This is Skip Orth with Father and Son Pest and Lawn Solutions. And today what we're going to demonstrate is how to patch in a piece of sod into an area of your lawn that perhaps has declined. As you go through this growing season, different things happen to areas of the lawn, and it's not uncommon to have an area, or two or three decline. And instead of waiting for that sod to recover or for that part of the lawn to recover and come back, a lot of times you may just want to take a piece of sod and patch into that area. That way it looks good and you don't have to wait for the lawn to recover in that area. So I'm going to demonstrate how to do that today.
So we've chosen an area here in the lawn that has declined. As you can see, we have healthy grass out here, but this area right in here has started to decline. You can see the different runners where it's starting to recover. And there's a runner here in this area. If I gave it enough time, this area would fill back in. However, if I don't want to wait for it to do that, I can just take a couple pieces of sod and prep this area, lay the sod in, and it'll look as good as new. So we're going to demonstrate how to do that. The first thing I want to do is, I want to get an idea of the area that I'm going to be prepping.
So what I'm going to do, I'm going to lay the sod here and I'm going to just lay it on top of the area where I'm going to be placing the sod. I've got the sod bordering the good grass here, and I'm going to grab a shovel and I'm going to just go around and outline the edges of the sod so I can see where I need to prep that area.
Okay. So I've got that marked out, going to remove the sod and I can see the line that I made with my shovel to give me a guide of where I need to prep this. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to prep this the easiest way I found to prep it. I could take a shovel and skim off all the old grass and a little bit of the new, but the quickest, fastest way to do this is with a weed eater. So I'm going to show you how to do that. Let me grab my weed eater here, and I'm just going to scalp this area down with a weed eater. And after I scalp down I'm going to take a rake and just clean it up a little bit. Now you can do this with either a hard rake or a soft rake. Just get out all the junk and just loosen up the dirt just a little bit.
So now we have our area prepped. I'm going to lay our pieces of sod in here, like that. Now let me show you a little shortcut that will make this a new grass nice and even with the other sod. What I want to do is, I want to stick my shovel in the dirt, right in front of the sod like that, and then pry the existing grass up a little bit, like that, all the way around. Stick the shovel about halfway in the ground and just pull back just a little bit.
Like that. Then once I've gone around and I pulled all that back, then I just step on it and it creates a nice even transition all the way around the new sod. Like that. And just want to make sure this new sod gets plenty of water. This time of year it's relatively cool so it may only need to be watered a couple of times a week until it roots in. During the middle of the summer you'd want to water it at least every day, maybe even twice a day, while it's getting established. But that's how you patch in an area of your lawn that has declined.
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