Dave, I'm not really sure about using a sod cutter, but moistening the lawn is often suggested to make mechanical routines easier. Moist soil will give easier than hard, dry soil. You might want to call and ask a local landscaper to be certain. I don't doubt it though. If you do moisten it, keep in mind moist doesn't mean wet. You don't want to have to create a sloppy mess. You just want the labor of the job to go easier on your back. LOL David knows way more about St. Augustine soil requirement than I do, so I'm not disputing him. I am just most accustomed to sandy soil being unable to retain moisture. I'm thinking that since you are cutting away the sod anyway, it might be a good time to correct the soil composition. The following links might be helpful. Information here to help explain soil composition. Information here to explain grading zones. Information here on using a sod cutter

ibuzzard - yes, constantly adding organic matter after harvest before the next crop. To speed things up bring in a lot of organic matter as manure + bedding to compost in piles set aside from the current gardening beds. Then after harvest rake those on to the beds if you let some lay fallow or put what is crumbling & dark brown on beds you plan to replant right away. It takes awhile to build enough compost to cover all the beds at all times, but with diligence you can do it. The small animal manures like chicken & rabbits are potent, but not the quantity you'd need. Get a hold of some horse manures and you'll be able to speed up the process. Ten years of using chicken, duck & rabbit manures from our backyard animals (Plus liberal amounts of used coffee grounds + shredded leaves mown over on the lawn in fall. Plus our kitchen waste compost bin contents.)... didn't up the soil organic matter content as much as when we started adding horse manure as well composting first in piles or spreading in fall on fallow beds. Volume made a huge difference though I was quite skeptical in the beginning, afraid of weeds & then learned about the herbicide residue in some hay fed to livestock. I made sure we used manure from horses fed alfalfa hay instead. Now after at least 3 years of horse manures we no longer need 6-12 inches of it added in the fall to break down. The soil is light, fluffy and diggable with hands rather than pickaxe like before.

It is impossible to change clay soil to sandy soil. Your soil composition is the result of millions of years of geologic effects of earthquakes, glacial movement, oceans coming and going, etc. More recently, the bulldozers that excavated the lot that your home is built on may have had a significant effect on your soil, but even that was probably minimal. If you try to add sand to your clay soil, I'm afraid you'll end up with something very close to concrete. The best way to improve the drainage of your soil is to incorporate organic material such as compost, shredded leaves, wood chips, peat, manure, etc. these will all increase the ability of water and air and nutrients to flow through the soil, which increases the availability of these items to the plant roots. Unfortunately, these additions need to be made repeatedly since the micro-organisms in the soil break the organic matter down, which is how it becomes available to the plants. Fortunately, nature cycles in such a way that organic matter is replaced yearly as fallen leaves each autumn. That is why the soil in deciduous forests is so rich, and why our ancestors cut down all the trees to grow crops. Unfortunately, they also cut down part of the very source of the rich soil. I hope that answers your question, though not in the way you hoped. Martha

Starting a new garden can be frustrating! I feel your pain. I might recommend starting the seeds in trays or pots, then transplanting into the ground when they're big enough to handle. That might help you deal with what you've got this year. I wrote this for someone else, actually 2 other people, but hope you may find some value in it also... If you've got more time than energy, like I do, smothering and lasagna is the easiest way to start a new garden bed for free, or almost. Sooo much easier than digging up grass. Just spread newspaper (about 10 sheets thick) or cardboard, overlapping well, until the area you want to be a bed is covered. Then cover the paper with 4-6" of finely shredded mulch and wait for the grass to die, usually 4-6 weeks but could be longer for some grasses. I've done this many, many times. My latest one is really ugly but I'm just trying to make lemonade out of lemons with this one... drought (probably aided by grubs) killed the grass here so I decided that would be the new sunny front bed I was considering. I did dig out a little spot that had hardly any grass and put some Cannas and Gladiolus there, a tiny baby maple tree, some Hibiscus cuttings which still just look stupid 'cuz they're "dead" sticks in the ground, then kind of working around it with smothering, and bark chips, which aren't my preference but I had them available. They don't stay in place if it ever rains really hard. Anyway, with this, I'm not planning to leave the bark chips there, they're just making sure the newspaper is held firmly to the contours of the ground to block the air and light from reaching the grass, which is what is needed to kill it. Whenever I can find more shredded hardwood, I'll replace the bark chips. Anyway, the newspaper decomposes and does not need to be removed later, just dig through it to add plants in the ground. I've also smothered grass with stuff that was handy, but does have to be removed to use the bed, like sheets of metal, old egg crate mattress topper, the bags of mulch that will cover the spot, whatever's handy. I think it's easier to wait for the grass to die than dig it up, and I don't mind if it has to get more ugly in the process of getting more pretty. One other benefit of smothering with a leave-in-place substance like paper or cardboard is that the weed seeds that may be in the ground are unable to germinate as they might be if you just dug up the grass and/or tilled. The lasagna comes into play if you add amendment layers to your smothering. For example, you could put the paper/cardboard, then kitchen scraps, ready to use compost, leaves, yard trimmings, whatever organic material (OM) that is handy, then the mulch (or not, if the other stuff is a thick enough layer to hold the paper in place and block the light.) It's not necessary to have lasagna layers when smothering, but when planting later, there's a huge improvement if a lot of OM was placed there. AND, while...