Good video. Thanks.

You don't have to wait for warmer weather to sod. That is part of the beauty of sod.

Fescue is the grass you want. It is the most shade tolerant of the cool weather grasses.

You have a tree issue that would be good to fix before you get started with the sod. One of your trees comes out of the ground like a telephone pole. The trees to either side exhibit "root flare" where the bottom of the trunk expands out and part of the root structure shows. That is what your telephone pole tree should look like. The bark on the roots is made for being underground. The bark on the trunk is NOT made for being underground. The trunk bark can get a fungal disease that will girdle the tree and kill it. I suggest you use your hose and wash away the soil that is up against the bark of the trunk until you see the root flare like on the other trees. Once that is done, you can either contour the entire surface to incorporate the base of all the trees or you could build a barricade around the one tree that is planted much lower and leave the contour where it is now.

Don't till the area. First of all tilling for turf is a bad idea but also you would never get a tiller to go more than an inch or two deep with the tree roots right there.

Your grass in that are is in competition with tree roots for moisture. At the same time that grass is more shaded and less affected by direct sun. Watering properly in here will be a trick. I would still try for deep and infrequent when you do water.

When the grass comes in, reset your mower to the highest setting for most of the year. The grass in the shade needs as much surface to photosynthesize as you can give it.

Another alternative in there would be a different ground cover. There are some grassy looking ground covers and some that are not. You might check around the neighborhood to see what others have done under their trees. If you are not using that particular area for human use, a completely different approach might work better. Two ground covers I have are Asiatic jasmine and dwarf monkey (mondo) grass. I don't expect those would work in your climate but who knows. We also have a plant we call cast iron which grows under all circumstances. It is not necessarily a ground cover but it becomes so dense that is does the same thing but sits 3 feet high.

This picture shows the dwarf monkey grass (invasive little devil) in the middle of my St Augustine. Above and out of the picture are three live oak trees providing year round shade. Surrounding the trees, and just barely in the picture, is the cast iron plant (broad leafy stuff). My wife planted four cast iron plants at the base of each tree and within a few years it looks like what you see here.

{{gwi:85314}}

Anyway you can see the dwarf mondo grass looks like grass. It grows in very dense shade and really never needs to...

Where do you live? Fescue will be a good choice in some areas, but not in areas where it gets too hot.

Also, the fescues you want are fine fescues, not tall fescues. Fine fescues include chewings fescue, hard fescue and creeping red fescue. Of those, only the red fescue spreads. The others are bunch grasses.

I haven't used this myself, but I've read good things about the Bonny Dunes mix. You should be able to find sources for it if you google Bonny Dunes fescue.

thanks dchall,

great info, i'll heed it wisely.