In the U.S., St. Augustine grass is found from the Carolinas to Florida and westward along the Gulf Coast to Texas and in Southern and Central California. Because of its lack of winter hardiness, St. Augustine grass is restricted to areas with mild winter temperatures.

After establishment the success of St. Augustine grass as a lawn grass depends largely on management. Mowing, fertilization and supplemental watering are required to maintain a dense, green, weed-free turf of St. Augustine grass.

Mowing heights may range from 1 to 3 inches depending on the frequency of mowing and the degree of shade present. At mowing heights below two inches, St. Augustine grass should be mowed every five days during late spring and summer. At a 2 1/2 inch mowing height, a 7-10 mowing schedule is adequate. Above 2 1/2 inches, St. Augustine grass should be mowed at 10 to 14 day intervals. In moderate to dense shade, St. Augustine grass should be mowed at about 3 inches at 10 day intervals.

Each pallet of Raleigh St. Augustine sod covers approximately 450 Square Feet and contains approximately 160 pieces of sod

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Rob Nelson stands just outside the arc of a sprinkler and looks over 18,000 square feet of new turf that will be ready to harvest this week.

The manager of Southern Turf Hawaii, which first put down roots on Kaiminani Drive in November, Nelson just needs a customer.

As the sprinklers soak 3 acres of new grass at the farm, Nelson isnt worried about finding someone interested in purchasing his 2-by-4-foot squares of green, which run between $2 and $3 a square foot. Thats because Southern Turf Hawaii the biggest sod farm in the state with operations on Oahu and Maui has been shipping sod over on barges to meet Big Island demand.

The landscapers are busy, said Nelson, whose background is in golf course management on Oahu, Kauai and Lanai.

The Southern Turf Hawaii sign is a new sight on Kaiminani, but the company isnt new to the state. In business for two decades, stores on Oahu and Maui specialize in sod for residential, commercial, retail and golf course projects, including two current projects for golf courses on Maui and Lanai. And while Southern Turf Hawaii is used to having landscapers reserve sod by thousands of square yards months in advance, it also offers single 2-by-4-foot squares to the do-it-yourself homeowner.

The company supplies Lowes in Kona and The Home Depot on both sides of the island.

The 5.5 acres of leased land used to have plumerias growing on it. The property has been graded and covered with a layer of fine gravel, plastic and sod. A home on the lower acreage serves as Nelsons residence and a barn is in the planning stages. A water tank serves as an emergency backup in case county sources fail. Sod would be dead in three days if water sources failed, Nelson said.

People are stopping by now, asking questions. How do I do it? Were here to help, Nelson says. This is foreign to a lot of homeowners.

One method called plugging can help landscapers save money. By cutting up the sheets of sod into plugs, theyll only need a fifth of the turf that would be needed for a full layer. Once in the ground, the sod will spread quickly to cover bare ground.

Come buy only what you can put down in one day, Nelson recommends.

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Sod company lays down roots in Kona

Dave Kuypers is pleased to just be opening his course.

Kuypers, the superintendent of Cutten Fields in Guelph, Ont., has struggled with ice damage on much of the green.

Golfers will be out playing this weekend, he says. They wont be putting on greens though.

Cutten Fields, a historic private course, is one of numerous Ontario golf facilities that faced an unusual amount of damage from ice and the extreme cold that occurred through to the end of March.

READ MORE: Toronto golf courses in the rough, but open for business

Most golf courses are open in April in Ontario. This year many are just opening in coming days, while others have opened with damaged greens that are brown because the Poa annua grass died after being under ice for more than 45 straight days.

Owen Russell knew he had a problem when the smell hit him.

Russell, the superintendent at Markland Woods in Etobicoke, Ont. for the past eight years, ventured out on his course in February, worried about the impact of ice and cold on his clubs greens. Like many superintendents concerned about how the coldest winter in the last three decades would affect his course, Russell drilled through the ice to see what was happening with the grass underneath.

I knew from the smell that we had a problem, he says. It smelled bad, sort of like rotten eggs.

WATCH: Conditions were questionable as Torontos public golf courses opened for the season in April.

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Cold winter leads to golf course struggles

Century-old sod wall highlight for researchers, students

The little house on the prairie is not so little anymore.

A team of interdisciplinary researchers has begun analysis on part of a 110-year-old sod house that was once home to a group of Custer County, Neb. pioneers.

This is the oddest project I have ever worked on, said John Carter, senior research folklorist/associate editor at the Nebraska State Historical Society. We have a lot of disciplines bringing together a lot of resources toward a central goal. Never in my life have I been a part of such a thing, nor have I ever had as much fun.

Built by Henry Eugene Chrisman in 1902-03, the sod house was originally a three-room dwelling with exterior doors into each room. The house is unique in that no other with its plan has been recorded in Nebraska.

Two years ago, Larry Estes, whose family owns the sod house, contacted archaeologists at the historical society to survey the property.

That is where I got involved, Carter said. I have a long and deep interest in sod houses, as they are not only cultural features on the landscape; they are part of the landscape.

Custer County is the epicenter of sod house construction, with more sod buildings there than anywhere else in North America, Carter said.

The project involves studying a 4-by-8-foot chunk of the sod house deemed the sod wall, which was removed from the house in November 2013. Pete Stegen of NET produced a video of the teardown available at http://go.unl.edu/ghxe.

I see these sod blocks as archived samples taken from a prairie in 1902, said Dave Wedin, professor of plant and ecosystem ecology in UNLs School of Natural Resources. Its rare to find plant and soil samples that old. These samples can give us insights into how that prairie functioned over a century ago before the onset of modern agriculture and all the changes in our landscape.

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Century-old sod wall highlight for researchers, students

Atlanta, Georgia (PRWEB) April 30, 2014

This April, just in time for spring green-up, Super-Sod added the Allett Classic and Kensington lawn mowers to their array of landscaping products. The lawn care experts at Super-Sod became enamored with Allett mowers because they are reel or "cylinder" mowers designed and built to deliver professional results, but with homeowner circumstances and budgets in mind.

Reel mowers are desirable because the cylinder of blades rotates against a bed knife, thereby cutting grass with a scissor-like action, versus a rotary mower that chops blades of grass in half with a machete-like action that renders a jagged cut to each blade of grass. The reel's scissor cut makes a clean cut that not only looks tidier - it gives a lawn the advantage of reduced water loss after mowing (a jagged cut has more surface area, thus more water is lost from the plant).

Besides the clean cut, reel mowers are also beneficial for warm-season lawns (zoysia, bermuda, centipede) because reels mow at a lower height than rotary mowers can feasibly mow and, with the lower cut height, reels promote a tighter, denser turf that looks especially handsome. Plus, rollers on professional mowers produce the beautiful striping effect as seen on showpiece lawns.

On Alletts, mow height is extremely easy to adjust with just the turn of a knob and a full-width drum roller on the back produces the sought-after lawn striping patterns. Yet, there is another compelling reason why Allett mowers are so intriguing and functional: they are designed with an interchangeable cartridge system.

A standard blade cartridge comes with each mower, but an additional six feature cartridges (verticutter, dethatcher, lawn brush, aerator, scarifier, and a cartridge with more blades) can be easily removed and replaced to accomplish more lawn care ventures. The Allett Classic and Kensington are more than just lawn mowers, they are multipurpose lawn care machines for home lawns.

Another advantage to having a removable cartridge of blades is that the cartridge alone can be taken to the shop for sharpening, rather than the entire mower. While the one cartridge is sharpened, a spare can be used for mowing, reducing down time of the mower.

Reel mowers are standard equipment on golf courses and a few high-end landscapers own these coveted machines; however, they are normally priced totally out of range of what a homeowner could ever afford. With the Allett Classic priced at $999.00 and the Kensington at $1,609.00, quality reel mowers that will deliver professional results (clean cut, low cut, striping, plus optional cartridge functions) are attainable by homeowners.

Super-Sod is a family-run business that employs experts in turf and horticulture. One of their most popular products has been their Soil3 organic compost, delivered in a cubic yard BigYellowBag, which they make partially from composted grass clippings from their sod production. Super-Sod continues to develop new garden products, foster gardening and landscaping, and always seeks to improve their farming practices, technology, environmental stewardship, and employee knowledge.

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Super-Sod Now Sells Affordable, Versatile Allett Reel Mowers for Home Lawns

Like most kids growing up in Brazil, Roberto Gurgel dreamed of being on the field for a World Cup.

That never happened. So this summer, Gurgel is settling for the next-best thing by helping to build five of the fields that will be used for the first World Cup in his native country in 64 years.

Gurgel is executive director of research for Sod Solutions, a South Carolina-based company that develops and licenses varieties of grass. One of those varieties, a deep blue-green Bermuda called Celebration, will be used in five of the 12 World Cup venues this summer.

Gurgel said the Maracana, the stadium in Rio de Janeiro that will play host to the final, as well as venues in Brasilia, Salvador, Belo Horizonte and Fortaleza, all have specific issues that required a unique turf like Celebration, which grows differently from most Bermuda.

"It has a very good ability to grow under a significant amount of shade," he said. "Celebration was selected for those stadiums because a lot of them have very tall structures and places for the fans that project a lot of shade on the grass."

The grass is also durable and recovers quickly but it doesn't do well in places like Sao Paulo, which is expected to be cool.

"There's a lot of science involved. It's kind of a tricky thing," said Gurgel, who has made several trips to the sod farm in Brazil where the grass is being grown, then visited again after the grass was installed ahead of last year's Confederations Cup.

He'll follow the World Cup on television, though, and admits he watches the games a little differently from most fans.

"I look more for the grass," he said. "I'm all the time hoping that the camera zooms in to the play so I can look at the grass and not so much at the players or the game. So yes, lately I cheer more for the grass than for the team itself."

Which isn't to say he doesn't have a favorite squad.

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For researcher, World Cup is a grass-roots endeavor

You may notice a slightly more charcoal hue to the artificial turf and a few sharper bounces in the outfield at the Rogers Centre this season.

But whats darker on the eyes is actually softer on the knees. The darker shade and livelier playing surface are the result of changes made by the Rogers Centres grounds crew to extend the turfs lifespan.

Underneath the polypropylene blades of grass think garbage-bag material is an infill of black rubber beads, which are about the size of coarse coffee grounds.

Previously, that infill was a combination of sand and rubber, which, in the four years that the current turf has been in place, had grown hard and compact from the compression that occurs whenever the turf is rolled up and not in use. The sand particles had settled at the bottom, while the rubber bits deteriorated to the size of pepper grains.

It created a very hard field, said Kelly Keyes, vice-president of building services for the Blue Jays.

By the end of last season, Keyes and her crew knew they needed to make a change.

So this off-season the grounds crew, led by Keyes and head groundskeeper Tom Farrell, painstakingly tamped out all of the turfs old infill and replaced it with a fresh all-rubber infill, doing away with the sand mixture. Hence the black streaks and puffs of what look like little black clouds when an outfielder dives on the turf or a ball skips hard on the surface.

Infielder Maicer Izturis said he noticed the difference right away.

Absolutely, its a little softer this year, he said earlier this month, before suffering a knee injury in Baltimore. But the ball jumps a little bit more, too.

But this years improvements are just a stop-gap, a means of squeezing another season out of the current field before purchasing a new AstroTurf field for next season, which will bridge the gap before natural grass is installed by opening day in 2018.

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Blue Jays pave way for grass at the Rogers Centre

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Real estate for sale in Copperas Cove Texas - MLS# 185698 - Video

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BEARD: Irish eyeing an artificial turf future in football

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SANTA CLARA (KCBS) Crews are installing hundreds of rolls of new sod at Levis Stadium in Santa Clara, the new home of the San Francisco 49ers, as officials prepare for the venues first event in August.

On Thursday morning, the rolls of sod were delivered on 13 semi-trucks. The turf, called Bandera Bermuda, is much more water-efficient than your garden variety Bermuda grass.

Hybrid Bermudas tend to be mowed very tightly, so they become very fast. The athletes can really be quite quick on them, said Greg Dunn with West Coast Turf, the company supplying the turf.

West Coast Turf has been cultivating the field in Livingston, part of rural Merced County. The company also supplies sod for AT&T Park, the home of the San Francisco Giants, among other professional stadiums.

Dunn said the Bandera blend only requires half as much watering as other varieties of Bermuda. He said they are spoon feeding the grass in its infancy.

Were always feeding it small doses of fertilizer all the time to get it mature and get it strong, Dunn said. What youre looking for is a grass that has a high tensile strength, holds together and provides great footing or cleat-holding capabilities.

The 49ers chose grass over artificial turf because they said players are less likely to get injured.

Although the officials date for the 49ers first pre-season game is not official yet, it will be held in August. Meanwhile, the first athletes to try out the turf will be soccer players, as the first game at the stadium will be a Major League Soccer match between the San Jose Earthquakes and Seattle Sounders on August 2.

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New Turf Being Installed At Levis Stadium In Santa Clara