The Grass is Always Greener – Part One

Our front lawn as it turns out is mostly not grass.  We’ve known that for a while.  Wesley and I spent a few weekend pulling weeds and all that was left was dirt mostly.  So we decided to redo the lawn.  To that end we haven’t been watering at all this summer (the front yard at least).  It only took a few weeks for whatever grass existed to turn into a nice brown straw.  Which I must admit Wesley and I use for straw fights.  And a good time is had by all.

I had assumed that you’d be insane to put new sod in during the middle of the summer.  After all the rainfall is zero and the temperatures are frequently one zero zero.  I was, as usual, quite wrong.  I figured the fall or spring was the right time, but a little reading online tells me that these are warm season grasses and that we need to get the lawn in yesterday so that it can get well established before the frigid (below 70F) temperatures come and it goes dormant.  And water?  Well we get to flood the thing twice a day for a week, once a day for a few more weeks and then once a week for all eternity.

Here is what our lawn looked like before we started to rip up the sod:

Isn’t she pretty?  The amount of green here is actually due to the massive rainfall we had from some rainbands coming off of Hurricane Dolly last week.  It generally doesn’t look quite this good.

But this weekend I spent most of my time whacking the ground with a pick mattock and removing the sod.  The pick mattock weighs a little over 5 lbs and does a much better job than a shovel, pitch fork, or hoe.  The work is hard and the heat is unbearable.  I generally only worked for 20 or 30 minutes and then would step into the A/C to get something cool to drink.  After two days we’ve removed the vast majority of the sod (about 1100 square feet).  The remaining sod is near sensitive areas that will need a more gentle touch (like around the roots of trees and bushes).  Here is the tool I used:

We could have rented a sod cutter, but this had a few advantages:

• It is a lot cheaper (only $27 and I get to keep it for other projects).
• It is pretty menacing.  I was out the other morning when the neighbor’s kid’s friends pulled up in their car and started honking.  I just stopped what I was doing, swung the pick up on my shoulder and gave them a dirty look.  They stopped honking, got out of the car and knocked on the door.  Without the pick I’m not particularly intimidating.  But with the pick, look out.
• The sod cutter strips off about the top 1″ of soil.  Doesn’t sound like much, but we don’t have much to spare.
• You can use it to dress up as a gold miner for Halloween (you never know when you might need to do this).

I wasn’t alone though.  I got some help from Amber and Wesley.  Amber helped rake up the sod and haul it to the back yard.  We aren’t going to compost it (takes too long), but we don’t have enough buckets to put it curbside all at once.  It will take 5 weeks or so to get rid of it all.  And yesterday I gave Wesley a hammer and set him to the task of busting up dirt clods.  He had a blast.

We still have a lot of work to do, but I think this was probably the hardest part (fingers crossed):

• Turn the soil (either with a tiller or pitch fork)
• Amend the soil with some organic matter and fertilizer
• I may put in at least the plumbing for a sprinkler system just so it is there in the future
• Pack the soil a bit with a tamper or roller
• Lay sod (goes quickly I hear, of course I still need to pick the type of grass we are going to put in)

It will all be worth it though.  Here is an artist’s rendering of the finished project:

 

Tags: grass, homstead, lawn, sod