DIYbanter - View Single Post - No-mow, easy-grow grass?

HellT

On 9/11/2012 11:11 AM, wrote:

I found one that would sell me a 50lb bag of the tall
fescue seed I was looking for. One supplier in the whole
country and that was after hours of googling.
It cost me $100. They don't sell it by the pound to the
local JQ Public guy. That was my point. Now if
you had to do that with 1,000 varieties, it seems like
one hell of a stretch to me.

I don't know where you live, but I was in the trade for nine years,
the company I worked for is still in business, and a large part of the
business is selling a variety of grass seed mixtures, blends, and
straight seed varieties in one pound and larger lots. We weren't
unique, either - the only difference between us and our local
competition is that we were/are the regional distributors for one of
the seed companies, meaning that nobody beat our prices, since our
competition had to buy their stock from us.

Haven't you any decent garden centers or feed stores in your area?
Otherwise, go straight to the source. Find the company that grows the
actual seed, or produces the actual blend or mixture you're looking
for. They usually don't sell in such small lots, so in those cases
they'll give you the contact information for their distributors.

Oh, and ordinary tall fescue? Cheap seed. We sold it by the pound and
in fifty pound bags. We recommended it for back yards that got hard
play, athletic fields that got little or no maintenance (i.e. public
parks) and rural properties where the owners didn't care too much
about looks and didn't want to put in much upkeep. But, like I said,
the problem with tall fescue is that it looks weedy, and the problem
with all fescues is they clump, so you don't get uniform coverage.
That's why most lawn seed is sold as mixtures - combinations of
different grass types. The most common mixes tend to contain some
fine-leaf fescues, hybrid bluegrasses, and hybrid perennial ryes.
Fescues for shade, ryes for wear and drought resistance, and blues for
the nice appearance, feel, and uniform coverage. Grass blends are
mixtures of different varieties of the same grass type. For instance,
a bluegrass blend might contain two or more different strains of
hybrid bluegrass. Blends are only a little less risky than straight
seed mixtures, as they, like straight seed, can't cope with all lawn
conditions (sun/shade, dry/moist, cool/warm). Not to mention that
they're more at risk for sustaining major damage from a lawn disease.
That's another point in favor of seeding with a grass mix.

Clover has its place, too. A low growing legume, it provides its own
nitrogen and shares some of it with surrounding grasses. Clover was
traditionally considered a desirable element in lawns until the
dawning of the commercial herbicide era. Lawn weedkillers tend to kill
everything that isn't a grass, which is a problem if you value clover.
So the marketing campaign for lawn weedkillers simply named clover as
one of the 'undesirable weeds' that the product would eliminate. That
way, instead of angry homeowners complaining that the product killed
their clover, they were led to believe that they shouldn't have it in
their lawn.
There are new smaller clover varieties now - microclovers - which
blend in even better in lawns than the traditional white Dutch clover.

Nowadays most people aren't fans of clover. Being an oldtimer, I grew
up with it, so I appreciate it...plus, since I don't view it as a
weed, I don't spend time and money trying to get rid of it. Bonus: the
rabbits prefer eating the clover in the lawn to the vegetables in the
garden. So it works for me.