I don’t know about you but taking care of the lawn can be a tedious task sometimes. After purchasing my home about three years ago I needed to fix up the dying lawn. I had considered a few different paths to do that including overseeding, patch repair and sod. In the end we decided to pull up the old, dying lawn and put in sod. It seemed like an easy enough project.
We planned ahead, ordered the sod and the top soil, and invited some friends to help us out. We did some research and decided to put in the sod in early September. The day came where we needed to pull up the old lawn since the sod would be here the next day. Since the lawn was about half dead it wasn’t all that easy to pull up the old lawn. We ended up using knives to cut the lawn into strips and rolling it up off of the underlying soil. This worked up until you hit a large dead spot at which point you couldn’t really roll it up, but rather you had to grab handfulls of the dead lawn. It took a few hours but we finally had the dead lawn up.
To make sure that the soil was prepared to receive the new sod we tilled the soil and put down top soil. We evened the ground and were ready for the sod. The next day the sod arrived and we started to lay the sod. This was actually a fairly simple process. We staggered the ends of the sod pieces as if we were laying bricks and made sure to butt the edges together very closely. Once we were done we made sure to water it right away to help stimulate the lawn and encourage root growth. It looked a ton better than the dying lawn. We were very happy.
We continued to water the lawn as much as possible throughout the following weeks up until the time we had to winterize and blow out the sprinklers for winter. When spring came around we aerated the lawn, turned on the sprinklers and worked to get the lawn back into shape. Most of the lawn looked fantastic, except we had weeds!! After all the work to take out the weeds and dying lawn the fall before it was frustrating to see the weeds coming in. We tediously pulled all the weeds and got the lawn into good shape that first year. The following year we had very limited weeds but this time we had a spot about four feet by four feet that had died. I have no idea what caused it but the only way to repair this was through Scotts Patchmaster. It worked great and rejuvenated the lawn within a couple of weeks.
We are now in the third spring/summer season and the lawn is looking good. There are no dead spots, very limited weeds but we have crab grass. We are continually working on it as I am sure every homeowner is. We have referenced a few sites to help us in maintaining our lawn and wanted to share those resources with our readers.
- Colorado State University Turf Program Lawn Care Tips
- This has been a great resource for Colorado lawn care including fertilization and aeration schedules
- Home Renovation Guide
- As I was doing some research for this blog and my own lawn I cam across this recent post and found that it offered some good insight and tips
- Referral Directory
- We have worked with some great professionals in the area of lawn care and sprinklers in addition to landscaping materials.
We hope this has been helpful to you. If you know of any other great resources or have some tips of your own we would love to hear about it!
Photo credit: iantmcfarland on Flickr
