Don’t Install Sod

Sod is held together with plastic netting. The netting reduces shipping costs and makes for a more consistent, better-looking product during installation.

Those costs are just passed on to future property owners and externalized to wildlife and other humans in the form of microplastics pollution.

9 years ago, our backyard was bamboo. The contractor who renovated our house removed it all, leaving bare clay.

The obvious solution at the time was to put down sod. It’s nice, it’s fast, it’s easy to outsource to a cheap landscaping firm.

And I sorely wish I had been able to ask to spend the budget on good soil and good seed, because 9 years later, I’m attempting to till the yard for mega-garden and am just digging up all the plastic netting. It’s really shocking.

And as a negative bonus – the sod did not even work. Since the landscapers installing it did not do any soil work, the sod grass lasted about 3 years until it ate up all the nutrients in the top layer of sod soil (and any we added was just washed away) until it was slowly killed off my invasive weeds like creeping charlie / ground ivy.

Right now, we’re slowly tilling up the yard in sections to rip up all the plastic (though also introducing a lot of microplastics in the process). Sod is great, but I wish the industry could go back to old school, falling apart sod that was installed on amended, healthy soil rather than being treated like industrial carpet.

Unfortunately, I also learned that most farming is done this way – even on “organic” farms. The plastics are everywhere.