Creating Low-maintenance Lawns

What a wonderful world it would be if we could discover the lawn grass that stayed green all year round, never had to be watered, fertilized or sprayed, and only occasionally mowed. While the cruel side of Mother Nature probably won’t allow such a thing to happen, there is a lot that we can do now to come closer to that low-maintenance lawn.

While a fortunate few homeowners who are just starting to establish a lawn can come closest to a low-maintenance lawn, even the majority of people who have to contend with a lawn planned well before they bought the house and yard can gain some advantages The Turf Resource Center, a not-for-profit group in suburban Chicago, has developed the following recommendations:

From The Ground Up. Low-maintenance lawns begin with almost compulsive attention to the site’s soil and most likely the need for its improvement, according to TRC Director Doug Fender.

“For new lawns, an essential first step is soil testing followed by incorporating whatever amendments are called for to create the proper pH and physical characteristics,” he points out. “For existing lawns, the only practical way to modify the soil is with seasonally repeated aeration and light top-dressing with high-quality, mature compost or other soil-test-determined amendments. Without good soil, even high-maintenance lawns will have problems.”

Good soils accept and retain moisture, while allowing adequate drainage and providing sufficient air space to permit roots to penetrate, absorb moisture and nutrients and exchange gases. To the degree that the soil can be improved, the lawn’s overall maintenance will be reduced. Conversely, the poorer the soil, i.e., compacted clay or 100-percent sand, the more the lawn will require energy, effort and maintenance in the forms of water, fertilizer, pesticide and probably even mowing. Yet, high maintenance in poor soils will return only high levels of frustration.

Selecting The Right Grass. After soil preparation, the next step is to understand and recognize the need to balance desires for low maintenance with the actual uses that the lawn will have. Growing prize-winning roses in a battlefield is impractical, so too is hoping for a low-maintenance lawn that must endure high-traffic use. For example, in cool-season areas, fine fescues (hard, chewings and red creeping) are generally recognized as low-maintenance grasses, compared to many varieties of bluegrass. But, if the lawn is subject to heavy use, fescues don’t have the capacity to recover from wear as rapidly as bluegrasses. So the low-maintenance advantages and slow-recovery disadvantages of fescues would each have to be weighed against each other. Which is better, reseeding or restricting traffic on a fescue lawn, or going with bluegrass and achieving reduced maintenance in other ways?

In selecting a grass specie and variety for a low-maintenance lawn, search out those that have undergone multi-year tests for water and fertilizer requirements, plus consider more strongly those grasses that contain beneficial fungi called endophytes. Present in ryegrasses and fescues, but not yet in bluegrasses, endophytes offer increased resistance to surface-feeding insects and seem to better tolerate heat, drought and many diseases. As turfgrass breeders expand their knowledge and abilities, expect to see more grasses with endophytes in the future.

Source: The Professional Hydroseeding Journal