Sod Party - Time Lapse

One of my favorite non-maintenance landscape jobs, is putting in sod. I love transforming a space and I love turf, so combining the two makes my day. I schedule this job to coordinate when Matt would be home for Easter. The shady backyard needed to be replaced with Zoysiagrass and came out to about 6 pallets. It also needed some topsoil, so we brought in 10 cubic yards. The backyard had limited access so that meant everything had to be carried by wheelbarrow into place. Since it was also on a pretty steep slope we had to staple a good portion of the sod so it would stay in place. We had a two hour rain delay on Thursday and also made things pretty muddy. Dad came out for a couple hours that afternoon to help out. The rest of the project took all Friday and an hour on Saturday to finish up. It all went really well and glad we got to be a part of it.

Mr. No Shoulders

Mr. No Shoulders with no head.

I set up the camera to do a time lapse of the project. Since its Rebecca's gear I had to be extra careful with it and so I put a ziplock bag over the camera and lens to protect it from dust and rain. That's why its a little hazy and has trouble focusing in some. The third guy in some of the pictures is the homeowner who was working on his back patio. The camera battery died in the afternoon on the first day so that is the reason for the big jump in progress.

Green Side Up

Two days of this past week were spent laying sod for a client. Another first for me now that I'm on my own. They have a great back yard area that was recently landscaped with stone retaining walls. They also just finished adding on to their back deck. The turf area, or what was left of it, was bermudagrass. However, it was way too shady for that species thus the reason for there not being much there.We decided to go with Emerald zoysiagrass, a much more shade tolerant species. The leftover bermuda and weeds got two doses of round-up before the new turf was put down. I prepped the soil bed a little and started laying sod around noon on the first day. I had to wheelbarrow each load of sod down a small hill to the backyard. I got a little over a pallet down the first day. I got the rest down early afternoon on day two. I spent a couple hours cutting it in and thoroughly watering.

Emerald Zoysiagrass

The first wheelbarrow load

One Pallet

Two Pallets

Three Pallets

The only mistake I made and it was almost a big one, was greatly overestimating how much sod I needed. I ordered 4 pallets and only used exactly 3. How could you be so far off you might ask. Laziness. I measured his backyard twice to figure out how much I needed. The first time I just stepped off to get an estimate, which came out to 2000 square feet. The second time was with an actual tape measure. In my head the number didn't seem that much different from what I had calculated the first time. One pallet will cover 450 square feet, so I ordered 4 pallets. As I approached a slight panic about what I'm going to do with this extra pallet of sod,  I went back and checked my real measurements and sure enough, it came out to 1300, pretty much exactly 3 pallets. What an amateur thing to do and I should have known better, especially when I can't afford to be absorbing a whole pallet of sod into my profit for the day. Fortunately the Lord was being gracious to be and allowed me an escape. My parents next-door neighbor just happened to be resodding his yard the next day. So I called him and he said he would take it. Other than having hand load and unload an entire pallet of sod, it turned out okay.

I definitely learned my lesson.