Brave New Lawn

One of our home projects for this Summer was to put a new lawn in the backyard. By the pictures below, you might wonder what was wrong with the lawn that was already there. For starters, consider that these pictures were taken in the late Spring when the grass was about as nourished and watered as it was going to get - yet there were already brown patches. But that's not the real reason.

The lawn consisted of Bermuda grass, which is popular down here, but I hated it from the first moment I saw it (back when we were looking at buying the house). No matter how well-watered it was, it still felt coarse and almost prickly. Plus, it is very invasive and constantly threatened to takeover my gardens. So, in early June, I hired a local greenhouse/garden supply center to swap this grass for another Southern classic - St. Augustine grass (wikipedia info on it). This is what we have in the front lawn and it is awesome stuff - incredibly green and very drought- and heat-resistant.

A few weeks AFTER I hired the company, they finally came and sprayed the lawn. That Bermuda grass was so nasty that it took another two weeks to start turning brown!

OK, already - it's dead... please come and plant the new lawn!

Another FOUR weeks passed (man, I miss the fabled New York minutes...) and the magical day arrived. St. Augustine grass doesn't grow via seed, so they installed hundreds of plugs. It was expected to take another two months for the plugs to spread (via above-ground runners). Danny wanted to get into the action, so he helped stomp down some of the plugs and also lent a hand watering.

The finished product looked pretty horrible, but an orderly kind of horrible.
This was early August.

And THIS is how it looks 5 weeks later (after a month of 100-degree plus
weather):

It's getting there - you can see the runners below - in no time this will fill in and Danny will have a nice soft lawn he can play on . Another project down...