How to Lay Sod Over Bare Dirt & How to Lay Sod Over Grass or Weeds
Call 281-431-7441 for a quick quote for your project and answers to your questions. In this video, Houston Grass owner Michael Romine describes how to lay grass sod and he talks about the benefits and the expense of removing sand and clay from the project area and then bringing in topsoil. If you want to learn more about how to prepare for laying grass sod and then how to lay sod, this video is for you.
Houston Grass sells grass sod with quality second to none in the Houston area. We grow our sod on our family sod farm located in Bay City Texas, where we’ve been growing sod since 1981.
We sell two varieties of St. Augustine grass sod, two varieties of Bermuda grass sod, and three varieties of Zoysia. If you have questions or would like to discuss your project, please call us at 281-431-7441.
Here’s the video describing how to lay sod.
Summary of the How to Lay Sod Video
One of the most common questions that we get is how to lay sod. There are two different scenarios for laying sod. Sometimes you’re laying sod on a new home that is bare dirt and that is the easiest situation to lay new grass in. All you have to do is make sure the ground is nice and level and raked out smooth and free of debris and weeds. And then you just simply lay the 16″ x 24″ pieces of grass down on the ground, just like tile, and you don’t want any dirt showing. Wherever there is dirt showing at the seams, there is the potential for weeds to come up and it just doesn’t look as nice at the end.
The little bit tougher scenario is when you’re trying to replace grass that’s gotten full of weeds. Or there is existing grass there whether it be weeds or you’re just wanting to change the variety of grass. Ideally, you spray the area with Roundup and wait for 7 to 10 days and let it die and then use a weedeater or a sod cutter to rip that old grass out or weed-eat it down to the ground. Like I said that’s not the preferred method, and then once you bag it up and haul it off, then lay the grass as if it were bare dirt.
A lot of people ask do we need to till it up and that is usually not the case. Most people don’t want to spend the money first of all. Ideally, what you would do in some of these new houses, there’s so much junky dirt there, it’s mostly just sand or it’s not good dirt to begin with, it’s mostly just hard clay. You would take 4 to 6 inches out and bring in good topsoil. If you do that it would be incredibly expensive, but you cut down on your irrigation costs, your fertilizer costs, and everything. So if you’re going to live the rest of your life in this house, then yeah I would spend the money. If there’s too much dirt there, if I couldn’t add the 4 to 6 inches of new topsoil, then I would get rid of enough dirt to where I could.
Because if it’s just sand, you’re going to leech your nutrients out into the ground a lot faster. Your water is going to fall through there a lot faster and not be held up near the plants and near the roots where it needs to be. So you’re going to increase all of those costs over the life of it. But upfront costs, it’s incredibly expensive, even in a new home to go in there and scrape dirt out and bring it all down four inches, so it’s nice and even with your concrete and flowerbeds and haul that off and then bring in a dump truckload of dirt, so you have, 4 to 6 inches over a whole yard is a lot of dirt. So that’s why most people will choose not to go that route.
If you have any questions about sod installation or any questions about turfgrass sod in general, please call Houston Grass at 281-431-7441.
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