Grass or Weed? How You View Your Sod Texture and Color May Depend on Where You’r From!
Do you have preconcieved notions of how grass should look and feel? Consider the texture and Sod color of your grass. It may be more important than you think!
– Sod Texture
To some it may sound strange to consider the sod texture of our lawn while others will see the sod texture of thier lawn as a deal breaker. We have predispositions to texture that have been with us all our lives and are not likely to change anytime soon. Why would we not automatically apply those same predispositions to sod texture?
We consider texture everyday in our choices everyday, in everything around us.
– The type of clothes we wear…do we prefer the feel and look of cotton to wool or silks over polyester?
– The food we eat …has every mother not seen her baby as he begins to eat differnet baby foods spit out the same one he ate with no problem before because it is a thicker texture? Can you not stand the feel of an oyster in our mouth or do you, like me, wash your collard greens a ridiculous amount of times lest there be a single grain of sand when you take a bite?
– The way we prefer to wear our hair… for every woman that stands in front of a mirror trying to make her curly for that special occasion there is one doing the exact opposite thing and standing in front of her mirror taking a straightener to her curls to flatten them out!
Texture is important and we all have our preferences. The type and texture of sod in our lawn will be no exception to this scrutiny of texture we apply to everything we see and feel.
I can’t tell you how many times I have laughed as a recent Florida transplant from the North tells me that this stuff we call grass is what they spent all of their weekends pulling out of their otherwise beautiful lawns. “You have weeds for a lawn here?” Funny but true, it’s a no brainer that they will prefer the look and feel of Centipede grass sod to St. Augustine grass sod because in their mind it feels under their feet the way a lawn should, no “squishing around on a ridiculously thick carpet of who knows what under your feet”. They have simply used theri predisposition to sod textures to dislike the rough thick St. Augustine sod they see being used all over Florida. Its all about sod texture preferences!
I once even had a customer who had no other requirement than sod texture, she was adamantly willing to do whatever it took to get a lawn that she could walk on with bare feet and have the grass feel like the one she remembered playing on as a child. She wanted to feel the ground under her feet and have a soft thin bladed grass between her toes. She didn’t care what color it was, that it would go brown in the winter, if it was going to burn when her dog decided to use it as his fire hydrant replacement or that it would be a lighter kelly-green color. The Texture of the grass was the only deciding factor for her decision of what type of sod to use on her new lawn.
– Sod Color
Once again our predisposition to sod color will affect whether we like the appearance of one sod color to another. While St. Augustine grass even at its worst is a nice deep forest green, Bermuda will never be that deep dark green sod color no matter how much fertilizer you give it! I have seen many a lawn damaged by people unknowingly adding unnecessary fertilizer to grass to make it a shade of green it was never meant to be.
I, being a long time Floridian think that lawns are a deep green fluffy carpet because everywhere you look St. Augustine sod is what is predominantly used as a lawn grass here, it is what I am used to.
Not only do I think that my sods color should be a deep green but I expect it to stay that way so that my pictures on ‘Facebook’ of my kids in the grass at Christmas time make all my friends wonder if I really just took that photo, and are they wearing shorts? J Year round green is what grass is “supposed to do.” In my book it’s a Florida thing, like beaches and palm trees. “This is Florida, we don’t get snow, but we get green grass in January!” Like I said I’ve been in Florida a long time….I went to visit a friend in Pennsylvania one winter, it was hateful, I looked outside the window and saw a ‘snow flurry’ and asked her what these little bugs were that were flying around outside! I thought the snow was some weird little swarm of whitefly in December. Ya, it happened, you can’t make this stuff up, only a true Floridian would mistake snow for a bug infestation. No snow here, but lots of bugs and green grass in December, a trade off, and a good trade at that if you ask any Floridian native.
So, needless to say, I prefer a deep green, while a good friend of mine thinks that the deep green lawn isn’t natural and that a nice soft medium green lawn is the way to go and “OF COURSE IT IS BROWN IN THE WINTER, ITS GRASS! DUH! ” ( Forgive her she’s not from here, she’s a snowbird that landed and didn’t take off come spring, but I like her anyway! )