A Gardeners Forum Forums Gardening Reference Gardening in 2004 Can I bury old sods of grass under my beans?

This may seema silly question but I am new at gardening. I've just acquired a house with a terrible lawn. I've removed the sods of grass and dug it over well, added compost and manure and now plan to make it a vegetable garden...but I've got this big pile of old sods of grass with some quite nice soil attached to their roots.

I was thinking of burying them in a trench to be the basis of a patch of runner beans.(Thiniong they would add nutrients and help hold water).

Would this be a good idea or would the grass just come up through?

I have actually had this same problem once. I dug out a large section of my lawn to make a garden bed & decided instead of wasting the soil I would just bury it along my garage where the lawn was thin & patchy & dogs had dug many holes making the ground uneven & lumpy. After which I dumped top soil down & compost, then I planted flowers. Turned out to be a big mistake for me. The grass grew back through & it looked awful & weedy when it came up. Granted the lawn here was awful to begin with. We had more weeds than grass to start with. I am sure someone with more expertise on this subject will come through & help you out with this.

Got a question for you Chrissy,
When you did this, did you turn the sod
UPSIDE DOWN????
Grass on the under side and roots in the air/???

I did!!

Worked out pretty good, the only thing I did was check it every so many days, and continuously tucked under the weeds on the out side, trying to grow side ways then up!!!!

It does take a bit of patients, alot of time,
alot of stuff on top (chopped up leaves in the fall time worked great too!!!Then they also have a hard time with no sun and if some were still tenacious enough, the dirt and worms and stuff were'reasonably easy to pull out!!!

****Robert Fletcher,
Do you have the time and dilagents to do it,
try it, if you've got alot on your plate, think
it over..... I dont' regret doing mine, but I had the time to do it!!!

(I hate wasting dirt, I don't get much of it!!!)

Weezie

Hi. If I may make a suggestion, take the sod you removed and put it into a pile and leave it until next year. If you have a tiller, run the tiller over it a couple of times if grass wants to emerge. The grass will die and rot just like in a compost pile and next year you can use it where you wish. I have never had luck trying to use sod to fill low spots in a lawn. It's lumpy and a pain in the behind.
FWIW