1. Having my neighborhood go up in flames 2. Having my neighborhood washed away in a flood 3. Having my neighborhood be swallowed up in the next quake, #1 No fires if you stay away from the hill's where there are lots of old dead tree's #2 Floods - Just stay away from those few areas #3 Will yea Earth Quakes are defiantly scary! Can't do much about that. I would recommend a one story ground level house. As you can see I have a two story Cape Cod style home. I'm always worried we will get shook off our foundation. Earthquake insurance it is too expensive with huge deductibles! Everything does grow good here though. Weather is nice most the year. LetÂs see sod laying tips. When I lay sod I straighten the sod edges and corners as I go and make sure no grass gets stuck between the sod edges. This will avoid dead grass and brown and yellow stripes between the sod pieces that can make fungus and just makes for a bad start. I spray the ground with water and put down a little fertilizer as I lay the sod. I always use my square so I get nice square edges when I cut sod. Sometimes I donÂt even till the ground. Sod will live on the patio if you water it. I do it all the time. DonÂt over water your new lawn. Get out there and lift up the sod and see how wet it is. If you over water your new lawn you will get chlorosis and fungus like I have now from too much rain. If I need to replace a small spot I use a plate or bucket for a stencil and cut out the bad piece. Then I use the plate or bucket to cut a new piece of sod from extra sod that I keep on the patio or garden. If you are going to put in French drains or remove and replace tree's itÂs better to do it first. I did it all backwards. I have a spot were an old tree and its roots were removed and it keeps sinking along with the trenches were I put the drains. If you put drains. It is good to attach your rain gutter down spouts to them. Also if you dig your ditch for your sprinklers try to keep the top soil separate from any clay soil that may be down lower and put the soil back in the whole the same way you took it out. The grass grows better on the top soil than the clay. ThatÂs about all I can think of for now other than I like Blue Grass because it self fills. But. If you have shade you will need to over seed now and then were it thins out. I left a link below to other garden pics. I like to grow fruit trees as well. I get all my info for the roses and fruit tree's here on GardenWeb. Take care Dave Here is a link that might be useful: Garden Pics

Darlin, fraid I can't help you. It never occurred to me to put grow lights on a lawn. Do people actually do this? This isn't a joke, is it? My approach to my lawn is to kind of chill out and see what the flow of nature is. Put things where they grow best, water with what falls from the sky, if one thing doesn't work, put in something else. I'm farther and farther from grass lawn every year. But to address your situation from a horticultural standpoint, if you have 4 hrs of light (I'm assuming you mean full sunlight) under your tree in the summer, you still have light, meaning not dense shade, in the winter. There should be strains of grass that could grow there. I'm from Fla, so I'm not familiar with grass varieties in your neck of the woods. If you're not satisfied with performance of the sod you ordered, if they told you it would grow under the tree and it hasn't, you should be due a refund or new product. Have you consulted with not just one but several landscape specialists - try to find one that employs someone with an actual hort degree. Then again, I'm sure you've seen many beautiful yards that have areas of groundcover or plantings where grass won't grow. I'm sure you could get wonderful plans from a garden designer or landscape architect, and have the plantings installed, and maintained, for mucho less dineros than what you're planning. And you'd probably end up happier. Cause trying to make grass grow where it's not natural for it is going to be one long headache, I expect. Besides light, there will be bugs, fungus, disease, other assorted weirdness. I find it's more satisfying to flow with nature than to try and beat her into submission. But what do I know, maybe this grow-lighting of lawns is perfectly common where you live, in which case you should be able to find lots of good advice. I'm sorry, it just seems so strange to me. Hey, what about AstroTurf? Or painted-on lawns? Last summer there were a couple of companies painting lawns. I kid you not. Anyway, good luck to you.

Grass-killing herbicide, applied according to directions, would work. Whatever you do, better get on it as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the more challenging the job.

My house was on the back of a 1-acre lot on the edge of town. The only tall grass was back by the house, so you had to stop and look kinda hard to see that the grass was that tall. If you were going to be offended, you had to stop and make a big deal out of it. When it's all the same height, it still looks manicured, especially at a distance. Well it turns out there was an ordinance against eyesore lots. The ordinance had words to the effect that you could not have piles of junk with weeds, grass, or plants growing 18 inches high. We all know what this ordinance is there for - so people will not toss their junk on the street and let grass and weeds grow up through it. I did not have piles of junk. I could walk down my street and find at least 5 other houses with piles of trash and weeds growing up through them for 6 months or more. The problem with my house is that it used to belong to a prominent lady in local politics and the church. She was one of those "GET OFF MY LAWN" people who took exceptional pride in the appearance of the yard. She passed away and it went to hell. A guy bought the house to rent the rooms and I bought from him. He let half the lawn die completely. All this happened so fast that the neighbors and friends of the original lady seriously resented my "letting the lawn go." So I was selected for one-time enforcement of the ordinance. I showed up at a city hall meeting and convinced them they needed to print a lot more signs and enforce the rules everywhere in town. They did that and quickly overwhelmed the enforcement employees. I also took issue with the word, plants, in the ordinance. Strict wording of the ordinance would prohibit any plants taller than 18 inches. Everyone has plants taller than that. I started mowing the lawn down to 17 inches to test my skills at passive aggression. A year later they rewrote the ordinance taking the plant/grass/weed height down to 12 inches. So I mowed at 11 inches. Mowing that high takes a string trimmer and actually goes pretty fast - much faster than mowing with a mower. So it was nice for awhile and then not so much fun, but I did learn a lot about lawn care.