Choosing and installing

After I had the soil ready, I had to choose and choose wisely. Now, I don't think I could have made a seriously bad choice with any of the varieties Western Sod had to choose from. They would have all grown well, and looked great. However, for me, it came down to three factors;

1) Durability
2) Drought Tolerance
3) Easy maintenance

I was torn between BOBsod, which they use in a lot of baseball stadiums, and Tifway419. The BOBsod has all the characteristics I was looking for, but the Tifway is a little more durable and easy to maintain. Remember, my field is going to get a lot play time from my two little guys, and they can be rough on grass. Tifway recovers so well, they can't really hurt it for long.

The other factor I had to consider, although not so much, was my mower. I have an excellent mower, but it's rotary mower. Most experts recommend a reel mower for hybrid bermuda. The reason being you get a more even cut and you don't have to constantly sharpen the blades. For now, I'm sticking with the rotary but a reel is in my sights for the future.

Back to the sod.

I went ahead and ordered the Tifway 419 for delivery. They dropped it off the next week as scheduled. Because it was early January, the sod was over-seeded with rye grass and looked great. It comes on wooden pallets and boy does it weigh a lot per roll. I'd guess 50lbs at least. The night we got it, there was a slight rain shower so that helped to keep it moist the next day. In fact it rained pretty much the whole time we installed it, but just enough to keep things a little damp, which was nice.

I had the help of my Dad and Father-in-Law for the installation. I highly recommend getting a few people to help out if you want to get the job done in a timely manner. Without their help, I would've been one hurtin' sonofagun. We got it all laid, according to the instructions on the Western Sod website. It took about 3 hours to get it all in and trimmed out how I wanted it. I used a drywall saw to cut the sod and it really worked wonders on the thick roots of the muddy turf.

As soon as the sod was laid, I cut a three foot circle freehand in the center of the infield for the pitchers mound. I made my first cut in the center, worked my out about 1.5 feet, then cut a circle around it. Though mine came out really well this way, I wouldn't recommend this technique. I got really lucky.

So, the last step was to roll the sod with the roller. This took me about an hour. No big deal to get it level since I had spent so much time taking care of that beforehand. There was one spot in the outfield that was very spongy so I did my best to avoid rolling over that, and just kind of patted it down by hand. After I was done rolling...it just looked great.

Then it was time for....the clay.