You've just bought or built a new house with a bare landscape and lots of mud where a lush green lawn should really be. You're into the installation phase of your landscaping and it's now time to put in the lawn. There are two ways to get a new lawn, and both have their pros and cons. Laying sod is the fastest way to an instant lawn, but it is also the most expensive by far, and still requires immaculate subsurface preparation.

A new lawn can also be installed from seed. This requires a bit of effort up front and will take some time to mature into the lush green lawn of your dreams, but is much cheaper than sod, especially over larger areas. Before you start, there are a couple of important things to consider.

• First off is the planting time. The optimal time to start a lawn from seed is either in early spring or in late summer/early fall. The intense heat of a northern summer can be hard on newly sprouted baby grass, and makes the effort much more challenging. The experts consider early spring best, but late summer works well too, as long as the grass has had an opportunity to sprout and set roots before the frosts set in.

• It is impossible to overstate the importance of a good subsurface before you ever begin the planting process. Think of installing a new lawn as laying a carpet; rather than hiding them, a new carpet will show any imperfections, even the very smallest, in the floor surface underneath. It's the same with your lawn; it doesn't cover imperfections, it actually magnifies them!