The weather has been so great, it's the perfect time to get some grass in the back yard for Owen. I want it to have some time to acclimate before the heat of the summer comes. This is a before picture I took shortly after we moved in, in September. The grass was so fried. We started watering it, but the only thing that grew was weeds.

This was yesterday after I ripped out all the dead sod. It came up pretty easy.

Then I started digging to turn the soil, and added a few bags of manure and lawn starter soil from Home Depot.

Nick came home from school in time to see me rake it all out, and get this picture.

He wanted to get in on the fun so he dug up a dead tree. (That looked harder than the dead sod.)

I thought I'd wait for Saturday to buy and lay the sod, but Nick told me he'd be too busy at school studying. So what the heck, I decided to do it today, and get it over with. It would have been nice to have a truck for times like this.
The guy loading our car at Star Nursery got a kick out of us. I had to put Owen in the front seat so there would be enough room for it to fit in back.

At this point I was a little intimidated with the task at hand.


Those pieces of grass are dang heavy! I had to carry them one at a time. Luckily we have a tiny backyard, and there were only 40 pieces of sod (only?!?!?) Nevertheless, it took less than 2 1/2 hours to get it all down. I've helped lay sod once many years ago in Alaska, so I had an idea of how to do it. Nick got to come home to a green backyard. The finished (almost) product:

We still have some trees and shrubs to replace before we will be completely satisfied.
Now, what do I do with this mess?

The funny part? The grass turned my knees green. It didn't take very long for me to discover that they spray the grass green so that it doesn't look so dormant in the winter. Gross. (Don't look too close, I haven't shaved for a couple days) Gross.