Top Dressing

Level Lawns is Atlanta's original, best, and most experienced choice when it comes to top dressing your lawn! Top Dressing is our specialty and signature service. Our teams have serviced millions of square feet of turf and have provided Top Dressing services for tens of thousands of customers. We have the experience, expertise, and equipment to handle any size property quickly and efficiently.

Top Dressing is the process of spreading a layer of material over the turf surface and smoothing it out, which in turf provides many benefits for your grass and soil. You can read more about the benefits in our blog post here!

Unlike some providers who estimate and provide pricing via satellite quoting or traditional measuring wheels, we prefer to assess our customers' lawns in person and measure with a highly accurate device that maps the perimeters of the turf areas we are going to service. This not only provides an accurate measurement of square footage (important to ensure the proper amount of material is applied), but also allows our Turf Specialists to assess the condition of the turf in person. We look for issues with drainage, compaction, grass health, significant depressions, and other details that are impossible to notice when measuring via satellite. This allows us to provide a true recommendation for achieving your goals for your lawn. We do not charge for these assessments, but we have found over the years it is worth the extra time and attention to ensure we can achieve the ideal results!

Our typical Top Dressing services are provided as either "Full Service" or "No-scalp" options. Turf should be cut to 1.5 inches or lower prior to Top Dressing, and the lower the better for most types of grass. Full Service top dressing includes our experienced crews safely cutting your lawn as low as possible prior to top dressing. We use high power mowers with a vacuum system that helps suck up debris and loose thatch, and our crew will make multiple passes and remove all clippings from the lawn. No-scalp service is available for customers who already maintain their lawn with a reel mower, or have the ability to get the lawn cut low enough to effectively service with top dressing.

As for the process itself, top dressing typically includes:

1. Cutting the turf as low as possible

2. Deep Core Aeration

3. Application of a high nitrogen fertilizer to aid in feeding the lawn through recovery

4. Spreading of top dressing material evening throughout the lawn

5. Smoothing the surface with drag mats and hand tools

6. Cleanup and blowing off the street, driveways, and walkways

​

The material used for top dressing depends on the condition of the lawn, whether it has been previously top dressed, and how it is maintained. We typically recommend and most often use pure sand for top dressing, but depending on the condition of the lawn and your goals, we may recommend and use other materials and blended soil mixes to achieve the desired results. In all cases, we control the material from the manufacturer/supplier to your jobsite using our own dump trucks and team members. This ensures we maintain the quality of material and control the timeliness of delivery. We do not use 3rd parties to drop ship material for top dressing, nor do we risk sourcing material from unknown suppliers to save costs. We have learned in our years of doing this work that the cheapest/closest supplier is often not the BEST.

Our crew leaders range in experience from 7 to 20+ years in providing the services we offer and in the course of top dressing your lawn and we will use nearly a half million dollars of specialty equipment when servicing your property! We take great pride in ensuring we have the best teams, best equipment, and best materials available, and in turn we feel we offer the best top dressing results available in our industry!