This Easy DIY Trick Solves 4 Common Lawn Problems at Once – All It Takes Is a Piece of Old Chain-Link Fencing
An old fence panel headed for the scrap pile has one more job in it. Turn it into a drag that solves several fall lawn care problems in one afternoon.
Fencing contractors throw away chain-link by the roll. Torn-out panels stack up behind shops and sit rusting along property lines where nobody has gotten around to hauling them off. Ask your local fencing company and you can often walk off with a section for nothing. Then turn that free piece of mesh into one of the most useful tools in your lawn care arsenal.
You can easily turn a piece of old chain-link fence into a drag harrow that makes your lawn care routine easier and your lawn look better than ever. A lawn drag harrow is a common tool of professional groundskeepers. They pull a piece of weighted mesh across the playing fields to clean up after aerating, aid in overseeding, leveling, and topdressing. You can make your own lawn drag that does all the same tasks and keeps your lawn looking like a professionally-manicured field.
Here’s how to turn an old piece of chain-link fencing into a handy tool that helps your lawn thrive.
Benefits of a DIY Lawn Drag
The diamond pattern of the chainlink fence is the secret behind this DIY trick. Where the wires cross, each junction sits slightly proud of the mesh around it. Dragging the panel presents a few hundred blunt knuckles that catch and shear whatever they pass over, like bumps in your lawn.
The fencing flexes over dips and rises instead of scraping them, which is why it spreads material rather than shoving it into a pile ahead of the tool. Galvanized wire holds up outside between uses, though every cut you make exposes bare steel that can rust.
The weight of the drag determines how aggressive the lawn leveling is. Bare mesh skips across the surface and does close to nothing. Wire a length of pipe or an old fence post along the leading edge and it starts to bite into the lawn more. Add a cinder block on top and it bites even harder.
A round edge tends to crumble clods better than a straight edge, since material rolls under it instead of getting shoved along. Start light. You can always pile on more weight as needed.
How to Turn Fencing Into a Lawn Drag
A panel of chain-link fencing around 4x6 feet (1.2x1.8 m) covers ground quickly. Anything larger gets awkward at the corners of your lawn. Home Depot's Anvil 24-inch bolt cutters go through chain-link wire without much effort. A cheap pair of cutters is fine here since the fence gauge is soft compared to a padlock shackle. Cut ends of the fencing leave sharp spurs, so bend each one back on itself with pliers or wrap the whole edge in a strip of old garden hose.
Handle the panel carefully so you don’t accidentally poke or scrape yourself. A pair of cowhide palm work gloves from Walmart saves a lot of grief here because fresh-cut galvanized wire catches skin easily. For the tow, run a rope or light chain to two corners and keep the attachment point low.
A high hitch lifts the front of the mat and cuts its contact with the ground. Behind a riding mower it works at a walking pace, though a strong person can pull a smaller panel across a modest lawn by hand.
Use It After Core Aeration
Core aeration leaves your lawn covered in plugs, each one roughly three-quarters of an inch (2 cm) wide and up to 3 inches (8 cm) long, and a well-aerated lawn carries 20 to 40 holes per square foot.
Plenty of people rake away the plugs or leave them to weather down over the course of a few months. Using your lawn drag to break down aeration plugs returns that soil and organic matter to your lawn, where it belongs. If the underlying soil is decent, there's no real reason to haul away the plugs.
Timing matters more than technique here. Wet plugs smear. Let them dry out until they crumble between your fingers, usually a day or two after aeration depending on weather, then drag in one direction and then perpendicular to the first pass.
The lawn will look scruffy for a few days afterward with a fuzz of loosened stems and old clippings sitting on top, but it will settle. Mow the lawn at a normal height one week later to tidy up whatever the drag left behind.
Use It for Seeding, Topdressing & Leveling
Broadcast seed has a habit of sitting on top of the grass canopy, where it dries out and feeds birds rather than germinating. A pass with the drag knocks a good share of it down to soil level, and seed-to-soil contact is what a thick overseeding tends to rely on.
Aerate first, if you can, so some of that seed drops into the open holes instead of resting on the soil surface. Early fall is the window for this in most cool-season regions while soil is still warm and once weed pressure has eased off.
Topdressing your lawn with extra soil works the same way, in reverse. Compost goes on thinly, about a quarter inch (0.6 cm) at a time, and the drag spreads it and works it into the soil instead of leaving it in windrows where the shovel dumped it. Resist the urge to topdress any thicker. Burying the crowns of the grass plants to save a second round of topdressing is how people smother the lawn they were trying to improve.
Leveling your lawn follows the same routine. Material settles into the hollows first, so a low corner takes a heavier hand while the drag pulls the surplus off the humps. It is slow going, next to stripping sod and regrading, and a bumpy lawn may require three or four rounds across as many seasons. Nothing dramatic happens in only one round of leveling. The lawn is flatter each fall than the one before.
What This Tool Can’t Do
A lawn drag is not a dethatcher, so it can't do that. It lifts loose surface debris and stirs up dead material sitting on top, which helps, but true lawn thatch is a dense mat knitted below the green blades of grass. Once that layer passes roughly half an inch (1.3 cm), a power rake or vertical mower is usually the tool for the job. Anything less aggressive just combs the surface.
Skip the whole process on soggy ground, since dragging saturated turf tears the crowns of the grass plants and compacts what you just opened up. If you're not able to find a scrap piece of chain-link fencing for free, Amazon carries a Yard Tuff steel mesh drag mat with a tow rope that does the same job. The homemade version has one clear advantage, though. You won't mind when it gets bent and replacing it only costs a phone call to a fencing company or a trip to the junkyard.
