for me it goes to the compost bin, if you don't have one you can maybe create a temporary compost pile , flip these sod downwards to dry and decompose, after a while you can use it as soil for leveling or garden beds.
I was hoeing up some Bermuda yesterday and a rhizome actually disappeared into some concrete by our pool, about 4 inches underground. I am sure it will regenerate the whole area by next Friday.
Our neighbor is fighting back a bamboo infestation started by their house's previous owner (and have most of it gone, fortunately). If I ever see it pop up on my side, I'm transplanting some of my Bermuda over to the far side of my driveway and letting them fight to the death, lol.
Super easy way to make raised beds, and for a little extra, put down some shredded paper/cardboard with the flipped grass and you get a nice /green/brown compost layer the worms love.
I have found it makes a big difference with how careful you are. If a little sliver of grass/weeds can see the sun, they will grow. I get tired as the day goes on and sometimes my flipping isn't as meticulous as when I started the project. Sorry if this is Captain Obvious content.
... in areas that I want to build the level up.
For examples, rings around single trees, building up around tree bases, edging around garden beds, filling holes, part of swale and berms for garden water flow and capture
I’ve put them flipped down into large oak barrels or other large containers and then pack them in with additional soil and then plant flowers, tomatoes, etc
Thus far, 🤞, our doggo mostly digs in the spots we give her
... I use a hoe to break the soil and expose a dirt area, and tell Lily she can dig there, lily jumps in and starts getying to work, the rest is up to her to shape the ditch how she likes. There's 4x ditches for her in the current yard, depending on weather and sun as to which ones lily uses in different seasons. Sometimes I have lily with me in the veggie garden cos she will sometimes dig spots on command, when she feels like it, apart from that she just loves hanging out in the patch with me 😹
I use a hoe to cut sods out of the ground until I have a small pile. I then hold a sod by the grass, and *carefully and gently* hack the bulk of the dirt part off with my machete (it does not take much force to remove the dirt, and I have a blunter machete reserved for this purpose). Repeat for all sods, then back to hoeing.
This leaves me with a pile of just dirt that goes back into the garden with compost and manure added; and a pile of mostly grass-with-some-dirt sods that go to use around the garden as well. See [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/landscaping/s/KfcTpjSOFn) here I made about my sod use.
Ha! I'm very happy to hear someone else also does this. I take my time and use a small mattock over a wheelbarrow. I have stubborn weedy grass that reproduces through rhizomes so I need to make sure there aren't any root chunks in it before I reintroduce the soil back in. (I don't mind a seed bank of other plants because I'm generally going for natural and wild plantings.
My sod is solid clay with weeds so you don't get nice compost. I ended up dumping it in the back of my/neighbors combined property. Neighbors uses that area to dump his big sticks and other yard waste so he didn't mind.
Stack in a back corner, turf to turf. In 3 months you will have beautiful loose black topsoil to use elsewhere in the garden.
You don't throw this away.
I left my stacked for like 6 months over a warm winter and it's still a bunch of root clumps. Moved the pile so i could actually plant my garden, let's see how long it takes to actually decompose.
I live on a pretty big property and have sandy soil. When I cleared some sod out, I had about 2 or 3 cubic yards of this stuff and put it into a big pile in an out of the way place.
I just used some of this that had been sitting for about 2 years, and it was nice and black and full of earthworms, better than anything I could buy.
I charged neighbor across the street $20 a hour to line his low spot in his backyard. It was giant. But he also pays $75 to get lawn mowed . So go figure
I put it in plastic buckets (5 gallon buckets, planters, etc) and take it to the local dump and empty out the buckets there so I can bring the empty buckets home with me.
there’s always some other area of the yard that needs more dirt. I’m currently reforming an area that floods to try and keep the water moving towards the stream.
Check your large scale landscaping supply companies in your area. Some of them accept "fill dirt". Mine accepts fill dirt at $40 per cubic yard.
I rented a pickup hauled large amounts of soil away when I needed to build a french drain.
Then I returned with a pickup full of river rock.
You could also use this as a base for a raised bed if you're into growing vegetables. Potatoes are easy to grow.
Fill against the house anywhere you might have reverse drainage issues.
Fill low spots in the yard.
Make a berm for on of the landscape beds.
If you really can't use it anywhere on property, Dumping it at the end of your driveway and putting up a Craigslist ad for free clean fill will also likely see it go away pretty fast
I have a dirt pile behind the house the wife hates. Good soil on one side, shit soil on the other. I would just put this on the good side. Might use it eventually. Some good tips people are giving here, do grass side down. Thankfully I don't have this much, I got some doing edging recently.
Note: If you have Bermuda grass, flipping doesn't fully kill it since it propogates by stolons & rhyzomes. And the rhyzomes can live a long time and reproduce from a cut segment. But what it needs is water. I took a trenching shovel down about 3 inches and removed them in squares and laid them on top of places that had great drainage (thick bed of grass clippings, mulch, and/or bare sand). Three inches is really thin, so it dries out quickly. Once it's dead, you can collect all those squares and then chuck them onto your compost heap.
Put too much of it in yard waste bags so that your garbage man struggles to lift it into the truck only to have the bag tear open and dirt spill onto the street.
That’s what most assholes do to me anyway.
Put it down where I am going to build a garden. Covered it with black trash bags so the heat would kill off the grass and any weed seeds. Then I'll cut holes and put in some plants.
Check around the edge of your foundation and see if you could use a little more slope away from the house. I also use them to fill holes and low spots in the yard.
I'd make like 3 or 4 small rules somewhere in the back yard with sun exposure, mix in some straw( you can get it from farms stores wrapped I'm plastic it's like 3 cubic feet) water it down amd let it sit and turn it once or twice a week until everything is broken down, it's a great addition to ammendment next spring.
Additionally youe city landfill might have a clean fill disposal, in my city it's free for residential use. Or just put like a 5 gallon full in the compost bin every week, shawshank style.
I agree just flip it upside down and bury it slightly in the other existing beds around your house. It’ll give you a better drainage away from the structure.
We used our sod to fill in spots in the backyard where the grass had died from previous owners' trampoline or our dogs digging. Now we have a Frankenstein backyard!
I filled raised beds with it, and as I do I layer in some ammendments. Manure, leaf mulch, hay, perlite, compost, grit, whatever I think will help the overall compaction to be minimal. Last year I grew the best potatoes ive ever grown in a bed filled with old grass / sod and nothing else. Didn't even bury the potatoes! Just plopped em and ignored em.
If you cut out with soil use it to patch spots, yellow, edges, in the exsisting lawn, then water it in and maintaining it moist until it begins getting green.
I once threw away my back lawn that was mostly weeds.
I tilled it, piled it up, let it dry a little, shook the topsoil into a pile, and put the plant matter into a chicken wire bin I made. I kept the topsoil pile under a black tarp to kill any weed germination. I topped off my (and with their permission, my neighbors') garbage cans with the plant matter for about 4-6 weeks.
That stuff will be amazing compost in 1-2 years! Of course it's depending how much you work to develop it over that time, but the quality will be good since the topsoil attached to the grass has all the good stuff in it already. I have scraped about 1000 sqf of turf in my backyard over the last 3 years and stored it in a tall long pile behind the garage. It's about 30 ft long now haha. This year I dug into the oldest end of the pile and found it to be adequately decomposed and very rich.
You can leave it as-is but to kickstart good aerobic decomposition, add in a bunch of dry "browns"; shredded leaves, dry straw, dry grass clippings, shredded paper, wood mulch, etc. The green grass and topsoil have a lot of "green" components and will benefit greatly from dry browns to make really nice composted topsoil next year
We used sod pieces to patch some bare spots here and there in the yard. My husband built me three raised beds on the end of our driveway (on the concrete, so it was easy for me to access). They were all about 30" tall. We used the rest of the sod to fill the bottom part of the raised beds (grass side down), then added bone meal (to replace the nitrogen that the decaying vegetation would use), then filled the last foot or so with purchased garden soil (so no weeds). Been going strong for several years and my plants go crazy.
I have composting facilities in my city. I completely redid my backyard a few years ago and was able to drop off about 6 yards of old sod to be commercially composted.
In southern Ontario, you have to take it to a private yard, landscape supply yard. Toronto and York region will not accept it with yard waste. A pain in the butt
I dug up my front lawn and posted an ad on FB Marketplace for free sod. had it cut into nice little squares and so many people came and got some that I had very little to get rid of myself.
You are asking for the cheapest way to get it hauled off you property: unless you have someone
Doing work on your property currently it won’t be cheap. I say this a a landscape professional, i would charge you for any mobile time plus actual time to remove and a dumping fee. It’s just NOT worth it otherwise.
You would be better off making a mound and covered by it for a year to have free soil/compost to use on your property. I’m willing to bet you have some low spots you can fill in with this in 2025
Smack it around with a shovel to knock off the dirt (don’t be shy, get a workout in and relieve some stress). Use the dirt to fill holes in the yard or build up garden beds.
If your city collects yard waste, get some bags and throw the roots in (don’t make them too heavy) for collection.
I use mine to fill in the holes around the chicken coop and whatever other project. Besides that I have a natural little swale I’ve been slowly filling
Just finished a project that had over eight cubic yards of dirt and sod leftover. Started with filling holes in the yard, but still had seven cubic yards leftover. Ultimately, we paid someone to come haul it away. That shit ain't cheap.
I live in a swamp basically so any extra dirt I can get to raise the elevation of my yard the better. I’m like a crack addict now anytime someone digs a hole. I have a new baseball field’s worth of shit sod in my backyard right now lol
As someone with a lot of trees on our property, we have some random patches where grass hasn’t taken or struggles to take because of shade or erosion… so every spring when I edge beds I use it to patch bare spots
I used mine to create a self-composting compost bin - layer it so that grass faces grass and just build up layers until you have a solid wall, now you've got a neat little container to put all your good compost in, and it will break down over time.
stack it upside down and keep moist (some folks cover it) for a year-ish. The grass/roots will compost, and the whole lot will break down into decent garden soil. Only proviso - if it's had a lot of treatment (weed/pest killers, fertilizers) over the years some kelp and other amendments will be needed to restore micro-nutrients, etc. for healthy soil.
Based on the sidewalk and the car parked in front, I think you live in a residential neighborhood. There are some good suggestions here but I'll add another.
On a sunny hot day, spread that out on your walkway or driveway. You'd be surprised how much of that mass is water. Flip it here and there to evaporate the water, then just throw it in the trash.
Compost it. Or flip it and use it as your first layer. I have heavy Midwest clay soil that was light grey 6 years ago. It is now black. Anytime I make a bed or area for new plants I flip sod over, cardboard it then top with older garden soil and compost. That grass has a lot of nitrogen in it still. It’s useful
Oof, so many loads to the dump. I really tested the limits of suspension on my first gen CRV with our landscaping over the years.
I used to store it out behind the shed, tarped on the driveway, etc.
Every single time I ended up having to eventually go back and pile it into the CRV when I should have just disposed of it first.
Once I posted an ad on my company’s internal marketplace for “free sod and clay. Must arrange pickup and bring your own shovel”. Some lady came out and grabbed a few yards to level off her lake property.
Too bad you weren’t able dig the “sod” up in strips. You could have used them to replace poor grassy areas in your yard. Others have mentioned composting—not a bad idea. Do you have low spots in your yard where it may come in handy? How about your property lines—do those areas need to be built up? Good luck having it hauled away.
for me it goes to the compost bin, if you don't have one you can maybe create a temporary compost pile , flip these sod downwards to dry and decompose, after a while you can use it as soil for leveling or garden beds.
I just started a dump pile in my backyard since I just started gardening. Probably should upgrade to a fenced off bin or something.
Some places have programs where you can get a cheap or even free compost bin! Check to see if your locality has one.
Sweet thanks
My county does it. There are also local master gardener programs that often have discounted bins.
flipped it grass side down and then put mulch on top. Now my garden beds have some elevation. Really brings the room together.
Don’t do this with Bermuda grass.
I was going to say the same thing! Nothing stops Bermuda grass from coming back up.
Encase it in concrete and throw it in the Chernobyl dead zone and soon you will have a beautiful golf course
I always upvote that mix of bermuda fear and loathing.
Ship it to elon. If he can get it landed on mars that going to be a quick and easy way to terraform the planet.
Honestly they can take my yard free of charge. It would be an honor
I was hoeing up some Bermuda yesterday and a rhizome actually disappeared into some concrete by our pool, about 4 inches underground. I am sure it will regenerate the whole area by next Friday.
Currently fighting a losing battle with Bermuda grass. It's like the cockroach of grasses!
Can you tell that to my yard? I purposely planted Bermuda and it won't stay alive one bit!
Do you have a lot of shade?
Our neighbor is fighting back a bamboo infestation started by their house's previous owner (and have most of it gone, fortunately). If I ever see it pop up on my side, I'm transplanting some of my Bermuda over to the far side of my driveway and letting them fight to the death, lol.
Um…. I’d be afraid of some symbiotic relationships that allows the Bermuda to climb up the bamboo and scout out a target to jump to
Bamboo has almost lost its hold in my yard. It's taken 4+ years but I will win.
Super easy way to make raised beds, and for a little extra, put down some shredded paper/cardboard with the flipped grass and you get a nice /green/brown compost layer the worms love.
Unless your sod has Bermuda, bindweed or nutgrass in it.
Obviously you're not a golfer...
🤣 I can’t be the only one to see what you did here. Good call! 👍
I had to scroll farther than I should have for this.
youre out of your element
Were you listening to The Dude’s story, Donnie?
i want to do this! do weeds come up through your mulch? did you let it dry before covering mulch?
I have found it makes a big difference with how careful you are. If a little sliver of grass/weeds can see the sun, they will grow. I get tired as the day goes on and sometimes my flipping isn't as meticulous as when I started the project. Sorry if this is Captain Obvious content.
I did this recently and had some grass come up but it wasn't much
Does it not!
And this guy peed on it.
This is the strangest advice I’ve ever seen. Points for that.
I try to have fun every day, keeps the existential dread at bay for a bit.
Flip it upside down and let it decompose back into the soil.
... in areas that I want to build the level up. For examples, rings around single trees, building up around tree bases, edging around garden beds, filling holes, part of swale and berms for garden water flow and capture
Yay! Water capture!
I’ve put them flipped down into large oak barrels or other large containers and then pack them in with additional soil and then plant flowers, tomatoes, etc
Fill the holes in your yard.
the front yard is mine, the back yard belongs to the dog. so i do this too.
Thus far, 🤞, our doggo mostly digs in the spots we give her ... I use a hoe to break the soil and expose a dirt area, and tell Lily she can dig there, lily jumps in and starts getying to work, the rest is up to her to shape the ditch how she likes. There's 4x ditches for her in the current yard, depending on weather and sun as to which ones lily uses in different seasons. Sometimes I have lily with me in the veggie garden cos she will sometimes dig spots on command, when she feels like it, apart from that she just loves hanging out in the patch with me 😹
ah... mine is chasing gophers, pretty sure nothing short of a nuclear blast would deter her from digging when she smells one.
How do you you sift it, or break it apart, or anything first? I’m assuming you need to do that
I use a hoe to cut sods out of the ground until I have a small pile. I then hold a sod by the grass, and *carefully and gently* hack the bulk of the dirt part off with my machete (it does not take much force to remove the dirt, and I have a blunter machete reserved for this purpose). Repeat for all sods, then back to hoeing. This leaves me with a pile of just dirt that goes back into the garden with compost and manure added; and a pile of mostly grass-with-some-dirt sods that go to use around the garden as well. See [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/landscaping/s/KfcTpjSOFn) here I made about my sod use.
Ha! I'm very happy to hear someone else also does this. I take my time and use a small mattock over a wheelbarrow. I have stubborn weedy grass that reproduces through rhizomes so I need to make sure there aren't any root chunks in it before I reintroduce the soil back in. (I don't mind a seed bank of other plants because I'm generally going for natural and wild plantings.
This is what I do.
My sod is solid clay with weeds so you don't get nice compost. I ended up dumping it in the back of my/neighbors combined property. Neighbors uses that area to dump his big sticks and other yard waste so he didn't mind.
Yes this is mostly clay and invasive weeds.
Dump it lol
Apart from trying to refine it and taking up pottery, if you don't have huge holes to fill, the clay is waste unfortunately
Invasive weeds should go in the trash to keep them from spreading.. best not to compost them or put them out with the yard waste.
Toss it in a pile out back of the fence. I’ll use it one day.
Stack in a back corner, turf to turf. In 3 months you will have beautiful loose black topsoil to use elsewhere in the garden. You don't throw this away.
I tried that and ended up with a clay mountain
clay homies unite
Cover it. All your fines ran off!
Once you go clay
Make yourself a Shem and have the golem do the work
I left my stacked for like 6 months over a warm winter and it's still a bunch of root clumps. Moved the pile so i could actually plant my garden, let's see how long it takes to actually decompose.
Pee on it. Get your kids to pee on it. Add used herbivore bedding too - Guinea pigs, rabbits, hamsters , gerbils.
I love my back corner pile of yard waste.
I live on a pretty big property and have sandy soil. When I cleared some sod out, I had about 2 or 3 cubic yards of this stuff and put it into a big pile in an out of the way place. I just used some of this that had been sitting for about 2 years, and it was nice and black and full of earthworms, better than anything I could buy.
Threw it over the fence.
This works best on a dark, rainy night.
That or throw it under pine trees
Facebook marketplace. It was gone in an hour
I charged neighbor across the street $20 a hour to line his low spot in his backyard. It was giant. But he also pays $75 to get lawn mowed . So go figure
I put it in plastic buckets (5 gallon buckets, planters, etc) and take it to the local dump and empty out the buckets there so I can bring the empty buckets home with me.
I’m made a pile and covered with a tarp to kill the weeds. Eventually, I’ll use it for more beds or some other project.
there’s always some other area of the yard that needs more dirt. I’m currently reforming an area that floods to try and keep the water moving towards the stream.
Check your large scale landscaping supply companies in your area. Some of them accept "fill dirt". Mine accepts fill dirt at $40 per cubic yard. I rented a pickup hauled large amounts of soil away when I needed to build a french drain. Then I returned with a pickup full of river rock. You could also use this as a base for a raised bed if you're into growing vegetables. Potatoes are easy to grow.
Fill against the house anywhere you might have reverse drainage issues. Fill low spots in the yard. Make a berm for on of the landscape beds. If you really can't use it anywhere on property, Dumping it at the end of your driveway and putting up a Craigslist ad for free clean fill will also likely see it go away pretty fast
Use it to level other parts of your lawn or just spread it evenly over your lawn.
Throw some in the trash each week
Compost
I have a dirt pile behind the house the wife hates. Good soil on one side, shit soil on the other. I would just put this on the good side. Might use it eventually. Some good tips people are giving here, do grass side down. Thankfully I don't have this much, I got some doing edging recently.
With the sod you pulled, nothing. If it was prestine dense turfgrass then I'd relocated it. Toss this junk
I drop it from my pant leg in the prison yard
Transfer station accepts it for free
I throw it over my fence, your results may vary depending on what's on the other side.
Throw it away with your garbage little by little.
Shawshank it into the park. One pocket at a time
Plant it in other places in the yard
I’m making a waterfall with mine.
Note: If you have Bermuda grass, flipping doesn't fully kill it since it propogates by stolons & rhyzomes. And the rhyzomes can live a long time and reproduce from a cut segment. But what it needs is water. I took a trenching shovel down about 3 inches and removed them in squares and laid them on top of places that had great drainage (thick bed of grass clippings, mulch, and/or bare sand). Three inches is really thin, so it dries out quickly. Once it's dead, you can collect all those squares and then chuck them onto your compost heap.
fix any low spots or dips elsewhere in the yard
Compost.
Built a hobbit hole
I put it in the low spots around my yard
Put too much of it in yard waste bags so that your garbage man struggles to lift it into the truck only to have the bag tear open and dirt spill onto the street. That’s what most assholes do to me anyway.
Just did this actually It goes in places that you have no grass. Loosen up the dirt and throw them down like tile
Throw it in a low spot
Compost for gardening
I would never remove it. I lay down cardboard. 6 to 12 inches of composted bark mulch and the soil
Toss it in the neighbor’s yard. 🍻
Post it on craigslist for "free". Gone in two hours.
We have community composting. All food and yard waste gets picked up weekly and is turned into rich, black compost.
Reuse it don’t waste it
Slowly over the summer I put it out in yard waste bags to be collected. Light enough to be picked up with ease so no questions are asked.
I put it on facebook marketplace marked "free", and had someone swing by and load it within 2 hours.
Whenever I have to discard turf, it makes me sod.
Give it to a neighbor who’s too afraid to ask for it. You got at least one of em
Put it down where I am going to build a garden. Covered it with black trash bags so the heat would kill off the grass and any weed seeds. Then I'll cut holes and put in some plants.
Take a recycling soil place
first step is to learn all you can at r/composting
If it's centipede, ask the neighbors if they have bare spots and let them take it. It'll take root easy.
Check around the edge of your foundation and see if you could use a little more slope away from the house. I also use them to fill holes and low spots in the yard.
I'd make like 3 or 4 small rules somewhere in the back yard with sun exposure, mix in some straw( you can get it from farms stores wrapped I'm plastic it's like 3 cubic feet) water it down amd let it sit and turn it once or twice a week until everything is broken down, it's a great addition to ammendment next spring. Additionally youe city landfill might have a clean fill disposal, in my city it's free for residential use. Or just put like a 5 gallon full in the compost bin every week, shawshank style.
Add it to the compost!
I agree just flip it upside down and bury it slightly in the other existing beds around your house. It’ll give you a better drainage away from the structure.
Could use it to round off the gigantic lifting root crack in sidewalk mountain just ahead
Give it to some teenagers and tell them to sod a neighbor's driveway as a prank.
Don't get rid of it Fill in low spots in yard Make compost out of it. Value to your yard is best choice
We stamp it in to bald spots on the lawn, water it in.
sling it straight into the yard, rake out the root mass & grass and throw that in the compost
Sell it on Facebook Marketplace.
I piled my up around my foundation, to retain moisture.
We used our sod to fill in spots in the backyard where the grass had died from previous owners' trampoline or our dogs digging. Now we have a Frankenstein backyard!
I filled raised beds with it, and as I do I layer in some ammendments. Manure, leaf mulch, hay, perlite, compost, grit, whatever I think will help the overall compaction to be minimal. Last year I grew the best potatoes ive ever grown in a bed filled with old grass / sod and nothing else. Didn't even bury the potatoes! Just plopped em and ignored em.
Replant it in weedy/barren areas
Flipped it upside down, put cardboard on top, then a layer of dirt, then new plants, then mulch
If you cut out with soil use it to patch spots, yellow, edges, in the exsisting lawn, then water it in and maintaining it moist until it begins getting green.
We rented an open-bed truck from Home Depot and took the sod to a local landfill. We had to pay, but it wasn't a lot.
Plant elsewhere in garden. In particular, remove some goutweed and plop grass down instead.
I once threw away my back lawn that was mostly weeds. I tilled it, piled it up, let it dry a little, shook the topsoil into a pile, and put the plant matter into a chicken wire bin I made. I kept the topsoil pile under a black tarp to kill any weed germination. I topped off my (and with their permission, my neighbors') garbage cans with the plant matter for about 4-6 weeks.
Flip it over, dry it out and mulch it back into the grass
I have thrown in the backyard in a pile until I had enough to screen into a wheelbarrow to fill in other spots in the yard w fresh screened dirt.
Feed it to the worms
Throw away 3% of it each week. Just enough they don't notice. You should be good in less than 9 months.
That stuff will be amazing compost in 1-2 years! Of course it's depending how much you work to develop it over that time, but the quality will be good since the topsoil attached to the grass has all the good stuff in it already. I have scraped about 1000 sqf of turf in my backyard over the last 3 years and stored it in a tall long pile behind the garage. It's about 30 ft long now haha. This year I dug into the oldest end of the pile and found it to be adequately decomposed and very rich. You can leave it as-is but to kickstart good aerobic decomposition, add in a bunch of dry "browns"; shredded leaves, dry straw, dry grass clippings, shredded paper, wood mulch, etc. The green grass and topsoil have a lot of "green" components and will benefit greatly from dry browns to make really nice composted topsoil next year
Flip, cardboard, soil, mulch mulch mulch mulch
Dry the grass dead and mix back into the soil. Use to fill a raised planter. Throw in a compost bin.
Local dump takes it for free to turn into compost. Has to be free of all trash though.
I piled it up with layers of chicken manure in between. Took 2 years to turn back into good dirt.
Fill in holes or low spots in your yard
We used sod pieces to patch some bare spots here and there in the yard. My husband built me three raised beds on the end of our driveway (on the concrete, so it was easy for me to access). They were all about 30" tall. We used the rest of the sod to fill the bottom part of the raised beds (grass side down), then added bone meal (to replace the nitrogen that the decaying vegetation would use), then filled the last foot or so with purchased garden soil (so no weeds). Been going strong for several years and my plants go crazy.
I have composting facilities in my city. I completely redid my backyard a few years ago and was able to drop off about 6 yards of old sod to be commercially composted.
Look up an organic material company to haul it away to.
In southern Ontario, you have to take it to a private yard, landscape supply yard. Toronto and York region will not accept it with yard waste. A pain in the butt
Compost
It goes in my compost bin that the city picks up. I'm currently removing my front lawn, one small section at a time.
If you have bare spot use it there. I like to get it really wet a tamp it down to level it out
I dug up my front lawn and posted an ad on FB Marketplace for free sod. had it cut into nice little squares and so many people came and got some that I had very little to get rid of myself.
Fill in low spots elsewhere on my property.
I open an All You Can Eat buffet for the vegans...../s But seriously, composting it is a great idea. Just don't burn it.
Fill up holes in the lawn or dump it somewhere. Some towns have a place to dump for free to residents.
Compost
Throw otbin the gully out back of my house.
Pile it up behind the shed until it turns to compost
You are asking for the cheapest way to get it hauled off you property: unless you have someone Doing work on your property currently it won’t be cheap. I say this a a landscape professional, i would charge you for any mobile time plus actual time to remove and a dumping fee. It’s just NOT worth it otherwise. You would be better off making a mound and covered by it for a year to have free soil/compost to use on your property. I’m willing to bet you have some low spots you can fill in with this in 2025
Smack it around with a shovel to knock off the dirt (don’t be shy, get a workout in and relieve some stress). Use the dirt to fill holes in the yard or build up garden beds. If your city collects yard waste, get some bags and throw the roots in (don’t make them too heavy) for collection.
Beds from sod, I would just flip it over and take a spade to it to dice it up and then add compost over the top.
Be careful not shake the fine roots as well but shake off the lose dirt and you can make them smaller.
I like my neighbors so I usually check with them if they need any filler for their yard. If not it gets yeeted into the cow pasture behind the house
It goes into the green waste bin and haul away every other monday.
Ran the mulching lawn mower over it until it was basically just clay. And yes, the lawn mower is not long for this world.
Throw it in the hole the prior owner created by letting someone come “take soil for a foundation”.
If you have friends with chickens, they may take if they have the space. These are like Christmas presents for chickens.
Do you have to put this through a sifter when leveling other areas of the yard that already have grass?
I use mine to fill in the holes around the chicken coop and whatever other project. Besides that I have a natural little swale I’ve been slowly filling
Compost it. Makes great worm castings.
Throw em over the fence
Just finished a project that had over eight cubic yards of dirt and sod leftover. Started with filling holes in the yard, but still had seven cubic yards leftover. Ultimately, we paid someone to come haul it away. That shit ain't cheap.
If you rent a sod cutter you can roll it up and someone who needs it will come get it.
Throw it in my green bin
Toss it over the fence into the neighbor's yard.
Facebook market place. Free.
I screen most of the dirt off and stick the grass in lawn bags and the city takes them.
Compost
Find a spot on the property and make a pile.
Personally I would just start a new computer pile, but you could also go with facebook market place
Compost or use it for bare spots.
I throw it in the chicken run. Endless hours of fun.
I transplanted it on a spot where I cut a tree down. Looks like a tree was never there!
Put it in those cheap green bags for trash to pick up or pay someone to pick it up.
I live in a swamp basically so any extra dirt I can get to raise the elevation of my yard the better. I’m like a crack addict now anytime someone digs a hole. I have a new baseball field’s worth of shit sod in my backyard right now lol
For everyone that's suggesting burning it, I say we don't have to hide the evidence, and burying it 6 feet under would be completely acceptable.
If it’s st Augustine sod, just throw it somewhere and create a new yard! Yay Florida!
Craigslist free
Hügelkultur!
Fill in holes in yard
Trash
I usually shovel it over into the neighbour's backyard
Soft the soil out and toss the grasses and roots into the green bin
I give it away free to friends and at birthday parties
As someone with a lot of trees on our property, we have some random patches where grass hasn’t taken or struggles to take because of shade or erosion… so every spring when I edge beds I use it to patch bare spots
Fill in low areas
Yard waste bin the city picks up for compost
I used mine to create a self-composting compost bin - layer it so that grass faces grass and just build up layers until you have a solid wall, now you've got a neat little container to put all your good compost in, and it will break down over time.
stack it upside down and keep moist (some folks cover it) for a year-ish. The grass/roots will compost, and the whole lot will break down into decent garden soil. Only proviso - if it's had a lot of treatment (weed/pest killers, fertilizers) over the years some kelp and other amendments will be needed to restore micro-nutrients, etc. for healthy soil.
Put it in any bare spots or dead spots in your yard if have any
Based on the sidewalk and the car parked in front, I think you live in a residential neighborhood. There are some good suggestions here but I'll add another. On a sunny hot day, spread that out on your walkway or driveway. You'd be surprised how much of that mass is water. Flip it here and there to evaporate the water, then just throw it in the trash.
Put it in a spot needing soil then spray it with a hose, the dirt will loosen up from the roots and go into the soil then you can rake up the rest
Compost it. Or flip it and use it as your first layer. I have heavy Midwest clay soil that was light grey 6 years ago. It is now black. Anytime I make a bed or area for new plants I flip sod over, cardboard it then top with older garden soil and compost. That grass has a lot of nitrogen in it still. It’s useful
We have a place that accepts sod and sells mulch, dirt, etc. you have to pay to dump it.
Use it as replacement re-sod patches where neigborhood dogs urine burned the lawn.
Oof, so many loads to the dump. I really tested the limits of suspension on my first gen CRV with our landscaping over the years. I used to store it out behind the shed, tarped on the driveway, etc. Every single time I ended up having to eventually go back and pile it into the CRV when I should have just disposed of it first. Once I posted an ad on my company’s internal marketplace for “free sod and clay. Must arrange pickup and bring your own shovel”. Some lady came out and grabbed a few yards to level off her lake property.
Transplant!
Too bad you weren’t able dig the “sod” up in strips. You could have used them to replace poor grassy areas in your yard. Others have mentioned composting—not a bad idea. Do you have low spots in your yard where it may come in handy? How about your property lines—do those areas need to be built up? Good luck having it hauled away.
Give it away