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

I'd personally go for Penncross Creeping Bentgrass is you are going for that .5-.75" height. It is adapted well for that height. Its spreading ability is very lovely, much faster than KBG. I put an all bent backyard in last fall that I mow with a reel mower at .625" and it looked wonderful last fall. Here are a few pictures when the lawn was just over two months old planted from seed: Bent really hasn't been to complicated to take care of for me. The only issue I had is snow mold this spring, but since you live in VA, that shouldn't be a problem. Since you have an irrigation system, and a reel mower, you should be all set to tackle bent. It loves lots of nitrogen, which I will be giving in the form of Turfbuilder this spring, milorganite every 21-30 days this summer, Turfbuilder late summer, and winterizer in November. Not too hard of a plan to follow. If you have a good stand of bent, you shouldn't need any preemergents or weed killers. You can find Penncross Creeping Bentgrass seed at www.outsidepride.com or at your local Lesco. Seed your lawn at 1-2 lbs per 1000 sq feet, and you can pick the seed up for $12-$18 per lb. Good luck, and let us know what you do.

KBG mix (Award, Touchdown, NuGlade and a 4th that I cannot recall). Yeah, I used a combo of the skid steer and elbow grease to level it out. Dragging the bucket backwards is how I did it, but with the soil being so heavy from the rain, the bucket/hydraulics didn't have enough weight/power to be as effective as I thought. I definitely wouldn't suggest doing it the way I did, nor would I do it the same if I had to again. It was a first timer project and I wanted to stay under a certain budget (which meant doing all work myself and "improvising" where I needed to i.e. grading with a steer skid instead of a more recommended method) and giving my daughter a lawn to play on for the summer. Hopefully all will be well in the upcoming year...it'll be a test of time for my soil as well as the sod. I knew something was going on under my soil since it was beyond horrible. When I tilled the soil

While it is true that you can put down St. Augustine any time of the year but Fall is the best to do so. Why because the heat doesn't get to it. Water, right now you would not have to water near as much as in spring or summer. Plus if we had a wet spring it's a mess trying to work getting the sod laid down. If you have trees that have not lost their leaves may I suggests that once the leaves fall to leave them on the ground. This will help like a mulch and with the first sign of spring mow over the leaves. I did this one year and the grass really did great, even better than all the other areas that I've laid sod. If you don't have trees then don't worry about it but DO NOT USE REG. MULCH it's not the same. Don't use chemical fertilizers. Get some box's of Bone meal and Blood meal spread it over the grass and water it in. It takes at least 6 months for blood meal to work but bone meal helps right away with roots. You may still have a little time left for the roots to start taking hold before the grass goes dormant. I'm by no means an expert this info as only my experiences and I've been working on my yard for four years for ST. Augustine to take over it's nearly there but I've been doing plugs and playing the waiting game, for it to take over.