Planting Grass

Now that spring is here, you may want to consider planting grass to spruce up your lawn.  The winter often shows where your lawn needs the most help, and the wet weather of spring can be a big help.  By the way, fall is also a good time to plant.

The two primary ways of planting new grass in a lawn is:

1. Laying Sod
2. Planting Grass Seed

In both cases, you'll want to prepare the land.  It's good to have tilled and graded land (churned up and smoothed out) to get ready for planting.  You'll want to remove plants, roots and rocks.  Once you've prepared your area, you'll want to decide which way you're going: seeding or laying sod.

Sod is quick, much less work and looks great.  But it's also much more expensive.  Sod can cost as much as 50 cents for a square foot of sod. That can add up.  Where a 50 pound bag of Kentucky Blue grass seed may only cost $120, but it will also plant over 16,750 square feet. HOW BIG IS YOUR YARD?Rectangular YardFour Sided (irregular) YardTriangular AreaThat's the difference between$120 in seed and $4,000 to$8,000 in sod, but again, someone else has done a lot of work, and with sod you almost instantly have a lawn.

Another important consideration is the type of grass.  This, in part, dictates how much grass seed you'll need.  Furthermore, some types of grass are not well suited for different climates.  What might do well in the Pacific North West may not survive at all in a dry climate.   The Types of Grass graphic shows some guidance of the types of grasses that are common in different regions.

Note 1: This vCalc web page has numerous embedded calculators to make it easy to compute the numbers you'll need on your project.  Every place you see CLICK HERE, a pop-up calculator is ready to help you.  Click on these, and enter your measurements.  You'll find that they are a great help.

Note 2: This article and its calculators are for planting grass in a lawn and not for grass planted in a pasture.   Lawns are planted much more densely, in some cases 17x as much seed.  To compute the amount of seed needed for a pasture, CLICK HERE. Thanks to our new friend Sarah K. for asking about pastures.

First things first.  Before you can even start to estimate the amount of products you'll need, you should know the size of the area you're planting.  The following list has pop-up calculators to help you make the calculations.  In each case, you'll need to make some measurements outside with tape measurer.

• To compute the area of a four sided area with roughly square corners, CLICK HERE.
• To compute the area of a four sided garden without square corners, CLICK HERE
• To compute the area of a garden with three sides, CLICK HERE