Establish lawn using woodchips

New poster here. Looking for some advice on establishing a new lawn using woodchips. We recently had a lot of trees removed (20) from our 1 acre residential lot in Virginia. My goal is to bring in more sunlight and breakup the monoculture of tulip poplars on the property. I didn't like having any close to the house either. Anyway the arborist suggested using the woodchips from the operation as a mulch for the lawn. I did some research and I've seen Gauchy talk about it. My neighbors think I'm crazy, but:

1) the lawn (if you could call it that) was heavily dominated by Japanese stiltgrass and didn't' have much of a root mat anyway
2) the lawn was in terrible shape from last year's rain
3) any topsoil was pushed around by the skid steer used by the arborists and trashed due to rain on one of the days

So I had them distribute the chips over the work area. It turned out to vary anywhere from 1-4" inches. Last weekend I manually raked the area maybe 1/5 acre to get about 1" woodchip depth. I then broadcast a shade mix (tall/fall fescue + perennil rye) over top in anticipation of heavy Spring rains. If the seeds establish and there's sufficient sun, I might consider adding some dutch white clover to fix nitrogen.

Has anyone had any success with this method or seen someone else document their progress? My search hasn't found much. Thanks!

I can't imagine why it wouldn't work. I've mulched my lawn with straw to start grass. Worked out very well.

Brandon,

It certainly could work.  My suggestion would to get the chips as small as possible.  Some chips from a chipper will be a couple of inches across.  The grass seeds likely won’t germinate under these chips, or the grass seedlings won’t grow through the chip.

If at all possible, get those chips really ground up, almost like sawdust.  I have put in two lawns and in each case, the initial grass grew faster and better under the thicker straw.  I personally never want to put in another lawn as both the ones I put in were immediately followed by drought summers.  I cringed at the amount of water I spread just to keep the young grass alive.

Wood chips might well work, and if you have them, why not use them.

Best of luck,

Eric

Fresh chips might not work , but once aged a bit they will work great. As I understand it, The culprit of fresh chips is the tendency to use nitrogen while decomposing. So, to offset this, you could add nitrogen regularly until grass is established. Urine, diluted 1:10 with water in a garden sprayer, would be a tad smelly but likely effective.

If you have the inclination, it may be interesting to try different methods in small parts of the yard: tilling the chips in, treating them with fish oil/other N sources, mechanical aeration, mushroom slurries, or just natural.

Thanks all for the tips. At a minimum I will try adding some nitrogen to some areas and see if I can note any differences.

I raked out a lot of the large chips over to my eventual flowering perennial beds, so hopefully that helps let some grass penetrate.

Brandon,

I think that as long as you are putting down the nitrogen before the chips you will be fine.  Great job on getting the larger chips out first.  The most important part of establishing any new yard is to make sure that it never dries out.

Eric

This will work and it will work quite well actually. Keep the area moist until the grass is up and about 3 weeks old, that will get a root system/mat started, from there, you have a lawn.
fine compost is going to be a good addition at about 2 months old too. I use a 1/4 inch mesh screen to size my compost that goes onto the lawn once a year.

Redhawk