Stan: One of my newer guys screwed up on a sod job today, and it wasn't his fault at all. It was my fault for not giving him a clear enough sense of direction on what not to do while I was busy explaining all of those little details that make for a successful sod installation. So today we're gonna cover the best time of the year to lay sod, what not to do, and the things that you need to get ready so you can have a perfect lawn. So without wasting any more time, let's get into it.

Stan: Problems started when I went out to the job site and noticed that some of the sod had been laid on top of existing turf. Now you can lay sod over existing turf, and it will grow. This is the freshly laid sod before we did the repair, and this is the same spot after, it looks almost identical, and the customer didn't have a problem, and didn't know there was an issue. But it's not the recommended way to do it, and it's not the way I'm gonna leave one of my job sites.

Stan: To correct this specific...

There is a brand new phenomenal technology that's finally available to us. it's called core airvation. What? Do you like it? We're going to discuss that in comparison to dethatching and in comparison to core aeration and there are critical differences.

Core Airvation

In this video, we're going to cover them plus when you would want to do each service. I own a detaching unit. I've never used it at my own house. I rent the core aeration plug machines.  I've never used it on my own property.  As soon as I was able to get my hands on the core airvator, I went over my own yard not once, not twice, but fifteen times. About how many times have you gone over this spot do you think? And the grass is not destroyed? No. What is a core aeration or simply put soil fractionation and I know that's not really putting anything very simple but what it does is it literally drive spikes into the ground and then as those spikes are very below ground the shake rattle and roll. And they loosen...

Discovery Bermuda Sod

Let's take a couple minutes and talk about sod. In this case, we're talking about Discovery Bermuda Sod. The success of your site installation project is going to depend on a couple of things. First and foremost the prep. How you prepare the yard? How you amend the soil? Do you loosen the earth? What you do with the existing weeds? Do you spray them? Kill them? Get rid of them? Scrape them off? Secondly, though, and what we're going to talk about now, is the quality of the sod product itself. In this case, I'm using Discovery Bermuda Sod. Discovery Bermuda is an incredible shade tolerance Sod. It requires about 3 hours of sunlight a day. There are 504 square feet that come on this pallet. Pallet typically come in 504 square feet.

Fresh Sod

This Sod just arrived on our job site and there are a few things that I want to point out to you. Looking at the top and saying, "Well I see some green. I see some brown and some other colors in it." This is just now coming...

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Stan Genadek: What's up Dirt Monkey Maniacs? Today, we're going to talk about what everybody says you need to do, but nobody shows you how to do it. Not a lot of you know that I own a lawn care company, what you don't know is, my excavating company is completely separate from the lawn care division and what nobody knows is that I own a third company doing pure construction, decks, house additions, remodeling work and two other companies. All of my companies run themselves without me, you're going to see that today. If I can do it, you can do it. Each company is completely unique from the other companies but the systems that run them are not, they’re universal across the board. But what's even more important is, I'm going to teach you guys how to do the exact same thing. When you understand the basic principles of a system, you can tweak it and make it fit just about any company's profile. The system is the fundamental key to building a...

Whether you're seeding a brand new lawn for the very first time or you're overseeding a thinning out existing lawn, we're going to give you three rules for success using three very simple tools. It doesn't even have to be as complicated as this thing. It all starts with the base.  If your subsoil it's hard like concrete, your new lawn doesn't stand a chance. Ideally you must loosen up the top four inches, but a lot of people mistake that for thinking they need four inches of black dirt. Nothing could be further from the truth. The perfect man will have 1/3 black dirt, 1/3 sand, and 1/3 compost. Once you get the subsoil ready you can lay down your seed.

Seed Type

Rule number 2: for the best long term results, you have to pick the right seed right out of the gate. If you have a wide open sunny area, use a sunny mixture. But if you've got a shady area and you use this grass seed, it will sprout and it will germinate, but it will slowly die off. That's why you would need a shady...

It's all about the lawn mowers today. We're going to talk about the best of the best and the ones to avoid like the plague with a little bit of a twist thrown in at the end. So let's get started.

Toro

A bit of a surprise today guys Toro makes it's one of the absolute best lawn mowers and one of the worst.  This Toro turf master is the absolute worst one. No matter how long I own it, I can't convince myself to like it. For a push mower, this thing is just way too heavy. It's overbuilt thus not allowing an operator to easily maneuver it. It is a commercial unit meaning it's meant to be heavy duty, but that doesn't mean it needs to be bulky and cumbersome. There is a lot of room for improvement on this machine. It's kind of like a little guy stuck in a fat suit. What?! The power that this machine generates just does not translate to the wheels and the wheels don't translate what power it does receive to the ground. Meaning the operator ends up doing all of the heavy lifting....

Host:

You want a bright green lawn but you don't want to wear a hazmat suit to go outside into your own yard, I get it! We know chemicals work but chemicals also work their way down through the groundwater and into your local ponds and streams, turning your local ponds into fluorescent green mats of algae that look like something out of a Shrek movie. So let's talk about natural ways you can accomplish the same result without using chemicals, let’s get started. Now let's get into fertilization; natural fertilization comes in three forms. The first form is feather meal, the second form is peat moss, and the third form is worm castings.

Speaker 1:

So peat moss is basically just accumulated bio matter, so this comes from peat bogs and then is used as a grower by just drying some stuff out of it. Sometimes it's like in a brick, and you break it up, you add water to it, you kind of mix it and then you can plant into it. All of these are safe, natural alternatives that your grass...

Chuck Bowen, editor of Lawn and Landscape Magazine, talks about how to grow your business with fewer growing pains.

Set yourself apart from other companies with excellent customer service.  Customers want someone who is going to call them back and do a good job.

Solve the "labor problem" by creating a culture that makes people want to work for you.

What can people do to take themselves from a small to medium sized company?  "What got you here, won't get you there."  It requires the owner to step back into different rolls.  The owner needs to hire people to do the work he/she was doing and do different work (sales and business building).  What systems do we need to put into place so we can effectively scale it.  Get everything that's in the owner's head on paper so their employees know exactly what to do.  The owner who doesn't eventually step back, becomes the limiting factor in the company.

In the off-season, you should be stepping back and...

D.E.F. Regulations

Stan: The lawn care landscaping construction industry has dramatically changed in the last five years and the problem is we have more rules, restrictions, and regulations than ever before and this is the tip of the iceberg. It's only going to get worse. Luckily we have small companies out there that are helping contractors like you and I deal with these new regulations that the EPA likes to put on us. I want to introduce you guys to Thunder Creek, first they're going to teach us what DEF. is. And then they're going to show us some unique ways they're helping contractors like us work around the new regulations. So let's get started. Alright guys what we're going to be talking about today is that we want to de-mystify it. DEF is a new regulation that the government has imposed on all of us. And that's going to impact you, it's going to impact me. If it hasn't caught up to you yet, it eventually will. Luke is going to tell us a little bit more about these regs and...