Sod

Ever think about sod before? Yeah, me neither, until recently. Always seemed like such a boring topic—yah, grass, lawns, yawn. But I’ve been thinking a lot about sod lately, since we moved into our new house and had landscaping done. It turns out sod is quite a bit more interesting than I initially thought.

Watching the sod get unrolled out and pieced together to form our new lawn, I realized that I had no idea where the stuff actually came from: were these neat rectangular rolls of grass turf just carved out of somebody’s pasture somewhere? Somebody’s yard? Who’s letting that happen? And wouldn’t you start to run out of the stuff pretty quickly if you’re poaching it? I mean, even though grass is a renewable resource, it still takes time to establish a yard strong enough to start cutting chunks out of.

And then realizing the amount of sod that must be going into new lawns around here every day, I realized the inefficiency of this and went off in search of answers in my trusty Lawn Care for Dummies.

Turns out sod comes from sod farms. No kidding. (Blindingly obvious in retrospect.) There’s actually people running vast farms that do nothing but grow grass for lawns. Not livestock, not grain or vegetables, but lawns. And the best known sod farm in this area? McPheeter’s Turf.

Here’s a Bend Bulletin profile on McPheeter’s Turf.

We work long hours, we just get really tired sometimes. We start at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning and I’ll change water at 9:00 or 10:00 at night. But it’s so good to go to bed tired at night.

I know farming is truly hard work and long hours, but still, that seems like a hell of a lot of time and work invested in just growing grass.

Now, I just have to see a sod harvesting machine in action. What? You didn’t think they cut and rolled it by hand, did you?