Last October we had sod installed in our back yard. We had 2 weeks of sporadic rain and consistent watering before cold temperatures and night freezes permanently set in. This spring the lawn seemed to come through winter pretty well except there were quite a few gaps between the rows of sod where it appears there was either shrinkage or the sod was not very tightly "knit" together to begin with. Because of the "gaps" , the edges of the sod rows were curling and drying a bit yellow so that the sod rows were visually quite evident. To remedy this I painstakingly hand tucked a compost/soil mixture in each seam and have watered regularly since. The yellowing disappeared and currently the lawn is looking great. When we mow the "seams" are becoming less and less visible as the grass shoots are now "growing into" the soil that I placed in the seams. Question: I know that we want to encourage deep root growth and the way to do that is to water less often but to water deeply when we do water. However, in our case is this still "new" sod? And as such, should we still be watering more often? I am nervous that this sod is still too new to let it go brownish or "dormant" over the hot months. And though I do want to encourage deep root growth in the long run I am also wanting to continue to nurture the lateral near-surface growth that has been filling in those soil seams. I'm afraid that if we water only once a week that those more fragile new shoots in the soil seams will dry up. Should we just keep watering regularly throughout this first summer and perhaps when the weather cools towards fall we could lenthen the watering intervals to encourage the deeper root growth?