Our front lawn had never really thrived. It looked stressed and started developing some brown spots a few months after it was installed. And it showed striping, with rows of greener and browner areas.
Given that our watering system was in rows under the lawn, this meant that something with the watering was wrong, but I couldn’t quite figure out whether it was getting over watered or under watered. At times it looked really bad, and I’d spend some time watering it by hand, and it would perk up a bit.
If you tried to stick a moisture meter in the lawn to measure how wet the soil was, first, it was very hard to get it in. Second, it almost always showed very moist, even if the surface of the lawn was very dry. We determined that when it was installed, the soil wasn’t properly tilled and amended, such that the sod was laid on top of very compact native soil. We decided to replace it this month.
When our landscapers went to remove the grass they said it peeled off just like sod; it had never gotten established. Additionally, the noticed that the watering system had the tubes 20″ or so apart, where they really needed to be 12″ apart.
So the old irrigation was ripped out, and the soil was tilled and amended.
There it is pre-irrigation. You could tell a big difference in the color and consistency of the amended and tilled soil. The irrigation installation was a pretty big project. It involved building “headers” on either side of the lawn and connecting them with the irrigation tubing.
The irrigation tubing was then buried a couple of inches under the soil, and the sod laid on top. The end result looks simply amazing.
Combined with replacement of some other plants that hadn’t done well, and re-mulching of the yard makes for quite a pop.
With the finishing of our pool and the refreshing of our landscaping, our house now really feels done.
There are still small projects here and there, and we are waiting for delivery of all of our outdoor furniture, but we now have a settled feeling like we haven’t had before.