Field Construction
OH CRAP! This is Terrible
About 4 days after we got the sod down I realized we had 3 HUGE problems.
Problem #1
The field is SUPER lumpy. You can sort of see in these pictures how lumpy the field was but the pictures do not do it justice. For a soccer field it was completely unplayable. There were about 100 spots all across the field where there were 4 inch drops or humps. Bad enough you could roll an ankle if you were just running across it. A soccer ball would never roll straight across it and there was no way to top dress it and fix this. It was just way way way too lumpy.
Problem #2.
We had big patches of sod that were not coming in well at all - some of these would probably come in OK but damnit we paid alot of this turfgrass we shouldn't have huge patches of dead field to start recovering before we even get started.
Problem #3 - The really big problem!
Even if the grass came in and even if we could smooth out the humps and divots with some top dressing there was a much bigger problem. It's tough to show in a picture and I didn't take any close up pictures of this - but we got a huge rain storm that came through - I was excited for the grass to get a great dumping of rain. BUT - about 2 hours after the rain finished we had a shallow pond on the field. In the below pick you can kinda see how at the far side of the field it doesn't slope down (it's basically perfectly flat on the far side of the field in this picture ). And water was just pooling on the field. 4 days after we got the rain shower it was still squishing out water when we walked on it.
The lesson I learned here is that the dirt we dug up from the yard and moved to the low side to build up the field was a heavy clay soil. Once the clay is saturated, water does not drain out of it. So - what was happening is that water would drain off the high area of the field down - through the thick topsoil we put down and then into the clay soil and then just sit there - and since it was perfectly level it didn't run off and it just collected there - no drainage at all. After a lot of reading and learning about the soil types and how the field was constructed I had the hard realization that even if we re-graded and added a little slope to the field we would have problems when we get a lot of rain.
With all these problems there was no way we were ever going to be able to play on this field the way we built it.
ARGGHHHHHH!!!!!
Learned some hard and expensive lessons. BUT - we learn and improve so now, let's redo the whole project the RIGHT way!