Yard Relevelling

Why a Townsville lawn goes lumpy in the first place

It is not settling, and it is usually not the turf. It is the clay underneath coming up.

The soil under most Townsville lawns is hardsetting sodic clay sitting under a shallow layer of topsoil. Through the wet season, and badly through a flood, water sits on the surface of the grass for long stretches. Clay is drawn to that water — it swells, moves and works its way up through the profile, and it comes out at the surface as the lumps and hollows you are now walking on. Those bumps are clay that used to be under your lawn.

Which is why raking a load of sand over the top does not hold. The sand fills the hollows for a season, the clay keeps rising, and you are back where you started with a bill in between.

What a 6Foot relevel actually is

One job, in this order, and every step is there because the step after it does not work without it. We core the lawn to open the profile. We dethatch to take out the dead layer so the new surface makes contact with living grass rather than sitting on a mat. We scalp it hard so the sand is not smothering leaf. We feed it, we work gypsum through it, and then we bring the sand and level it properly off string lines and a screed, not by eye.

Gypsum is the part most people have never had done, and on a sodic clay it is the part that lasts. It changes how the clay particles hold together so the soil drains instead of setting like a road. Without it you have levelled the symptom.

Then it grows back through, and the lawn that comes up is flat because the ground under it is flat.

The parts people get wrong

Topdressing is not relevelling. A thin skim of sand across a lawn evens out the colour and lasts a season. It is a fine thing to do to a lawn that is already flat, and a waste of money on one that is not.

Going too deep in one pass. Bury more than about a third of the leaf and you kill the grass you are trying to level, and you end up returfing. On a bad yard that means we come back and do a second pass rather than smother it once.

Levelling before the drainage is fixed. If the water has somewhere to sit, the clay will keep coming up. If your yard holds water we will tell you before we quote, not after.

What it is like afterwards

It looks rough for two to three weeks. Sand on top, grass pushing through, patchy while it knits. That is normal and it is the part people panic about.

🔴 Do not mow it early. Wait until it looks shaggy — genuinely overdue — before the first cut. Mowing a relevel too soon takes the new growth off at exactly the moment it is trying to establish, and it is the single most common way a good relevel is undone by the person who paid for it.

Water it more than usual for the first fortnight. Sand dries out faster than soil.

How it is priced

From $13 a square metre, and it moves with how much sand the yard actually needs — a lawn with deep hollows takes more than a lawn with a gentle wave through it, and the sand and the tip fees are the biggest line in the job.

We measure it and quote one whole-project price in writing. Not a per-item list you have to add up, and nothing that changes on the day unless we find something under there and stop and tell you first.