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Experience Homeowner for 15 years, 30 years of gardening for personal pleasure, college credits in horticulture and botany, volunteer docent at the local botanical gardens, and a whole library of gardening and landscaping books at home some 100 years old.
Question I just put down sod & think I made mistakes. I dug up all the old sod, tilled the soil, removed rocks after rocks. I put down some organic mulch & topsoil. Spread out starter fertilizer. Tilled everything. Graded the soil. What I forgot to do was to roll the soil. I pre-ordered my sod to pick up at the nursery. When I showed up it was not there. They delivered to me the next morning. I rolled out the sod. My problem is I don't think the soil had time to settle & I have high & low spots. Also out of the 26 2x5 pieces of sod 5 are completely turning brown like hay. It's now been 5 days that the sod has been down. I am going to replace the dead spots. How do I go about fixing the feet imprints (high low spots). I am in Queens, NY.
Answer Hi neighbor, All that work - you were THIS CLOSE...
Sounds like there are 2 mistakes here.
1. Either you didn't get the soil even (but you "graded" -- it was smooth but how smooth? Just need to be clear) OR you didn't roll the sod after you put it down.
Sod roots MUST make good contact with the soil. The point of rolling is to press the roots into the new soil which I think you probably know. Air bubbles are lethal to new sod.
2. Never again will watering sod be as critical as the first few hours after it's put down. Personally, I believe that watering the soil -- which should be smooth, level, picture-perfect -- BEFORE the sod goes down is insurance. Then after the sod goes down, you water the bejeezes out of it. You can't water it too much the first day.
John, you did say you had this delivered by a nursery? NOT Home Depot, where it sits around for a few days? Are you positively, absolutely, 100% sure it was cut the day they delivered it? Because if it was cut the day you went to pick it up, and they accidentally had it sit around at the sod farm waiting for you to come over and get it, and the nursery had them deliver it to you the next day, then it's a day old. All sod should go back down in the ground before the sun sets. You didn't make any mistakes there but maybe somebody else did. And THAT would NOT be YOUR FAULT.
If so, at least make the best of a bad situation and get the nursery to admit they screwed up. You were diligent, they were not -- if this happened.
Weakened sod that is already on its last legs can't take any more stress. If there was a misunderstanding between the nursery and the sod company about where you were supposed to pick up the sod, there's no room for any more errors. You oversight notwithstanding, who knows?
Maybe your sod would have made it if THYE had not screwed up.
Just a thought.
By the way, the rolling isn't always needed. However, if there are ANY bubbles under that sod after it goes down, you can kiss that grass goodbye.
Best thing I think, without seeing the actual yard, and without doing the whole project over, could be to lift the sod where the ground has bumps and rake even. You even had fertilizer down -- high nitrogen or did you use high phosphorous? New grass roots need phosphorous (the "P" in N-P-K).
We are having a bit of a heat wave now as you know. That'll stress any grass. For your sod, it was the nail in the coffin.
About the highs/lows: That would be a symptom of your failure (I hate that word) to even out the soil before you sodded. You can try rolling the bumps out depending on how uneven they are, but if you had done that when the sod went down, it might not be needed now. The strange thing is, by any measure, but for this small oversight, it sounds like you are doing a really first rate job. It's the easy parts of the test where you made your mistakes.
Like I tell my daughter, when NASA sits down to calculate where the spacecraft is going to land, they can't do the whole problem and then screw up the decimal point or they'll miss the moon.
