You need a professional landscaper. You got cheated on the first one. The landscaper needs to rake out the rocks. He'll use a rake on the back of a tractor. If he shows up with a skid steer or a bobcat, he's not a pro. This is a job for a real tractor. Then he needs to use a tractor with a landscaper's blade, also called a box blade, to grade the surface of the soil. If you need more (or less) soil, he'll do that for you to make your yard drain properly. This is not a job for newbies to take on. Get several estimates but only get estimates from landscapers who will use tractors. For 2 acres the entire job should take about a full day. He'll have to run the tractor over it once for the rocks and once to grade it. If he has to haul much away or bring it in, that adds time, too. Two days at the maximum unless he has a lot of trees to drive around. Anyone who tries to use a bobcat for a job like this will give you an estimate of a week or so. They all get paid by the hour so you can figure that out pretty easily. Tilling is overrated. It is the fastest way to get back what you are trying to get rid of, unevenness. Whether you have any topsoil left or not, you will have plenty soon enough. Unless your soil has been poisoned by something, simply growing grass in it will bring back the microscopic critters that create topsoil. If you want to speed things up, topdress the grass with compost every now and then. Using organic fertilizer is another way to regain your topsoil quickly.

By all means, take advantage of the guys offer to regrade it. Assuming they know what they are doing, it will make a huge difference in your enjoyment of the yard. It takes years of practice to become good enough to do it "good enough." For an experienced tractor driver, it should take no more than 2 hours to do your back yard. Whether you need more soil or not will be up to them. More soil usually will change the drainage. Let them decide what to do. Actually you might get two other estimates for the job and talk to them about what they propose to do. You are bound to learn something. If you have full sun, the Kentucky bluegrass is the turf that will hold up to the kids best. It is a sod forming grass, meaning it spreads to fill in weak spots. Fescue is a bunch grass that might spread to fill in by the time of the next ice age. Ask your wife where she might like to have the garden before you do the lawn. She'll want the sunniest place. Here is the 1-2-3 of grass growing as found in these forums over the past decade. Water deeply and infrequently. Deeply means at least an hour in every zone, all at once. Infrequently means monthly during the cool months and no more than weekly during the hottest part of summer. If your grass looks dry before the month/week is up, water longer next time. Deep watering grows deep, drought resistant roots. Infrequent watering allows the top layer of soil to dry completely which kills off many shallow rooted weeds. Mulch mow at the highest setting on your mower. Most grasses are the most dense when mowed tall. Bermuda, centipede, and bent grasses are the most dense when mowed at the lowest setting on your mower. Dense grass shades out weeds and uses less water when tall. Dense grass feeds the deep roots you're developing in 1 above. By mulching you help return fertility to the soil. Fertilize regularly. I fertilize 4 times per year using organic fertilizer. Which fertilizer you use is much less important than numbers 1 and 2 above. GardenWeb does not host pictures. If you have pictures hosted somewhere else on the Internet, GW can link to them. An Internet photo hosting site might be tumblr, photobucket, picasa, or some others. Then you need to use the correct HTML code so it shows up here. Here is that code. <img src="YOUR PHOTO URL GOES HERE"> You get your photo URL by bringing up the photo (in your browser at the host's site) and right clicking on it. Select Copy Link Location. Then paste that location between the quotes in the code above. The quotes are necessary for this to work. Don't leave them out. The photo URL should look like this http://www.photobucket.com/yourphotos/photoname.jpg Putting it all together it will look something like this... <img src="http://www.photobucket.com/yourphotos/photoname.jpg"> Then post your message like normal.

G'Day! For lawn info, i'd start by reading past postings at: http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/lawns/ the lawn care forum. i noticed you list tractors as a favorite topic. Depending on what land you have besides the lawn, you may want to use a tractor-pulled mower, like we use for our pastures. If so, draw the edges of your garden beds and such to suit the curves your tractor and mower can fit. If not, with under an acre to cut, and flat at that, you really could do it with a reel mower - the old fasioned mowers you used to be able to hire a local teenager to do the lawn with for $10--. You'll probably end up with a power mower and an edger/weedeater/weedwhip. If you can, edge your flower beds and such with bricks laid side by side, not end to end; this will provide a wide enough margine you can mow right along and not worry about massacaring the "floppage" (overhanging part of plants.) You may also want to wrap the base of small trees with trunk tape before you accidently scar the bark. A ring of mulch provides a nice mowing-safety margin for trees too, but don't build a "volcano;" mulch should be only 1/2" next to the trunch base, thickening to 1" a foot away and 2" two foot away. Mulch too thick right be the trunck can rot the trunck bark above the root line (trunk and root barks are very different), and shelters wee critters than nibble bark in winter. 'Fraid i know nothing about caring for lawns exept to be sure to get the roots of any weeds. A lot of folk around here disapprove of chemlawn. All that stuff that gets sprayed goes in to the water table, and we who don't live in town pump it back up from our wells. Not so great for folk or our livestock. A perfect lawn is a very unnatural environment. Sure you don't want ot rip the whole thing up and make it all into garden? To each his own. You've got a couple month left to plan. Have fun! -vlad Here is a link that might be useful: GardenWeb Lawn Care Forum

We moved into a new house (new construction) about 2 months ago. The builder seeded the lawn with (mostly?) rye for quick growth. Parts are coming up fine, while some portions of the lawn had to be re-graded and the new seed is not coming up so well there. Anyway, I know that I need to seed with general-purpose seed, but beyond that I am pretty clueless and looking for help. In particular: Should I be seeding the entire lawn, or only the bare patches? Should I do this now or wait a while? Some of the lawn is quite hard and compacted, even with daily watering/rain -- what to do about that? How/when/how much should I be fertilizing? Thanks in advance for your help!