Questions About Disposing of Old Grass?
Many of our customers ask us questions about disposing of old grass. In this video, Houston Grass owner Michael Romine talks about your options for disposing of your old grass in preparation for laying new sod. Houston Grass offers sod removal services if you don’t want to undertake this task by yourself. Call us at 281-431-7441 for more information.
Here’s Michael’s explanation of how to dispose of old grass.
Summary of Disposing of Old Grass
How do you dispose of the old grass when you have a yard that’s been overtaken by Bermuda grass or weeds or something less desirable or it’s mainly dirt now. In this part of the World anyway, what normally takes over a yard, any bare spot, or even just an unhealthy yard, is generally just common Bermuda grass, which is the small bladed stringy grass that grows in your flower beds and is a general nuisance. And the only way to get rid of that — you cannot take a sod cutter or weed eater and just go in there and knock it down to the dirt, that will not get rid of it. You have to spray that area with Roundup, we offer the service, you go buy a pump up sprayer and the concentrated Roundup, you put it in there to the recommended dosage, you spray that yard and you give it 7 to 10 days to die and in 7 to 10 days you will know the areas that are good and dead and the areas that may need another spraying.
And once that area looks like hay, it looks like winter has come, then you go in with a sod cutter, we offer the service, or you can rent a sod cutter from Home Depot or Lowe’s or something like that, and it works pretty much like our harvesters that we get our pallets from, it goes along and cuts about a 12 to 16 inch piece out and it vibrates up underneath it and leave you a long strip of grass. You can set the depth of it and you can decide how much dirt you want to take. We try to take as little dirt as possible.
Once you do that it does leave a lot dead grass that needs to be hauled off. It’s an expensive service because you have to have equipment first of all, and you have to haul all of that dead grass off. That’s one of the main questions –what do I do with this grass? Depending on the area if it’s a typical yard, residential area, 40 or 50 foot lot, you probably can haul that off in three or four tandem axle trailer loads, that’s 14 to 16 foot trailer loads. You haul that to, obviously it’s better if you have land somewhere, it obviously will all degrade, so if you can haul it someplace like that and spread it out without taking up landfill space that’s better, and that’s what we try to to do. You can bag it up in trash bags and put it out by the curb, and they will pick it up.
It will be an incredible amount of trash bags and that’s the other option, but if you have a relatively dark large yard, when you get into half acre and three-quarter acre lots, then what we normally do is rent a rolloff container where you call a trash company and they drop off a big metal container on your curb and then you open up one side of it. Then you get your wheelbarrow’s full of dead grass and push it in there and dump it in there. That is a lot more economical even though it may cost you a few hundred dollars to rent one of those. It would be too many trailer loads and an unsightly amount of trash bags to try to put that much dead grass out on the curb, so that when you get into larger areas, we normally rent a what they call a rolloff container.
Even though it’s a pain to do this, you’ll want to make sure you do a thorough job of disposing of your old grass. If you skip this step, the Bermuda grass that you leave behind will establish itself in your new sod lawn. Houston Grass offers an old grass removal service so we can relieve you of the labor of this task. Call us at 281-431-7441 if we can help you.
Get the Installation Help You Need
Houston Grass grows St. Augustine grass, Bermuda grass, and Zoysia grass with a standard of quality second to none in the Houston area. Our grass sod is grown on our family farm in Bay City, Texas, so we can vouch for the quality of every piece and every pallet that we sell. Come and visit our office in Arcola, or contact us to arrange delivery to your project area. Call us at 281-431-7441.
