Neil for Messicks here to bring you along on some of my weekend chores. I've been out here doing a little bit of work around my property, moving a little bit of soil around. We're going to show you the project that I've been working on here, personally. Some of the challenges that I ran into in doing it, and some of the operational techniques here with this equipment that's helped me get this done. This is the driveway here at my front yard. I've lived now at this property for about a year and we had gone through the construction process and I've done all of the prep and landscape work myself using, for the most part, my tractor. What we would've done here, would've been an area out here that I would've leveled off. I would've prepped for seed use. Saw all the videos on that. We had a stone driveway put in by the contractor that was then paved over.
Now, at this point, all the contractors left and as a person doing new construction, I've been really surprised how much work is left for me when everybody is gone, right? One of the things that I've had left here, that I'm not totally happy with the way that it came out is this Stony area here along the side of my driveway. I come on and off the driveway with my tractor or zero term mower. I get bumped around and stuff as I make this transition off. I don't particularly care how it looks. And I don't want to deal with it this way for the rest of my eternity here. Right? So what I'm working on is bringing over some top soil that I had dropped off. Filling in this area right here and smoothing it out and prepping this for seed to try to ease this transition.
So a couple things to think about here when you're using your loader. This is my top soil pile here that I had dropped off. This is from another construction site that I had a company come over and drop off here with a dump truck. Now, while this is top soil, I've been pretty surprised how much clay is in it. And it's packed up really hard. When you first come up to a pile like this, we all want our loaders to be able to run right into that pile and power the whole way through and come up with a full bucket of dirt. But when you've had a pile that's been sitting here for six months like this has, and it's full clay, it gets hard really quickly. Even with my tractor in low range, four wheel drive. When I come up here and push into the bottom of it, I'm not going to go through and be able to power right through this. And when I do, the spoils that I'm coming up with, come up really pretty clumpy. Now a much better technique that's been working better for me out here, is to take my bucket and first shave this pile off, break the chunks up, bring the soil down and then go into it and pick it up.
So if we just very simply curl the bucket around, come up to the face of the pile and use that front lip of your bucket to go through, break up the soil, break the pile up a little bit. You can see by doing this, you're going to make the soil a lot easier to scoop up. And we're also breaking up those larger quads that you would end up with in your loader buckets. So you can see here once we've brought this down, I can now take my tractor, come up to my pile of dirt and come up with a good, big heaping pile of dirt. You also noticed the bounce there that you got out of the loader. I've been playing and experimenting with having a hydraulic accumulator on my tractor. And this is one place that I really come to appreciate it... is when I come out with these heavy piles of dirt, I can let that loader drop down and the accumulator just sponges and takes all the shock out of my tractor. It doesn't bounce me around. So I've just been coming up here to the edge and then slowly coming along here and dropping two buckets along here to feather this out as I go. And then head back for some more.
So now with my pile of dirt over here, I come out with my trustee rake and start raking this pile of dirt out. And, you know, as much as I'd love to be able to do every job from the seat of my tractor, it seems like this is one thing here that just, there's no way getting around the hand work. Now, as I take the rake here and start to spread this out, I've got a little bit more soil than what I want or what I need rather, which is okay, because after this is done, this is going to settle out a little bit. So, mounting it up a little bit isn't a bad thing. But even with taking a little bit of time to face the front of that pile of dirt, you see I've got large clods and stuff in here of clay, and there's no way like this is not going to dry out. I'm not going to break this up with my rake. It's going to take a little bit more to go through and really get this smooth without me having to go through here and pick it out. So at this point, I think I can get this done a little bit easier by introducing another piece of equipment. So maybe this is where we have a little bit of benefit to having an equipment dealership and a rental fleet to pluck these things from when you need them. But it was going through here doing the hand work and running into some of the troubles with it that it seemed that bringing in another piece of equipment would really help us here.
Now you could do all these things with just your tractor more than likely. But there's a couple of things here that bringing in the SCL with this Harley Rake on the front really helps. This soil pulverizer here on the front is going to have a spinning drum with nubs on it. They're going to help us break up the soil in this pile before bringing it out to fill in our area over here. Usually you use one of these things for prepping grass seed, but I've come to really like it out here while I've been working, for coming into my pile and breaking up the clumps and stuff in here in order to bring over than a lot more smooth soil to be able to distribute into the areas that I'm trying to cover. It's helped me come in and take care of the rocks and the clods and that kind of stuff out here where I can go back and forth and rip around a little bit more without worrying about tearing up my lawn while I'm doing it. So now what I came to like with this was almost using this like a silage defacer, if you're familiar with how farmers go into a silage funk and shave off their silage before taking it out to their animals. I use this spinning drum right here to work down through the face of this and break up all of that dirt into small pieces.
I'm going to come over here now with my tractor to pick this up, but you could just as easily swap this attachment out for a bucket on the front of here if you're trying to work with just one piece of equipment. But I can even see right as I get in there, it almost looks like a big clod of mud. You could probably cast that thing into a clay brick and allowing this to go in here and work that soil up. Helps me then have this nice spoils to be able to take over to my area, to spread out. Now in the absence of one of these, a rototiller could also do very much the same thing, right? Yeah. You got to take some time to put another attachment on the front of your tractor, but being able to go back and forth and take that tiller working is soil up before you go try to drop it into a place that you just spread it out. It's going to do much the same thing.
So now with that work done, whether it's facing that pile of dirt by pulling it down with your loader bucket or using your tiller or power rake to come in and clean it up, you can see, I can pick that pile of dirt up a lot easier and if you watch here, when I dump my spoils out, rather than having big clumps, I have much finer soil now to work with. Now when I go back over here to dump this out, to rake it back into this area, or try to level it out, it's going to go in a lot nicer than if I just crash my tractor into the pile here and try to come away with a big full pile of dirt. It's worse sometimes slowing down, taking the time with the extra implement, working that pile of dirt a little bit more. It might take you a little bit more when you're doing your loader work. A little bit more time. But the resulting work that you're going to do when it comes to finishing is going to be a lot easier than if you just crash through the pile.
So now with our two piles here, side by side, you can see the difference by taking the time to go through there and break the soil up before I bring it over, I have something here that's a lot easier to rake out. Now, it's not perfect, but in a lot of cases, I really took the time to go through and pulverize all this before bringing it over here. I could probably rake this out and have it fairly level. Now the next step here is going to be to come along with the power rake and level this out a little bit, because I need to actually cut into the ground here a little bit to feather this out properly. Otherwise, I'm going to get a bit of a stair step. So we're going to bring over the SCL and come out here and level this out properly.
So now we're just going to work back and forth here, make a pass of three over top of this, both working up that soil that I dropped in here, but also stepping a little bit down into the grass. That's there currently just to break up that top level of soil a little bit so I can feather these two together okay. You can see there how quickly two bucket loads of dirt disappears when this thing starts running and working all of this together. So that's it. Come out here now, take a little bit of seed, sprinkle this around and rake it in to get some seed to soil contact. Put a little bit of water on it and watch it go. Now, couple of thoughts from out here doing this. Maybe a couple things that might help you and the projects you're doing.
It definitely has been to my benefit to slow down a little bit. I work on a pretty tight schedule when I actually get time to come out here and sit on my equipment and work. First, when I was going into that pile of dirt, scooping up, crashing into it and coming out with clods of dirt in that bucket, I wasn't working very efficiently. I was out here with that rake doing way too much rework by taking the time to take that loader bucket and facing the pile or even better taking the power rake here and breaking that soil up before bringing it out and putting it here, I'm coming up with a much nicer result a lot faster without as much raking, which is always good.
Gives you respect for the hand work that has to go into a project like this. When you go out and you have a commercial landscaper come out and price your project, might seem like they're just whipping around with their equipment to get everything done. But at the end of the day, whether you're mulching or you're doing seed prep like this, there's hand work that goes into any one of these jobs. It deserves to be compensated for. It's hard work.
