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The Albuquerque Parks and Recreation Department finds itself in the uncomfortable position of sounding like the ill-tempered neighbor down the block who shakes his fist and yells, Hey you kids, stay off of my lawn!

Of course, the kids theyre yelling at are adults, and theyre not just stepping on the lawn, theyre playing tackle football and tearing up the newly laid sod.

In September, just more than six acres of sod was put down at Vista del Norte Park on Osuna, west of Jefferson NE. The roots need to be established before team sports can be played on it, sometime in spring, said Alex Kiska, the recreation division manager for the city parks department.

Were not telling people to stay off the grass. Its fine to walk on it, have a picnic there, throw a Frisbee, fly a kite or walk your dog on a leash across it. We just need to give the grass an opportunity to establish itself and extend its root system before we have rough activities on it.

To be clear, the stakes are higher than some kid chasing an errant ball across a neighbors lawn. The cost for the sod and labor to install it was just under $100,000, and that doesnt count the cost of land preparation and the irrigation system, said David Flores, planning and design division manager for city parks.

For the past three weeks, a rogue football league has taken it upon themselves to use that field for their games, and theyve been tearing up the turf with their cleats, Kiska said.

Weve asked them not to use the field, weve placed signs there saying no league play until spring and weve told them we have plenty of other parks in town that they can use if they register, Kiska said. We can find a park for them.

Nevertheless, the Parks and Recreation Department has continued to get reports of intermittent football games there, most recently last Sunday.

One football team that has used the park has been identified as part of the Wolf Pack league. Sam Boughter, a coach with one of the teams, acknowledged that he was contacted by city Parks and Rec officials and told that the sod hadnt been established and we couldnt use it for games yet.

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Foul called on football players at ABQ park

By Aaron Martinez

El Paso Times, Texas (MCT)

Published: November 1, 2014

(MCT)The El Paso City Council on Tuesday will discuss and vote on a resolution urging officials at Fort Bliss National Cemetery to replace the xeriscaping with grass and sod.

The efforts from city officials comes after U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke, D-El Paso, encouraged them to get involved in bringing grass back to the cemetery, city Rep. Cortney Niland said.

"The Congressman (O'Rourke) has asked if the city would draft a resolution for his initiative to turn the cemetery back to grass, which I feel would be very deserving to these brave veterans who served our county," Niland said. "They deserve a place to rest that is beautiful and when their families come to visit them, they can feel we have given them the respect they deserve."

Since the cemetery was xeriscaped in 2006, many veteran organizations and government officials, including O'Rourke and state Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, have asked the National Cemetery Administration, who oversees Fort Bliss National Cemetery, to bring grass back.

"We are one of a very small number of cemeteries that are xeriscaped, in other words, they have sand and gravel instead of grass at our veterans' gravesites," O'Rourke said. "What I have heard most from veterans and widows, widowers and family members of veterans buried at Fort Bliss, is that they would like to once again have grass. They feel it is more befitting of a cemetery."

There are more than 50,000 people buried there.

Ame Callahan, director of the Fort Bliss National Cemetery, said the xeriscaping was installed in to help save water because it took about 62 million gallons of water to maintain the grass a year.

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Texas City Council to vote on resolution to put grass back at Fort Bliss National Cemetery

State Rep. Joe Moody, middle, professors Diana Doser and Lixin Jin talk with Fort Bliss National Cemetery officials. (By Aaron Martinez / El Paso Times)

The El Paso City Council on Tuesday will discuss and vote on a resolution urging officials at Fort Bliss National Cemetery to replace the xeriscaping with grass and sod.

The efforts from city officials comes after U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke, D-El Paso, encouraged them to get involved in bringing grass back to the cemetery, city Rep. Cortney Niland said.

"The Congressman (O'Rourke) has asked if the city would draft a resolution for his initiative to turn the cemetery back to grass, which I feel would be very deserving to these brave veterans who served our county," Niland said. "They deserve a place to rest that is beautiful and when their families come to visit them, they can feel we have given them the respect they deserve."

Since the cemetery was xeriscaped in 2006, many veteran organizations and government officials, including O'Rourke and state Rep. Joe Moody, D-El Paso, have asked the National Cemetery Administration, who oversees Fort Bliss National Cemetery, to bring grass back.

"We are one of a very small number of cemeteries that are xeriscaped, in other words, they have sand and gravel instead of grass at our veterans' gravesites," O'Rourke said. "What I have heard most from veterans and widows, widowers and family members of veterans buried at Fort Bliss, is that they would like to once again have grass. They feel it is more befitting of a cemetery."

There are more than 50,000 people buried there.

Ame Callahan, director of the Fort Bliss National Cemetery, said the xeriscaping was installed in to help save water because it took about 62 million gallons of water to maintain the grass a year.

"In 2006, we had a study done, because we maintain a national shrine, we have very high standards for our cemetery and we just could not keep the grass green," Callahan said. "We used about 62 million gallons of water a year from the aquifer that El Paso residents are using. That, along with energy concerns and the fact that the aquifer is looking to dry up (is why we changed to xeriscaping). Our job is to honor our veterans and their families with dignity and respect in their final resting place. So with that, we decided to go with xeriscaping."

According to Callahan, it could cost about $12 million to put grass back and to maintain it.

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City Council to vote on resolution to put grass back at Fort Bliss National Cemetery

Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) October 31, 2014

In keeping with their DIY series of lawn care videos, Super-Sod filmed a new video and released it October 2014 to coincide with Tall Fescue grass planting season. It's called "How-to Plant a New Tall Fescue Lawn from Grass Seed" and can be found on YouTube, supersod.com, and linked herein.

The video applies to seeding any new Tall Fescue Lawn, but it was produced to support Super-Sod's Elite Tall Fescue brand. Every year, a team of Super-Sod's experts selects the best three Tall Fescue varieties for the Southeast resulting in their own blend marketed as Elite Tall Fescue.

Tall Fescue is a cool season lawn --- that means it begins to grow again as temperatures cool in the autumn. Now is the time of year when already established Tall Fescue lawns are overseeded. Overseeding is the process of distributing grass seed over an existing lawn to freshen up the lawn and fill in thinning patches with vigorous new seedlings.

Autumn is also the time of year when completely new Tall Fescue lawns are created from scratch. Since creating a new lawn from seed is a more involved process than overseeding, Super-Sod's video was filmed to demonstrate the process step-by-step to support homeowners in the endeavor of growing a new Elite Tall Fescue lawn from seed.

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 Filmed a New Video for DIY Planting of Elite Tall Fescue Grass Seed

Atlanta, Georgia (PRWEB) October 30, 2014

Super-Sod welcomed aboard Matt Torrence, who will be based out of their Gwinnett County store at 609 Airport Road, Lawrenceville, Georgia. He will serve the Northeast Georgia region as sales representative and in customer support. His main products are Super-Sod's turfgrass brands Zenith and Emerald Zoysia, TifGrand and Tifway Bermuda, TifBlair Centipede, and Elite Tall Fescue. He will also represent their supporting products: turfgrass seed, Allett reel mowers for homeowners and landscapers, Soil3 organic compost, and Doc's Raised Garden Kits.

Matt comes to the company with 3 years experience in horticulture, in both production and sales. Prior to his career as a horticulturist, he served in the United States Coast Guard and was based in Charleston, Norfolk, and San Francisco. With his wife, Emma, they now reside in Statham where they are preparing to welcome their first baby in December. Matt likes to stay busy and keeps bees as a hobby.

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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New Hire Announcement: Super-Sod Hired a New Sales and Customer Service Representative for Georgia

The lawn is the Atlas of our times, bearing its keepers and their children, dogs, cats and, if mine is any measure, whole armies of squirrels and chipmunks.

The lawn can bear this burden, with some periodic help, but it has also had to support a much tougher load that of societys conflicting expectations.

Up and down the land, local ordinances enshrine the front yard as a place where neatly mown lawns framed with low or no fences could speak of a communal respectability, openness and uniformity. With suburbia came and remains an enforced neighborliness. There was a time when every block had at least one greensward hobbyist, usually male, in unbridled pursuit of the trophy lawn. This mania probably has dissipated now that we inhabit Screen World.

To other eyes, the lawn is no trophy but a throwback to a time when its symbolic probity came at a cost not only to our individuality but to the health of the planet.

For a generation at least, environmentalists have been railing against the lawn for its addiction to scarce water, to polluting fertilizers and to life-killing pesticides.

My view? In our watery part of the world, the lawn is a welcome feature in many (though not all) gardens, but as one considered element of a landscape. Cultivated with care and knowledge, the lawn is a net environmental asset in its ability to check storm water, filter pollutants and generally cool the heat island.

Others might not regard the turf as kindly, and the debate lingers, but the lawn itself has moved on: Better practices and improved grass varieties now enable greater success with this ubiquitous land form. That is the central message of a living exhibition, Grass Roots, that opened this month at the National Arboretum and will be around for a few years.

Anyone with a lawn in these parts should make a point to see it for the simple reason that we live in a climatic cusp that makes turf cultivation particularly challenging.

I asked the experts behind the exhibit, Scott Aker and Geoffrey Rinehart, to rattle off some of the most common lawn blunders. You may know them already, but theyre worth repeating:

Mowing too short: If you mow cool-season grasses too short, youre inviting disaster. The grass will become stressed and die back, and the void will be filled with weeds. Keep your mower at its highest setting.

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National Arboretums Grass Roots: A brighter future for the lawn

Published on October 29, 2014

Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas: Immerse yourself in a vanishing landscape

STRONG CITY, Kan. - Stand here in a field of tall, windblown grass and wildflowers, and twirl around like a child. It's like being inside a prairie snow globe: You're surrounded by a sea of green, brown and yellow grass, with a blue-sky dome above.

The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas is one of just a few places in the country where you can immerse yourself in this serene but vanishing landscape. Tallgrass prairie once covered 140 million acres of North America, including much of the Midwest. But only 4 per cent of that ecosystem remains, wiped out by more than 150 years of human settlement, cattle-grazing and farming.

The Tallgrass Preserve here in the Flint Hills is one of the last tracts left, consisting of 11,000 acres mostly owned by the Nature Conservancy and managed with the National Park Service. There are miles of trails here to explore, but the Southwind Nature Trail is an easy-to-walk loop trail just under 2 miles (3.2 kilometres) that offers a sublime sense of what the landscape felt and looked like when it was covered with tallgrass and wildflowers across the region.

The preserve is also home to a historic site a late 19th-century ranch with outbuildings, along with a one-room schoolhouse used from 1882 to 1930. A free cellphone tour provides details on each structure, including a barn bigger than the house, an icehouse, carriage house, chicken coop with a sod roof (using plants as insulation, way ahead of its time), and outhouse with three holes. (Not that three people would have used it at once, mind you: one seat was for a child, and the other two were likely rotated in use.)

A prosperous cattleman, Stephen F. Jones, lived here on the Spring Hill/Z Bar Ranch with his wife and daughter in the 1880s. Limestone was easily quarried from the layers of rock beneath the rich prairie soil, allowing Jones to build an elegant mansion and stone fencing around his vast property.

But once you're on the Southwind Nature Trail, away from the ranch, you can almost suspend your disbelief and pretend you're experiencing this extraordinary landscape before settlers arrived, when the only destruction faced by the tallgrass was from a natural cycle of lightning-sparked fire, rainfall and grazing bison.

The park is open daily, year-round, and each season offers a different experience of weather, colours, flora and fauna. On a visit in early autumn, the trail was lined with fields of tall yellow flowers dancing in the breeze, punctuated by bursts of other purple, red and white wildflowers amid the grasses. Tiny lizards, a snake and grasshoppers darted across the path. Rabbits, prairie chickens and other birds and other creatures live here, too. The trail meanders gently into higher ground and over a brook, then finally to the school, still furnished with a woodstove, wooden desks and benches, along with portraits of George Washington and Abe Lincoln.

As you walk back toward the ranch house to the parking lot, you travel a path parallel to a road where the occasional car zips by. It's a good reminder of the human factor that led to the prairie's demise.

Continued here:
Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas: Immerse yourself in a vanishing landscape

The outfield of the intramural softball field off of Sprigg Street. Photo by Sean Burke

An abundance of time and money have been spent to make the fields playable, however the damage has already been done, and alternative solutions are already being considered for the future.

"Just weather-related, last winter we lost our grass on all three of our fields. This also occurred on city fields, the city of Cape lost several fields as well," assistant director of intramurals Jennifer Rose said. "Just the type of grass we had and the type of winter we had didn't mix."

As the spring of 2014 approached, Rose began noticing the deterioration of the fields. When the spring semester ended, Rose started looking for answers on how to repair the fields, but her options were limited.

"We did put seed down this summer," Rose said. "The seed was questionable whether or not it was going to work, but it was one of our options. We didn't have the ability to put it down on all three fields. We did go ahead and move forward with two of the fields, those fields do have grass now, that's our Bertling [Street] field and our upper Bertling field."

While the grass is there and the fields are playable, Rose is still doing damage control as the grass has already begun to show wear and tear.

"The grass kind of grows almost horizontal, so it looks like we've got this nice coverage in there but if you really dig around in that grass you'll see there's not a lot of roots for as much grass as there appears to be," Rose said.

Nonetheless, play still continues on both Bertling fields, but the field off of Sprigg Street is completely unplayable.

"We don't consider it safe enough to play any of the real sports on, so it is completely offline," Rose said. "It is open for recreational use, but we're not scheduling anything on there because it's more dirt than grass right now."

With only two intramural fields open for play, Rose had to make significant changes to the sports provided by the intramural office in order to preserve what quality of field is left and to ensure that the fields will be ready for spring.

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Mother Nature takes toll on intramural fields

Long Beach, CA (PRWEB) October 22, 2014

EasyTurf is scheduled to showcase their industry leading synthetic turf at the 2014 Long Beach Landscape Expo in Long Beach, Calif. Oct. 29, 30.

EasyTurf will unveil a booth that showcases the intricate energy saving and water conscious systems associated with their fastest growing artificial grass applications, pet, rooftop, playground and commercial landscapes. The EasyTurf artificial grass system can be largely engineered with recycled products, adding to the environmentally friendly nature of synthetic turf. EasyTurf will join other award-winning landscape professionals, the newest landscape products/equipment and educational seminars by some of the most respected experts in their fields at the Long Beach Arena.

EasyTurf has been an innovator of synthetic grass landscaping and has taken a leading role in educating consumers of our many benefits, said Dave Hartman, EasyTurf President. Were excited to join the Landscape Expo and show homeowners how we can improve their homes and quality of life.

The California drought will prompt many home and business owners to consider artificial turf for their future landscaping needs.

When natural grass is a part of landscape irrigation costs, 60 percent of those costs go to watering sod - not only is the water conserved [when artificial grass is installed] but so is the energy that would be used to get that 60 percent of irrigation from point a to point b, said Jackie Luper, EasyTurf Vice President, Marketing

EasyTurf uses a proprietary 100 percent permeable artificial grass surface backing, MaxxFlow, for unmatched drainage capabilities. Unlike a grass lawn, rain will not turn your EasyTurf surface into a mud pit. Natural grass lawns require regular maintenance, tremendous amounts of water, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer and time. EasyTurfs durability is also unmatched.

EasyTurfs superior synthetic grass products are matched by a dedication to exceptional craftsmanship and customer service, Hartman said. Our commitment to excellence continues to attract homeowners and commercial businesses searching for functional, aesthetic improvements.

World renowned dog whisperer, Cesar Millan recently introduced EasyTurf artificial grass as his turf-of-choice for pet owners. Millan says drainage was critical in his decision to partner with EasyTurf on the 10,000 sq. ft. installation of artificial grass at his Dog Psychology Center in Santa Clarita, Calif.

We have a lot of land to cover, so its important to me that our landscaping is easy to care for, safe for our pack and has proper drainage, said Millan. Not only does Easy Turf look just like natural grass, it helps to eliminate common lawn problems associated with pets like brown spots from urine, tracked in mud, grass clippings and it can even deter your dog from digging holes.

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EasyTurf One Week from Unveiling Water-friendliest Turf at Long Beach Landscape Expo

More Video...

New grass at Four Winds Field

Big changes at Four Winds Field

Four Winds Field Trivia Answers

South Bend, Ind. A new field, a new name and several other changes, Four Winds Field won't look the same as you head into the stadium for the 2015 season and some of those changes are happening Tuesday.

Starting at 7 a.m. crews brought in truckloads of new sod to cover the field and at 10:30 a.m. they started laying it down. The field should be done by Friday. If you are interested in watching the process you can head out to the stadium all week long. Getting all of the sod in will take about 30 trucks full of 24 rolls each.

Roger Bossard, the grounds keeper for the Chicago White Sox is the one installing it. This is actually a patent system that he uses. Our field can take a microburst of rain, which the way he explained it to me is essentially one inch of rain in a very short time frame which equals about 68,000 gallons of water. He says if that happens, within about 20 to 25 minutes the field is ready to play on, explains South Bend Cubs President Joe Hart.

The field is just one of the many projects happening at the field right now. This past weekend they broke ground on their brand new hitting facility. Hart says it will be over 15,000 square feet and it will be done April 1st.

They are also working on changing their signage, something Hart says is a lengthy process, Everywhere you walk around in this ballpark you see a new sign that needs to be changed out. Things are underway right now and we are starting the design work. Our plan is to have as much stuff done by Thanksgiving as possible. I dont want to leave it up to the weather.

They are also working on making changes in the locker room. Hart says they are adding new lockers, putting in new carpet and adding Cubs colors.

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Back to grass, Four Winds Field under CUBStruction