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!
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