Yard Butler G-PLUG Green Lawn Plugger

After trimming back lower limbs of a tree in my yard that's plush with St. Augustine grass, areas that got too little sun have Bermuda, and some spots are bare. I learned this year that the right kind of fertilizer and watering in Spring does wonders, even on where the mail carrier has established a trail. But the bare spots heal very slowly without some transplanting.Wanting a pretty lawn THIS spring, I used this tool first to make holes in some of the weak areas. No problem. But when I began trying to get some plugs of sod from the plush St. Augustine areas, I found I could not push the tool down through the grass and grass roots. I just happened to have my old, 4" blade pocket knife with me, however -- an old, inexpensive one I use only for gardening and working around the yard. I put the plug-cutting box down where I wanted a plug, knelt down, and cut around the box edge to blade-length depth. (When I got to the side with the foot pedal, I just gave the unit a quarter turn, to allow cutting along that side.) The plug-taking was then easy.To keep the grass and roots from pulling out on lifting the tool, I wobbled the tool in all directions and then just leaned it down so as to pry the plug out. (In each hole in the grass, I inserted one of the bare dirt plugs I had removed to make a hole.)The grass plugs were easy to insert in the hole where grass is needed. I mixed some Miracle Grow in water, at the recommended proportion for feeding pot plants, and poured slowly around each new plug-in, and then tamped down around (not on) the plug to squeeze any air out. I had some commercial potting soil on hand, and put a handful around each plug, and tamped that down, too. It only took about twenty minutes to do six plugs. Yard work is fun when you do it in short sessions and, those short sessions add up to much accomplished, over time.Now, I'll water these transplants daily for a week, and then maybe twice a week.From experience in gardening, I know these plugs will establish themselves and start spreading..Oh, and previously, when I tried doing this using only a sharp-shooter shovel, it was messy and far more time-consuming.And, at seventy-nine, I like to do things the easy way, and have it look neat when I'm through.The way I'll be using it, this tool is going to speed up getting the lawn pretty. It's fun. And it works GREAT!

The handle on this bent within the first 30 plugs I did. When you stomp down on the foot piece, if your ground is at all hard it will bend, making the eject mechanism jam. It has a bad design where the shaft opposite the foot pad has a slit in it for the ejector, which makes it very prone to bending.Also if your ground has a lot of clay, it is very hard to eject. The eject piece is a small rounded bend of metal, which gets pinched when the shaft bends. Especially since you're working on wet grass for it to work at all, your wet boot slips right off.I eventually found out that if you give the area you're working on a good spray with the hose, it works much easier, and is probably less prone to bending and jamming. My ground wasn't hard at all, but it needs to be really soft for this plugger to work. I'd recommend spending a bit more and buying something a bit more durable.

This tool helps in planting the plugs but it does not make it easy. I wet the soil to make it easier to make the hole. The problem was that the soil got stuck in the hole and it was hard to take out. I cleaned the tool everytime I made a hole which slowed the process of planting and it made it slippery to step on the handle to make another hole. If I had known that I would not have bought it.

The design has a mechanical weakness where the handle attaches to the plugger. I bought this item to plant 150 Zoysia grass plugs. After the first 25, the handle bent near the connection to the plugger. I straightened it, and continued to gently plant another 10 plugs. This time, the handle bent again, and partially broke from the plugger. I welded it and continued to plant the remaining plugs, straightening the handle after every 10 or 15 plugs.

I bought this this for planting some St. Augustine plugs I bought to improve some patchy areas of my lawn. The soil in some of those areas had been previously prepared for better cultivation by mixing in mulch and store-bought top soil. The plugger worked effortlessly and perfectly for those areas. However, most of my yard has the Texas native black gumbo soil which is like a hard clay and hard to work with. For those areas, the tool worked in that it made nice holes for planting plugs, but it took the force of all of my 200+ lbs to make the hole, and the only way I could eject the dirt from the plug box was by using a hammer (I used a carpenter's hammer) to hammer the foot pedal ejector to force the ejection. That black gumbo packs into the plug box pretty hard. I doubt that any plugging tool would have been any better for that. Forcing the dirt out that way somewhat bent the plate the part of the ejection plunger, but that hasn't much affected how well it works. I cannot see any reason to buy a more expensive plugger tools.

This is a great plugger but it is a little big meaning the hole it makes is for about 4 to 6 plugs still together. That is o.k. because the more plugs that ate together the more it spreads. Very solid and strong plugger.

The Plugger works fine when pushing it into the ground to extract the plug. The problem is when trying to remove the plug from the Yard Butler. The part you push with your foot is tiny, rounded and thin. Your foot slips right off, especially when your foot is damp.... and it will be damp or wet. It is a ridiculous design that could have been fixed very easily. It is maddening.

I like it it works great... For a man. I can not take the plug out