Professional Driveway Sod Installation

Professional Driveway Sod Installation

Professional sod installation in Austin, Texas requires more than just laying sod. Your lawn service provider needs to analyze the general topography of your driveway, and attentively prepare the area with that in mind. If you ever encounter a situation where you went with one of the cheapest bids and see the lawn service crew just laying sod right away, without removing vegetation, without leveling, you better ask them to stop and call another provider. Your new sod will most likely die, or if they ever survive, they will have drainage and puddling issues. Our goal is to arm you with general guidelines to protect yourself and save you a lot of money in future lawn issues.

When installing sod in Austin, Texas, the first thing we would need to do is have a feel of the area -- in this case, the driveway lawn. Along the driveway, we see that vegetation currently exists, a collection of dirt is piled towards the fence line, a small tree spout is under the fence, and the front street corner of the driveway lawn needs to be filled up with soil. We now have identified what has to be corrected, and we need to figure out how to make corrections properly.

Preparation involves removing the vegetation and re-grading the turf as we go along. This is the most important and time consuming phase of the sod installation service in Austin, Texas. We have to make sure that we prepare the area properly because turf growth has a lot to do with the soil it is on. If, for example, vegetation is left underneath it, the sod on top would dry out and die. If, for another instance, the soil was not leveled, puddles would easily cause turf damage and increase the possibility of root rot and fungal infection. Both of this in mind, we have to remove the vegetation from the roots up, in effect tilling the soil at the same time. We also have to remove excess dirt along the fence line and move this to fill in the front portion of the driveway lawn. We then remove most of the rocks and concrete that may stunt turf growth, and grade with the intention of having water naturally drain away from the lawn

After preparation of the area, we will now lay our organic compost and make minor grade corrections. This does two things. First, the height of our organic compost has to be close to grade level of the concrete. This is crucial to ensure we have proper drainage to let the water flow freely. Second, laying organic compost makes sure nutrients will be slowly released to support turf growth. We then removed more rocks that were missed during the previous phases in installing the sod.

The photo above shows the result we are looking for. The sod is noticeably a little higher than the concrete level. During heavy rains, the water won't puddle on the sod and will always have somewhere to go. We then lay the sod side by side, as close together as possible without overlapping.

We again make adjustments to the sod and compost as we go along during the installation. We cut where we are supposed to cut and re-level to correct minor imperfections. Our goal is to get the best possible installation results right now, not later. If we do the corrections months later, it will be very costly to re-do the sodding installation from scratch.

This is the completed project for sodding the driveway in Austin, Texas. Given adequate watering for the first few weeks, our new sod has the best foundation moving forward. We will maintain this sod with weekly mowing and periodic nutrient level checks. Again, we make minor adjustments and let nature run its course. As with anything in life, prevention is key. Prevention on a sodding installation in Austin, Texas centers on soil preparation, tilling, and removal of vegetation and rocks. That being said, this lawn will have a great chance to remain weed free and outperform the sod at the other side of the fence line.