The Lawn is usually most impressive and most important element of your yard, garden or other green area. Accordingly, it is very important to carefully decide on the mean of its establishment and to use high quality turf selected in line with intended usage and characteristics of the yard and micro location.
Starting a lawn by sodding a grass turf will enable you to quickly start enjoying the beauty of the mature lawn without waiting the usual time period needed for seeded lawns.
Certainly, the most significant advantage of the sodded turf compared to seeded one relates to the short time needed to establish mature and durable lawn. Effectively, sodding a turf lawn represents a transplantation process where grown and mature turf is introduced in your garden. Moreover, it is important to stress that such turf is raised by professionals. In this way, in a short time you would enrich your garden or other green area with high quality, healthy and extremely beautiful lawn.
However, in order to start sodding a turf and commence enjoying in its beauty it is necessary to skilfully and sensibly undertake several important activities.
First of all it is of utmost importance to perform excellent soil preparation. This is the most convenient moment to properly level the terrain and enrich the soil in order to provide solid conditions for the lawn to attain its full beauty.
Soil and terrain preparation is essential activity for successful lawn sodding by means of turf transplantation or laying a grass carpet and usually it includes following most important steps which should be carefully planned and executed:
- Clear the site of all building materials (wood, cement, bricks…) as well as any leftovers from dead plants
- Weed elimination is usually performed by applying non-selective herbicides in two spraying iterations within 7-10 days. This step is very important in order to prevent reoccurrence of the weed in the newly sodded lawn.
- Removal of old turf includes mechanical activities performed after chemical treatments of the old lawn and weeds. We recommend old turf to be removed by Sod cutter which cuts 3-6 cm of old turf enabling it to be rolled and taken out from yard. Alternatively, due to lower costs, removal of old turf by tillers is more common. Tilling certainly has its advantages, however it suffers from major disadvantage related to the fact that the tilled and racked terrain is settling down for next few years causing depressions and terrain unevenness. Such problems emerge even if the soil is rolled. More importantly, those depressions, even small, will cause rainfall stocking resulting with overwatered areas which are slippery and frequently damaged even by normal usage.
- Fertilizing and Enriching the Soil – this is the most convenient phase to enhance quality of the soil by applying fertilizers (e.g. Starters), additives, organic applicants, lime…
- Terrain levelling includes rough and fine levelling measures aimed at establishing drainage nivelations and filling the depressed areas and holes…
As soon as the terrain and soil have been prepared turf sodding should commence. It is very important to carefully and timely plan and match activities of soil preparation and fresh grass turf reception in order to ensure that the turf is installed within 24 hours after it has been removed from the professional grass nursery field. On the other side, prepared soil should not be exposed over several days to outdoor factors (e.g. weeds seeding by wind…), strong rains and strong winds could affect terrain levelling and chemical features…
Laying down the grass turf should be performed immediately after it has been received in order to reduce the stress to which the grass is exposed and ease the turf to integrate with new soil.
Immediately after turf has been sodded, it is necessary to perform heavy watering activity which should be repeated over next several days. At this stage, it should be emphasised that automated watering system (based on pop-up sprinklers) secures timeliness and adequate water dispersion contributing and easing grass carpet turf to integrate in the soil of your yard. Installation of such system should be planned and, preferably, performed before starting a lawn either by sodding or seeding.
During first few weeks, newly sodded lawn should not be exposed to intensive usage as it requires some time for integration and fixation for the soil and commencement of growth.
Still, soon after laying a turf carpet you will be able to enjoy its charm, beauty and functionality.
After the lawn has been established it requires significant care and attention as otherwise it will soon appear shabby, sporadically naked, uneven, poorly coloured and unhealthy. In any case, we recommend you to entrust turf sodding and its future caretaking to our team of experienced professionals.
