This invention relates to lawn and soil treatment and, more particularly, to a cultivating machine and process.
There are many problems in lawn preparation and conditioning. The presence of dead grass, clippings, and weeds often interferes with the growth of new grass or may smother the grass completely. Grass plants can become uprooted, torn, or otherwise damaged. Soil can become packed and harden in areas in which there is relatively little moisture from rainfall during extended portions of the year, making it difficult to successfully plant and germinate grass seeds.
In the preparation and conditioning of seed beds and the maintenance of attractive lawns, it is desirably to scratch, gently disturb, and cultivate the soil, lawn, or turf about the ground and around grass roots to receive air, water, fertilizer, and other materials for the stimulation of grass growth.
Hand rakes, hand cultivators, hoes, and other manual devices have been used for lawn preparation and conditioning, but they can be very tedious, strenuous, and time consuming. Furthermore, hand rakes, hand cultivators, hoes, and other manual devices, are very inefficient and require much labor for large lawns and acreage.
Power cultivating, tilling, plowing, and raking machines on the other hand, can also be useful, but they are generally large and heavy, difficult to maneuver and operate, and usually inefficient and complicated. Often, many conventional power cultivating, tilling, plowing, and raking machines uproot, mangle, destroy or otherwise damage existing plants and grass and excessively disturb, disrupt, clump, channel, mar, tear, and gouge the lawn and turf. Undesirably, many conventional power cultivating, tilling, plowing, and raking machines also create enormous amounts of thatch (dead root matter) which need to be collected and removed or else the new and healthy grass may smother and die.
Attractive lawns are desired and appreciated by owners, tenants, employees, customers, local residents, visitors, and others in many areas, such as in industrial parks, company headquarters, professional buildings, other office buildings, factories, city hall, homes, fire stations, municipal parks, schools, athletic fields, etc.
In the past, the planting and maintenance of a lawn has customarily been accomplished by a series of individual operations. These separate operations normally involve cultivation preparation of the ground for seed, fertilization, and watering. When properly planted, grass seeds will germinate in the soil to produce an attractive lawn. Once the lawn begins to grow it usually is necessary to maintain the lawn same by the application of additional grass seeds and, if necessary, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc. Sometimes it is also desirable to periodically aerate the lawn. Most of these steps are usually accomplished separately. Individual steps can be laborious, time consuming, and costly, especially for large lawns. Many of these steps are often done by hand or with different equipment.
In order to maintain good healthy attractive lawn in many areas, it is desirable to mix and plant two or more different type of grass seed. Often a greater amount of one grass seed is used than another. While grass seeds can be spread and distributed by hand, such work is tedious, inefficient and time consuming and often results in large concentration of seeds in one area of the soil and omission of seeds (voids) in other areas of the ground (soil). This often results in unattractive patch-like lawns. Furthermore, too many seeds in one area can cause the grass not to grow and too few seeds can result in bare spots.
Non-power manual spreaders are available, but they are often awkward and inefficient and do not provide for controlled mixing and metering of different types of grass seeds. Furthermore, for large lawns, non-power spreaders can be very tiresome and difficult to use.
Many types of power spreading machines have been suggested, but such conventional power spreading machines are usually bulky, cumbersome and inefficient. Furthermore, conventional power spreading machines do not provide for proportional controlled mixing and accurate metering of different types of grass seeds. Moreover, conventional power spreading machines do not dispense multiple types of grass seeds at different rates nor at adjustable speeds that are faster or slower than the ground speed of the power spreading machine.
Typifying various types of conventional spreading machines, cultivator, and other types of lawn care equipment are those found in U.S. Pat. Nos.: 964,490; 1,099,707; 2,056,337; 2,183,618; 2,206,264; 2,873,807; 2,476,918; 2,966,218; 3,140,677; 3,264,890; 3,414,063; 3,685,468; 3,777,460; 3,878,899; 3,926,131; 4,096,915; 4,167,976; 4,171,021; and 4,524,642. Such prior art spreading machines, cultivators and other types of lawn care equipment have met with varying degrees of success and have not been generally efficient, effective, and reliable for cultivating and properly preparing seed beds.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide an improved cultivating machine and process which overcomes most, if not all, of the preceding problems.