A Sod Story

Sod. I love sod. I’d forgotten how much I love sod. I’m not talking about the stuff you have to cut out of your yard when you put in a new sidewalk or a new driveway. That sod is usually uneven, in small, oddly shaped octagonal pieces that never seem to go down in the same pattern they came up from. It also has brown patches in the weirdest places, making your lawn look like a bizarre chessboard or Twister game.

No, I’m talking about the sod you get from the landscape companies on a pallet. Evenly cut, every piece one inch thick, grass all the same colour and growing in the same direction.

I have had grass grow downward before, on a misplaced piece of sod I cut out from a sidewalk. Seriously. It was a pain to cut with the lawnmower, let me tell you.

Now why would I be waxing poetic about sod, you ask? It comes on the heels of my new patio I just put in the front of the house.

This may get messy, so try to follow along -

The patio was the result of me replacing a dead flower garden with sod cut from a new vegetable garden on the side of the house. The dead flower garden had southern exposure and the Sun baked everything, despite my soaking the area with enough water to replicate Noah’s Flood. It baked everything so well that the ground was like sand and the local feline population were very happy to have public facilities so close, so to speak. Me, not so much.

So I rented a sodcutter and cut out the space for the new veggie garden and took the sod from there and put it in the old front flower garden. My darling wife noticed it was a little uneven, but I was pretty confident that when it was watered in well and firmly established, I could fill in the low spots.

Despite watering the area with the equivalent of Niagara Falls, the sod from the side lawn finally baked into the fine yellow colour of ripe wheat. It was then I decided to put in a patio using the interlocking bricks of the old patio on the other side of the house.

Rather than replace the interlocking bricks from the old patio with the dead sod that I used to fill in the old flower garden, I decided that I really should try for a new look – that being getting grass that would actually grow and would look nice at the moment I finished installing it.

So the bricks were pulled up from the side and the sod pulled up from the front and dirt dug up in both places. Then bricks were put down in the front and dirt put down at the side and a pallet of new sod was delivered.

I felt like a little kid again. This is why I love sod so much. When can you go out into your yard, dig up a huge area, get tremendously dirty and your wife will smile and hand you a beer at the end of the day? And let you back into the house?!

The grass is all the same colour, it’s all growing in the same direction and it’s level. I may never mow this part of the lawn again. Ever.

I do believe I may just set up my lawn chair here (on the sidewalk, of course) and let my toes revel in the feeling of green, soft grass underneath. Instant (four months) gratification at it’s best.