Grass for the East Lawn

With the digging and dirt done for the East Lawn, the question becomes what to put down in this space.  The landscape plan has it as lawn.  The City of Austin suggested using Zoysia Palisades as a grass that needs little maintenance and is drought tolerant.  We experimented with two pieces last year and it seemed to survive, so we will continue with it.

We find several places that sell Zoysia Palisades, and using Angie's List, we decided to use The Grass Outlet.  They sell Zoysia Palisades for $200 a pallet.  Each pallet is supposed to cover 450 square feet, and my estimate is we need 800 square feet.  The total cost, including delivery is $497.95.

The first pallet covered one end, leaving space around the base of the Monterrey Oak tree.

The second pallet gets us all the way to the end of what we have worked on so far.

This ties in nicely with the new walkway flagstones.

And we had a small amount left over, as expected, so we spread that out in the small area near the Bamboo Grove behind the Jungle.

This area will be interesting, since it has no irrigation (at least so far). (Update: all this grass died.  Clearly need irrigation to get it established, at least.)


One of the main questions in this work was should we install the sod now (early Fall), or wait until next Spring.  We decided that, temperature and water-wise, now should be about the same as the Spring, and it can rest over the Winter, before going into the heat and stress of next Summer.  Plus it will give us a grass cover instead of mud for the next few months.  And, in this particular case, we were fortunate enough to put the sod down just the morning before getting 0.5 inch of rain, followed by 1.5 inches the next day.  So we are getting it well watered in its new home.