15 minute read
Native by Nature
When Gary and Carol Bodeen lived near Maxwell, Neb., their yard was a mix of buffalograss and blue grama. The native grasses required very little input, and even though they watered them, very little mowing.
Native and low-maintenance species are becoming popular choices for lawns
Spring and summer time bring a plethora of outside chores. There’s the usual work around the farm and ranch, and then the lawn requires more time, too. By Ruth Nicolaus
Low- and no-maintenance lawns can offer the appeal of requiring less time and money.
The most common low-maintenance grass for the Great Plains is buffalograss.
Native to America’s mid-section, buffalograss varieties have been developed to grow well as lawn cover.
Paul Thorson, along with his sister and their parents, run Todd Valley Farms at Mead, Neb., and start buffalograss, selling it across the nation.
Buffalograss comes in several varieties. Todd Valley Farms offers three main ones: Legacy, Prestige and UC Verde. The first two varieties were developed by the University of Nebraska Turfgrass Research Program; the third one was developed by the University of California and is a better fit for hot climates.
Buffalograss offers many advantages for low- and no-maintenance lawns, Thorson said. Mainly, it requires less water and mowing.
“In general, with bluegrass or tall fescue, you mow once a week,” he said. “With buffalo, it depends on what type of look you’re going for. If you want to keep it more tight and manicured it can be mowed every two weeks. But if you’re looking for groundcover, or for a short prairie-type look, you can mow it as little as once a month or let it go all year.” If it’s mowed only once a year, Thorson said, vegetative varieties of the plant will get six to eight inches tall. For the seeded varieties, the seed heads grow a bit taller.
Prairie lawns can add aesthetic variety to an environment and require little or no watering.
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Planting buffalograss can be done in one of three ways: sod, seeding and plugs. Buffalo sod is more expensive than bluegrass or fescue sod and “more of a pain,” Thorson said, because it tends to fall apart. Seed is hard to establish, he said, because “buffalo is pickier about how it germinates.” Todd Valley Farms sells buffalograss via sod or plugs. The plugs, which are 1 ¼ inches around and two inches long, are planted every twelve to eighteen inches apart. Over the course of three months, they will fill in.
Another choice for low-maintenance lawns is zoysia grass. Zoysia, which isn’t native, requires less water than bluegrass but more than buffalograss. It grows thick and chokes out weeds, Thorson said, but can be very invasive. “It spreads underground through long rhizomes that pop up anywhere: in flower beds, even under the sidewalks, from one side to the other.” Buffalograss spreads by stolons, which are plant runners that take root at points along its length to form new plants.
One of the biggest advantages to buffalograss is that it requires very little water. When drought hits, as it does every few years, buffalograss survives when bluegrass lawns might not. “The one big advantage, and it’s a big one, is that in a lot of situations you don’t need sprinklers at all,” Thorson said. In general, bluegrass or fescue requires an inch of water a week. Buffalograss is onefourth to one-half inch a week, Thorson said.
It does have some disadvantages, mainly cosmetic. As a warm season grass, it doesn’t green up till May and goes dormant in September or October, so it looks brown for longer than bluegrass. Its natural color is light green, not the dark green that comes with bluegrass or fescue. It’s not as soft to walk on, and it doesn’t grow as
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thick as bluegrass or fescue, which means more issues with weeds.
Buffalograss also likes sunlight. It does not do well in shady areas, Thorson said.
In the 1980s, the University of Nebraska’s Turfgrass Research Program worked with the U.S. Golf Association to identify and propagate alternate grasses for use on golf courses. Those grasses were to require less management input, including water and fertilizer. Buffalograss was a perfect fit for the Great Plains, said Keenan Amundsen, associate professor and graduate chair of agronomy and horticulture.
In addition to the Legacy and Prestige varieties, the university has developed other varieties, like Cody, Bowie and Sundancer.
Amundsen said buffalograss is usually pest-free. Leaf spot disease sometimes afflicts it, but buffalograss “naturally grows out of it itself,” he said. The disease “can damage it but it will be fine.”
The biggest pest for buffalograss is chinch bugs, Amundsen said.
Chinch bugs are nearly impossible to see, Thorson said, and a damaged lawn is proof of their presence.
He has a way to find them. “Put a coffee can cylinder with the bottom cut off, stuck an inch or so in the ground. Fill it with water, wait a few minutes, and you’ll start to see bugs float to the surface. They’re really tiny little things and hard to see with the naked eye.”
Thorson said buffalograss can withstand the bugs if they are treated with an insecticide. The grass “is pretty resilient. You might think it’s all gone but the next year it will come back. It might take a while, but usually you won’t lose it unless you wait a long time.”
There aren’t too many other bugs that affect buffalograss, he said. The root system is deep, so there are no issues with grubs, June bugs and Japanese beetles.
Carol Bodeen and her husband Gary had a low maintenance yard when they lived on their acreage near Maxwell, Neb.
The Bodeens, Maxwell, Neb., seeded their lawn to a mixture of buffalograss and blue grama. The blue grama grows in bunches which seemed to stabilize the soil and allowed the buffalograss to take hold.
Prestige buffalograss is one variety developed by the University of Nebraska Turfgrass Research Center.
PHOTO COURTESY KEENAN AMUNDSEN AND THE UNIV. OF NEBRASKA TURFGRASS RESEARCH CENTER.
It was a buffalograss/blue grama mix, which Bodeen said worked well. The blades from the two grasses are similar, she said, which made it look like the same kind of grass.
The blue grama, which is native to the Great Plains, grew in bunches which seemed to offer more soil stabilization and helped the buffalograss establish.
The mixture of the grasses, for the Bodeens, was a good fit. “The colors are about the same and the growth rate was about the same,” she said. “We did an equal mixture. We hand seeded and then raked it in and watered.” It was very, very time consuming to plant them and I just didn’t feel like they took off as nearly as well as seeding.”
Seeding worked for her and her husband. “We had worked on a couple of projects where they planted the plugs of buffalograss, and I didn’t think it was worth it.
As for maintenance, she and her husband chose to spend more time on their lawn than it would have needed. They chose to pull weeds by hand, instead of spraying them. “We babied it, and it was gorgeous.”
What was an advantage to them was less mowing. They chose to water it often. “We wanted it pretty,” she said. “Even when we watered it, we probably mowed three or four times through the whole season, when everybody else is mowing their bluegrass every five days.”
The Bodeens had a piece of prairie lawn, seeded with native grasses, and after a few years, other natives they hadn’t planted returned, she said, including lead plant,
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Daryl Cisney, Ogallala, Neb., has a strip of prairie lawn in his back yard. It is low maintenance, requiring weeding three or four times a year and cutting back once a year, in the spring.
gray-headed coneflower, liatris, prairie clover, larkspur, little penstemon, and aster.
It also brought back an insect that became very useful to the Bodeens: the dung beetle. The couple has several dogs, and in the summer, the dung beetles took care of any “piles” the dogs left. “Their feces would be gone in a day.”
Daryl Cisney lives in Ogallala, Neb., and has had a bit of prairie lawn in his backyard for the past fifteen years.
A 12-foot by 18-foot strip of his backyard was planted to a variety of native grasses: switch grass, big bluestem, Indian grass, eastern grama grasses, and more.
It has flourished, with rainwater only; Cisney has never watered it, even in the first few years as it got established. The biggest part of maintenance for his prairie lawn is weeding.
“You’ll inevitably get some kochia and sunflower, and the milkweed will drift in,” he said. He weeds it three to four times a year, but usually leaves the milkweed for bees and other pollinators. “I try to get the kochia out because it can start to over-compete with other grasses.”
Once a year, usually in mid to late-April, Cisney cuts the lawn back to about six inches tall and takes off much of the organic material. “A lot of people don’t understand that if you just plant grass and leave it alone, in a matter of years, it will cease to be productive grassland. You have to do a bit of work with it every year. You don’t have to remove all the stuff but it has to be a fairly thin layer to decompose and keep soil health up.”
His neighbors had their doubts when his strip of prairie lawn first started growing. “Most of the neighbors probably thought there’s a guy who doesn’t give a rat’s bottom about what goes on” in his yard, he said. “A lot of people aren’t excited about the wild appearance.” Other neighbors were worried that the native grasses would spread across the street, which it didn’t.
Cisney says the day is approaching when the low inputs of native grasses will be more appealing to people for lawns. “I think we’ll get to the point when water becomes the most precious resource we have and we’ll have a lot of people going towards native grasses that can survive on their own without the fertilizer and the additional water.”
Amundsen, associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, summed it up.
Native grasses, including buffalograss, “is really this low input management,” he said. “That’s important for every sector. We’re trying to cut back on irrigation, pesticides and fertilizer. Whether it’s related to a potential environmental concern or resource conservation or the economics of not having to pay for it, those are huge assets for native grasses.”
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