Healthy Top Dirt For Lawn Grass

[doglover]

Howdy Y'all,

I have already brought in sand to raise the land around our house and the house is completed. After our fence is finished I want to lay sod for a nice healthy lawn. My wife tells me that sand mixed with buffalo manure is all they use in the rice fields and that's all we need. We tried this before on our old house and the grass health is only so-so. I figure black dirt would be much better to bring in as a top soil. We already brought a little in for our flower bed and most of the flowers died. The black dirt we bought was quite clumpy.

So what is your opinion? What should we use? And where do we find it? We live outside of Kalasin. Thanks for your opinions.

[pothai]

How many SQM. We used the same as you with the manure but that was awful and creted endless hours of weeding. About 9 months of hard work and now only ok. The other smaller areas of grass we have just used the bags you can buy at the garden shop...100 baht/7 bags....not the cheapest way but it seems to be better....also once the grass has taken get the white pellets, sprinkle them over and water in..the grass does go a little brown in places at first but after a week or so it really gets thicker and greener...they cost 20Baht in a simple polythene bag...dont put too much on

[doglover]

How many SQM. We used the same as you with the manure but that was awful and creted endless hours of weeding. About 9 months of hard work and now only ok. The other smaller areas of grass we have just used the bags you can buy at the garden shop...100 baht/7 bags....not the cheapest way but it seems to be better....also once the grass has taken get the white pellets, sprinkle them over and water in..the grass does go a little brown in places at first but after a week or so it really gets thicker and greener...they cost 20Baht in a simple polythene bag...dont put too much on

We have a big yard. Minus the driveway, walkways, etc. we will have about 1 rai left to lay sod (not Canadian sod mind u, Thai carpet sod with only a hint of dirt on the roots along with a bit of moldy fungus stuff in my past experience). I am seeing from other posts to do with grass health that I could have alot of work ahead of me. There is alot of great info on how to lay sod, fertilize, etc. I am just wondering about a good top soil I could bring in for the first building block. Underneath the dirt we will bring in for the top soil is a clay sand mix. Not good for drainage or growing grass I understand. I will slope the landscaping to drain excess rain water into our fish pond (might end up with some 3 eyed fish from the fertilizers) to alleviate challenges with puddling of water. I plan on using a grass native to Thailand rather than a foreign variety. Thanks for the info on your fertilizing experience though. May you have a lush, vibrantly green, healthy lawn!

[ubonjoe]

You might use chicken manure instead of cow manure, It has less seeds in it plus it is mixed in with rice hulls which helps to keep the soil loose instead of compacting.

[PeaceBlondie]

Our tiny new plot of 70 talang wah was built above the surrounding rice paddies by many truckloads of fill that looks like clay. I cannot imagine growing anything on top of that. The lawn area that will have grass is really small. If I ask for black dirt or river bottom soil (we are building outside Chiang Mai), can we grow grass on top of that?

[mackayae]

What thickness or depth of top soil is recommended?