to use for a roller. If the lawn is really soft you may only be able to partially fill the barrel.
I rented a tandem vibratory roller a couple of years ago and it did a decent job. It had 48 inch wide drums.
When I worked for an asphalt paving company we used them for driveway approaches.
If the bigger asphalt break down rollers weren't so expensive to rent I would have used one of them.