WAIT A MINUTE. Okay y'all, if you think you have an addition question that will help you improve your lawn PLEASE start a new topic if you have ANY question related to new sod. dreabird I would love to interact with you on your issue, but I'm holding back. Here's why... jberger went the wrong direction and while he did get good advice, it did not go far enough or get the normal attention his question deserved simply because this was not his topic. I am not the forum police or even the moderator. I happen to be a moderator on other lawn forums, and have had to deal with this issue. I am just trying to get the best information out to the people who need it. Tacking questions on to other people's topics is not the best way to do that. J GIL, good advice, but you're only encouraging them. This topic should have died 5 years ago.

Whoa, hold on a second. The advice of seeding a Bolero Plus lawn isn't exactly great. Here's how I would handle this situation. First of all, are you on a sprinkler system? If not, I would seriously consider a system if you're wanting to keep a lawn in any kind of consistent shape. They're actually not that difficult to install yourself. Second, do you want it to remain Bolero Plus? If you do then I would strongly suggest NOT seeding it. The problem with seeding is that Bolero Plus has the potential of a 6 foot root system whereas any seed you buy at a local store is usually never going to get to 1 foot little long 6 so you will always have grasses competing against one another. If you want to remain Bolero Plus, I have a feeling that the problem you had initially lies in your soil preparation. If you planted your sod right on top of good old San Jose soil then you essentially planted it in clay. I live in San Jose and have had to learn about the soil the hard way. If you run a ph test on the soil, it looks great, in fact it's fantastic but the fact remains, it's still clay. If you planted just in San Jose soil then you might as well rip up the entire mess because you will be fighting it forever. There will be constant brown spotting and all sorts of growing pains. So I would suggest doing some soil removal if you have to because in this soil, you want amendment at about 70/30, meaning 70% amendment and 30% regular soil. It might seem high but go out and dig down about 6 inches and grab out enough soil to form a ball about the size of a baseball. Check out the consistency and you'll see what I'm talking about. If you rub your finger over the ball does it seem like the soil breaks loose easily? I bet it doesn't. That's NOT what you want to plant sod into. So I suggest no less and 18 inches of amended soil. Also add in a good lawn fertilizer as your mixing in the amendment. Try to save enough prior to finishing to add another inch or two on the top because you want to tamp down this stuff, just a little, don't want it compacted but you want some of the air out of it too. That's what you'll use the 1 or 2 inches of left over for, to recover what you tamp down. Now, when you lay the sod, have a very large bucket or something that you can place the entire roll of sod into. Fill it with water and sink the sod into it so that the water covers it completely. You'll see the air bubbles finally stop once it's soaked through. Don't be afraid to be a little rough on the soil side of the sod because the dirt that holds it together isn't always the best stuff to plant with. (Repost possibly?) Roll it out, tamp it down lightly. If the roll is moving around then you need to figure out a way to move it around until it stops moving. After you roll it all out, don't be afraid to water it, in fact a good soaking won't hurt at all. You also need to water it every day for about two weeks. I water my grass every day but it's simple because everything is electronic and I don't usually waste water. Good luck!

Floratam. It would be Floratab if the guy had allergies that day. You can save it. What happened is it got a fungal disease. There is nothing you can do about anything until you get rid of the disease. If you pulled up the old sod and put down fresh new sod, the new sod would be dead in 3 weeks. Ask me how I know that!! Summer time in south FL is too hot for chemical fungicides, not that I would ever recommend one to anyone. The only practical solution, believe it or not, is whole ground corn meal applied at 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet over the entire lawn. When corn meal decomposes it attracts a predatory fungus called Trichoderma (try koh DER mah). It will take 3 weeks to see the improvement but by then the grass should be coming back strong, especially in the full sun. Floratam does much better in full sun than in shade, but it will be fine once the disease is over and done. If you want to continue with corn meal just to be sure you got it, that's fine. You can use corn meal any day, or every day, of the year. It won't hurt a thing. It provides a reasonable amount of fertilizer factor if you continually apply it. You should notice the yard turning deep green and all the new grass will be deep green. Here's what you should have done instead of watering 30 minutes per day. You should have watered at most, 10 minutes, 3 times per day, for 3 weeks or until the roots knit down into the underlying soil/sand. That might seem like 30 minutes per day, but when you spread it out it gives the moisture time to soak in and also evaporate in between. Now that you're where you are, you need to back waaaay off on watering frequency. Ideally this time of year you would be watering 1 inch, all at one time, per week. Measure 1 inch by putting cat food or tuna cans in the yard and turning on the sprinklers. Time how long it takes to fill the cans and that is your watering time from now on. Then shut off the water for a week or as long as the grass will go without looking wilty. If it looks wilted before a full week, then water it again immediately. It will develop deeper roots when you water like this and allow the soil/sand to dry out at the surface. Those deep roots will allow the grass to go longer and longer between watering. If it rains, don't water until the grass needs it. Rain is different from irrigation water and seems to allow the grass to go much longer than you would let it go from irrigation. By the way my oscillator sprinkler takes 8 hours to fill the cans, so be prepared for anything. High flow undergrounds systems can apply an inch in 20 minutes. Also you should be mowing at the mower's highest setting. There is never a reason to mow Floratam lower than the highest setting. If your mower can stand it you can go 2 weeks between mowing. The problem there is Floratam grows extremely dense and requires a lot of horsepower to get through it. Weekly should work, but even that might be too dense to get through for lower powered mowers and most electric mowers. Floratam was developed by the University of Florida and Texas A&M University. Texas A&M goes by TAMU here in Texas, so the name of the grass came from blending all that together.

Yeah, it got scalped for sure but if it's rooting it'll be OK. Only cut the top 1/3 of the blade each mow in the future. I tell everybody to use fish fertilizer for a quick boost, it's like caffeine for the grass. Rooting hormone from the local nursery is also great. Spray the brown areas especially & hopefully a bluegrass expert will post up about ongoing maintenance and fertilizer needs. Young sod is all about the roots for the first year, so stay organic whenever possible & build the soil, your grass will be thank you for years to come.