Rogue Grass Taking Over - By Greengrass

An interesting question and well worth thinking about. This is a common problem that most people have when trying to maintain a lawn.

In the words of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic park "Nature will always find a way".

Lets start with an example.....

You live in the UK and you would like a great, lovely flower border. So you set about planting orchids, palm trees, geraniums, a few cacti and a few native species like rhododendrons and hydrangeas. After the first year what have you got???? Well all the Cacti got killed off after the first frost. The orchids did not like the dry atmosphere, and the palm trees - well it was just too cold, too wet and too windy, but the geraniums were ok. Well its the same with grass - there are over 10,000 species and they live all over the world, so unless you are a gardener who know what he is doing, it doesn´t make much sense to plant English Grass in the Mediterranean and visa versa.

Now we come to those fringe areas, where people like to grow lawns.

The Spanish have a word for coarse grass it´s "Grama Basta - Coarse Grass". Unfortunately there is nothing Spanish about this grass - It´s American. And that is one reason why it goes brown and stops growing in the Winters in Spain. It basically responds to the temperature, the rainfall, the hours of sunlight and the soil. Having said that, it is possible to grow this all year round but only if the above 4 are OK:

You will I hope at this point see where I am going.

Lawns will always suffer from rouge weeds or grasses. The weeds are easy to take care of but should we think seriousely of cultivating the rogue grass species? The dominant species of grass will be the grass that best likes, your soil, your watering, your cutting height, your fertilising and your weather. So if you are going to neglect your lawn for long periods, choose a grass that will tolerate this. If you continually mow your lawn low (less than 1") then the only grass that will survivewill be the finer Bermudas, Alicante and a few Fscues. This leaves us with the good old Grama Basta. By the way theonly reason it is popular is it doesn't need much attention in the winter and it will tolerate the rubbish soil that we have in most places in Spain.

So personally unless there is a particular reason to grow Grama, my advice is: If you have Grama Basta, help the Med Lush and let it get the upper hand - Its green all year round, a much nicer grass, is more aggressive, more drought resistant, you can´t kill it, and it grows more quickly than Grama Basta. - Down side it needs a little more mowing all year round and does not like shade.

So if you want to make the transition, get in touch we have the products and the know how.