When it comes to lawn grass, be careful what you buy and be suspicious of extravagant claims

I can tell you what I was doing 68 years ago this week. Watching my front porch in College Station every day for a delivery of what I thought was going to change the way that I lived.

I’ve been an avid gardener all my life. I took pride in the way our lawn looked. I gardened with my dad, but he got busy with his Aggie herbicide research in the spring, so he turned the yardwork over to me when the trees began to leaf out. Fine with me because that was where I wanted to be in the first place. I got up at dawn. We lived close to the campus, and the Aggie band and I were out there honing our skills every morning as soon as it was light enough for us to see.

But, back to my package. I’d been mowing yards for a month. Big, old-time Texas yards. Quarter-acre-sized yards. With a rotary mower with four wheels and a motor. It was “self-propelled” all right, and I was that “self.” And the reason I got all those mowing gigs was because all the college profs on our street didn’t have the energy to mow all the bur clover and dandelions that had sprung up over the winter. I got $2 a yard for mowing that stuff, and I thought I was getting rich. (This was just as the weedkiller 2,4-D was being tested for use on home lawns. That was part of my dad’s research, and I was helping with that, too.)

But, back to my package. As I did all that mowing — up to seven of those gigantic yards in one single day, I kept thinking how nice it would be to have a lawngrass that never had to be mowed. I was 12 remember, and I’d never been on a golf course. But I’d certainly viewed golf greens from afar. “How do they do that?” I wondered. “How do they keep that grass so short and so beautiful? They must never have to mow it.”

It wasn’t until my turf management courses at Ohio State a few years later that I learned that reel mowers go across golf greens daily (or more often), but they’re out there early in the morning before the first tee times.

And I learned about the great work of Glenn W. Burton at the USDA Turf Research Station in Tifton, Georgia, where he introduced so many dwarf, hybrid bermudas for sports field and home lawn uses. I later learned that Burton received the National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan for his contributions to biological sciences. It seems he also developed pearl millet in 1956, which saved millions from starvation. He graduated from the University of Nebraska about the same time my dad was in school there. I just read that as I prepared for this story, so I’m still learning. That’s the great thing about horticulture. There’s always something to learn.

But, to finish up on my package. I had taken one week’s earnings from all that hard mowing to buy myself a box of zoysia plugs. Those stinking little mail order zoysia plugs that came in dried up and brown, unidentifiable as anything close to a turfgrass that I’d want in our yard. The ad in the gardening magazine had told me that a person would “Only mow your lawn once or twice every summer.” And that this grass would “ … choke out all the weeds.”

Well, 12-year-old Neil learned a tough lesson when that package finally did arrive. Those people selling mail order turfgrass are more about making money for themselves than they are for making America beautiful. I planted those sorry-dog little plugs just like the instructions told me to do, but my bet is that they still haven’t grown together to make a lawn down there in Aggieland. What a bum steer.

And this morning, as older, wiser Neil sat down to eat his cereal and think about his gardening topic for you today, there was that ad.

That same old misleading ad. Oh, it’s been gussied up by the graphics people, but it’s still plugging the same old plugs with the same old baloney.

Zoysia isn’t a bad grass. There are attractive zoysia lawns here in the Metroplex. There are many varieties, some fine-textured and some coarser. All are slow-growing. All are intermediate to St. Augustine and bermuda in their tolerance of shade. All have long winter dormant (brown) periods. All can be dominated by either St. Augustine or bermuda, so you want to plant them where they won’t be invaded.

If you want to try zoysia as a lawngrass, buy from a local sod vendor so you can buy fresh, green grass in April or May. Ask for their recommendations of varieties and have them give you addresses where you can see lawns that have been growing for two or three years or longer. Plugs are also sold locally in retail nurseries, but for important landscapes, sod is more dependable.

Be careful what you buy. Be suspicious of extravagant claims. Grass seed that’s promised to patch bare spots usually won’t. And it’s probably a blend of northern cool-season ryes and fescues that die when gets blazing hot (90F) in late May or early June, to say nothing of July and August.

Additionally, soil additives that “activate enzymes and stimulate microbes ...” Watch out for those buzzwords. They’re short paths into dark forests where you’re likely to be fleeced from your wallet.

There. Column is written. My cereal is soggy, but I feel better.