I just cooked up a 1/4 size grass patch. But the matter of carsmaster's original rather random surface normals finally pushed me to fix them. In his original grass object, the low height of the grass, combined with the enormous length-to-height-ratio of each grass strip, did not result in the often wildly varying surface normals for the 4 corners of a face to stand out. But here, with the grass being VERY much taller with respect to the strip length, the horrible 'flipping' of surface normals causes pronounced diagonal discontinuities in the lighting along many of the faces.
For a single grass strip face, comprising 4 corners, each corner could all have wildly different normals pointing all over the place.
I took a more structured approach, and the result is seen below with this new smaller object. Old on the left, new on the right. Accomplished with the Poor Man's 3D Modeling Package
TM, that being a spreadsheet and Notepad.
I'll be doing the same for the existing larger grass patch, obviously.