This is the question we get asked more than any other, and the honest answer is that it depends on the yard rather than on which product is better. Both are good. They are good at different things, and the yards where each one works are genuinely different yards.
Start with real sod, because it is the cheaper installation by a comfortable margin. It feels like a lawn, it smells like a lawn, and — the part people forget — it repairs itself. A worn patch in sod grows back. A worn patch in turf is a repair job. If you want somewhere for children to lie down on in April, nothing synthetic matches it.
The costs come later and they are real. In Los Angeles, sod wants water through every summer for the rest of its life, and water here is priced to make you notice. It wants mowing, feeding, and edging. And it has two hard limits: it will not survive deep shade, and it will not survive a dog that runs the same line across it every day. Both of those are absolute — no amount of watering fixes a lawn that gets three hours of filtered light, and nothing fixes a dog's favourite route.
Synthetic turf answers exactly those problems. It stays green through August with no water, it does not care about shade, and it takes traffic that would wear sod to dirt in a month. In the Valley, where summer heat is what kills lawns, it is very often the right call. Over a decade the water saving alone tends to cover the higher install cost, and that is before mowing.
But turf has its own hard requirement, and it is the thing that separates turf that still looks good in five years from turf that has gone lumpy and smells: the base. Synthetic turf is not a carpet you roll over the ground. It needs the existing lawn and roots stripped out, a compacted aggregate base built and levelled, and drainage that lets water — and, if you have dogs, everything else — pass straight through rather than sit in it. Turf laid over compacted clay with no base will hold odour and develop hollows, and at that point the only fix is lifting it and starting again.
The other thing worth knowing about turf is that it gets hot. In full afternoon sun it will be significantly warmer underfoot than grass would be. Shade over part of it, or a lighter-coloured product, makes a real difference, and it is worth raising before installation rather than discovering in July.
So, practically. If your yard gets real sun, you want the feel of grass, and you are prepared to water and mow it — sod, and we will prepare the soil properly so it takes. If you have deep shade, dogs, heavy traffic, a Valley summer, or you simply do not want to be watering a lawn in a drought year — turf, on a base built to last. If you are somewhere in the middle, there is a third answer people often overlook: use less lawn. A smaller area of real grass where you actually sit, with paving, gravel and drought-tolerant planting around it, gets you the lawn feel at a fraction of the water.
Millan's landscaping installs sod and synthetic turf across Los Angeles County, from Glendale and Burbank out through the San Fernando Valley and the San Gabriel Valley. Call (323) 697-8198 and we will tell you which one we would actually put in your yard.