We have sod

We finally had much-needed sod installed in the backyard yesterday. Originally, we had opted not to chose that option when we had the house built thinking the price that the builder asked was exhorbitant. Instead, we seeded the backyard(the front yard sod was included in the price of the house) with rye hoping that it would grow quickly and that we we would have a nice carpet back there. In the spring we would follow up with bermuda.

The rye grew but much too thinly. We ended up with a lot of mud in the back whenever there was any moisture there. Of course, the mud tended to end up in the house, on the carpet.



So I finally tracked down Mow, Grow, & Sprinkle, the landscaping outfit that puts the sod down for HistoryMaker Homes in this area. After I left a ton of voice mails, a guy finally came over and gave me an estimate. It seemed like a reasonable price as it included installation. The guy said that they could do it on Friday. So I waited at home all day Friday and nobody showed. I left a few more voicemails and planned on finding another company to do it on Monday.

Then, Saturday at 7:30am, the doorbell rang. It was a guy with a flatbed full of sod. I had him put it over by the gate. He had no idea when the installation crew would be by.

The installation crew came by about 10:15. They no habla but they were all very good at what they did and had obviously done it quite a bit. They started off by leveling things off either by flattening the rises in soil or by filling in the depressions.



Then they started laying it down.






After it was down a couple of guys went over it with something resembling a giant rolling pin.



The final product.





The time from when the installation crew arrived until the completion of the project was about 2 hours. Not bad.

After they were done and had left, M, Ranger & I got into the car and went to a maple tree farm in Fort Worth called 'Metro Maples,' wanting a maple to provide some color in the yard. We ended up getting a Fire Dragon Shantung - a kind of chinese maple. We are looking forward to the red foliage.




Ranger promptly inagurated the new addition to the yard by chewing off a significant portion of bark from its trunk, which, as you can imagine, caused us no small amount of consternation. After all, we had just gone all the way out to Ft. Worth and bought a limited availability Fire Dragon Maple, and then come back, dug a hole, and then planted the thing. This is not an investment that I want chewed up. On Monday, we are getting some fencing to put around it.

Late Saturday night I set the sprinkler system to drench everything. Its important for the roots to get into the ground as soon as possible.