Builder & Commercial Hydroseeding in Minneapolis, MN

In Minneapolis, builder and commercial hydroseeding deals with the ground construction leaves behind: finished home lots waiting for a buyer, the slopes and bottoms of stormwater ponds, boulevards after a utility job, the open areas around a new office or apartment building, and phases of a subdivision that are graded but not yet built. General contractors and developers usually call hydroseeding contractors for two reasons. They need permanent turf on finished areas, and they need temporary cover on bare soil to keep it on site and out of the storm drains.

Deadlines set by the state permit

On projects that disturb an acre or more, Minnesota's construction stormwater permit sets the clock. The MPCA timeline table says soil stabilization must begin immediately when construction in an area has stopped and will not resume for 14 days, and must be complete within 14 days. Where the site drains to a special or impaired water, that window shrinks to 7 days. The last 200 feet of a ditch that connects to a surface water must have its wetted perimeter stabilized within 24 hours. Those are the deadlines our schedule is built around on construction sites.

And by the city

Inside Minneapolis, Chapter 52 of the city code requires an erosion and sediment control permit for any disturbance over 500 square feet, including utility excavations and demolitions, and an approved plan over 5,000 square feet. The permit has to be posted at the site. Sites over an acre also need a stormwater management plan under Chapter 54. Suburban cities have their own versions. We work from the approved plan and the stabilization notes on it, and we keep the records of what was seeded and when so the site manager can show them during inspections.

Temporary versus permanent cover

Not every bare area needs a lawn. A stockpile that will be moved in spring, a pad waiting for a second phase, or a slope that will be regraded later only needs to stop eroding for a while. For those, we spray a fast-establishing temporary seed mix with mulch, or mulch alone, which is less expensive than a full turf mix. Finished lots, boulevards and pond slopes get the permanent mix the plans call for, whether that is a bluegrass and fescue turf blend or a native grass seeding mix for pond edges and open space.

Volume and access

On large areas, hydroseeding is mostly about water and access. A truck-mounted machine covers acres in a day if it can get close and refill quickly. We plan where the truck will park, where it will fill, and how far the hose has to reach for back lots and pond slopes. For lots spread across a subdivision, we can come back in rounds as each block is finished rather than waiting for the whole phase.

Getting on the calendar

The hard part of booking seeding is getting a crew on site when the grade is done, not two weeks later. Late summer is our busiest stretch, because Extension's mid-August to mid-September seeding window lines up with the end of the building season. If you have lots finishing in August and September, get them on our calendar in July. Frozen ground in November ends the season for seed; after that, the conversation turns to dormant seeding, mulch and blankets.

What builders ask us

General contractors comparing hydroseeding companies usually want to know three things: how soon we can be on site, whether we will seed the lot in pieces as it is finished, and whether the seed will still be there after the first storm. Our answer to the first depends on the calendar, which is why we ask for finish dates early. The answer to the second is yes; we would rather seed a finished lot now than leave it bare for a month. The third depends on prep and mulch rate. On builder-graded clay loam with no topsoil, a light slurry sheets off in a downpour. We raise the mulch rate, add tackifier, and recommend blankets on any swale or slope that carries water.

Native seed for open space

Pond buffers, infiltration basins and open space on commercial sites are often specified with native grass seeding rather than turf. The USDA notes that the native vegetation on the outwash soils south of the metro, such as the Waukegan series, was tall grass prairie: big bluestem, indiangrass and switchgrass. Native mixes like those are slower to show than turf grass and look thin in their first year while they build roots, so they usually go down with a fast-growing cover crop in the slurry. We spray whatever the landscape architect or the watershed district specifies, and we flag the difference in establishment time so nobody expects a lawn in the first season.