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chris32599

Streambank wheat grass lawn

chris32599
15 years ago

In my walled in garden I want to plant an no water lawn. At first I looked into Buffalo grass.... but after looking into it, my climate may be too cool for buffalo grass since even in summer nightime temperatures drop below 55F. Its an cabin garden at 7,000 feet.

We get about 21 inches of rain a year so I am thinking about SODAR streambank wheat grass an drought tolerant cool season grass. Has others tryed different wheatgrasses and how well did they work in low irragation or no irragation lawns....

Comments (8)

  • bpgreen
    15 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    I've been working on replacing my lawn with several wheatgrass varieties for the past few years. Streambank wheatgrass has very fine blades and is light green. I'm not sure how well streambank wheatgrass would do for you. According to this guide to grasses it's not adapted to Arizona. What kind of soil do you have? If it's sandy, you might do better with thickspike wheatgrass. I've seen some reference works that say that streambank and thickspike wheatgrass aren't different species at all, but thickspike does better in sandy soil than streambank.

    Western wheatgrass might be a good choice, also. It's harder to get started than streambank, and is more of a blue, but it stays green longer without additional water (streambank does well, but goes into dormancy more readily than western).

    A couple of other choices would be sheep fescue and Arizona fescue.

    The fescues are bunch grasses and the wheatgrasses spread through rhizomes.

    I've seen crested wheatgrass touted as an alternative turfgrass, but I don't like it as much as the other choices. The leaves are somewhat yellow green, and it deals with drought by going in and out of dormancy at the drop of a hat. Most crested wheatgrass varieties are bunch grasses, but there are a few new varieties that are weakly rhizomatous.

    If I were you, I'd go with thickspike or streambank wheatgrass (depending on soil type) and maybe add western wheatgrass to the mix.

  • chris32599
    Original Author
    15 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    bpgreen thanks for all your info and the site... I do have some western wheatgrass seed which I was going to plant too. I like the streambank wheatgrass because is stay shorter. In the part of AZ I want to grow it, it should be fine....the soil is an sandy loam with a ph of 6.5

    Most guides when thinking of Arizona look at the climate of the low deserts where most people live and most cool season grasses are not a year round grass.

    I was thinking about mixing sheep fescue into the streambank wheatgrass seed.... but not sure how they would look together.

    If I was to make a blend what grasses would look good together? Mostly want to stay green during our early summer dry season..... Winter rains stop by april and its stays dry till July rains. This is why I been wanting a drought tolerant cool season grass.

    I have a small patch of KB grass... it stay green till about early June they turns brown till the summer rains come and then green back up. I would like a grass or blend that would stay green during that dry season...

  • bpgreen
    15 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    If you haven't bought your seed yet, the most inexpensive place I've found (especially if you order 10 lbs) for Sodar streambank wheatgrass is Mountain Valley Seeds. They no longer show the wheatgrass seeds in their catalog, but if you search for wheatgrass, you'll get a link. They still show western wheatgrass, but when I ordered it, they told me they aren't stocking it and offered to substitute more streambank or to back order (but they may not get any more in this year).

    I reread the guide for streambank wheatgrass and it should be good on sandy loam. I guess it was just sandy soils where they recommended switching to thickspike.

    I know most people think of the low deserts when they think of AZ, but the guides on that page seem to take into account variations in individual states. I know northern AZ (around Sedona) gets pretty chilly in the winter and since you said you're at an elevation, I'm guessing you see your share of cool weather, too.

    The sheep fescue is a much darker green than the streambank wheatgrass, but both are fine bladed. I think they'd look good if you can get them distributed evenly. If you ended up with patches of fescue and patches of wheatgrass, it might not look as good because of the big difference in color.

    I'm probably going to use the sheep fescue mostly in the back yard and leave it unmowed.

    Both of the wheatgrasses spread via rhizome. The sheep fescue is a bunch grass, but if you mow it, it will tiller and spread out from each plant.

    The western wheatgrass has coarser leaves than either of the others. It's more of a blue than a green.

    Western wheatgrass is harder to get started than streambank wheatgrass (at least that has been my experience). In areas of my lawn where both are growing, I don't think it looks out of place. I can find it and identify it, but I know what to look for.

    Drought tolerance means different things and different grasses are drought tolerant in different ways, so I'll try to give some detail on how these three grasses deal with drought. With 21 inches of annual rain, all of these should live without additional irrigation. If there's no rain for three months, and you don't do any irrigation, all of them will probably spend some time in dormancy.

    Sheep fescue has relatively shallow roots, but has a lot of root mass and lots of very fine roots spreading laterally in order to make the best use of any water that is available. It also has very narrow blades that curl up to reduce the amount of surface area subject to evaporation. The leaves also have a waxy coating that helps slow evaporation. It takes a fairly long period of drought for sheep fescue to go dormant. Sheep fescue is a low growing grass (I think 4-6 inches) and is sometimes left unmowed.

    Streambank wheatgrass deals with drought somewhat differently. It has deeper roots than sheep fescue, but will likely go into dormancy somewhat sooner because it uses dormancy as a defense against drought. It also bounces back from dormancy pretty readily. I understand it is less likely to go dormant if left unmowed, but it grows to 12 inches, so that may not be an option for a lawn. It does grow much more slowly than western wheatgrass, so you may not need to mow it often.

    Western wheatgrass has very deep roots, so it deals with drought by relying on water deep in the soil. It takes a longer drought for western than streambank to go into dormancy. If the western wheatgrass goes dormant, it doesn't bounce back as quickly as the others, because so much of the root mass is deeper in the soil. If the July rains don't soak the ground more than 6 inches deep, the western wheatgrass will take longer to come out of dormancy.

    From the descriptions above, the sheep fescue may seem like the best option, and in some ways it is, but it does have some problems. In prolonged drought, it's more likely to die than the others, and it doesn't fill in as well, so if you get die-off, you'll have bare patches for a longer period unless you overseed regularly.

    I wish I could give you a definite recommendation on what route to take, but too much of it is subjective. I planted a few test plots (except for the sheep fescue, because I found out about it too late) and tried to decide what I liked and disliked about several grasses.

    I eliminated blue grama and crested wheatgrass as options for me. Blue grama takes too long to green up and it doesn't spread. I may still try it in a couple of spots that really suffer in the summer, because I've seen some wild grama that was green with no irrigation at the end of a hot summer. The crested wheatgrass is too yellow for my taste and it goes dormant if I read an article about dry weather. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but it deals with drought by going in and out of dormancy at the drop of a hat.

    I really like the western wheatgrass, but I've had a lot less luck getting it to germinate, and it's about twice the cost of the streambank wheatgrass, so I think I'm going forward with a lawn that has more streambank than western. I'll probably water it once every two weeks to keep it green during the summer.

    I'll give a couple of pieces of advice. One is a "do as I say, not as I did." Don't try to overseed into an existing KBG/fescue lawn and try to keep both alive. Kill the existing lawn and start from scratch. I tried to overseed into the existing lawn and have probably spent more on seed and water as a result.

    The second piece of advice is don't convert the seeding rates from the guides I linked above to rates for sq ft for lawns. Those rates are much too low. Use 1-2 lbs per 1000 sq ft for the wheatgrasses and .25-.5 lbs per 1000 sq ft for the sheep fescue.

    Here is an article about low maintenance turf grasses that includes seeding rates for lawns. The rates for streambank wheatgrass are 4-8 times the rates in the Pawnee Butte guides, but for a lawn, they're still on the low side.

    I hit the preview message button and realized that I wrote far more than I realized. I didn't mean to write a book on the subject.

  • bpgreen
    15 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Click the search link and search for streambank. Or search for wheatgrass.

    I did that and realized that I've been at this longer than I realized.

    Your best approach is to kill the existing lawn. Not doing that is probably my biggest mistake.

  • bpgreen
    15 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    I think the hybrid grass is sold in a mix or blend by Scotts called Heat Tolerant Blue. I've read that some people who have used it are unhappy with the color. It's probably darker than the wheatgrasses, though. But I'd also expect it to do less well than the wheatgrasses in terms of drought tolerance.

    I'm just guessing that you'll get some dormancy if you don't water at all, but I think that if you have no water at all for three months, you'll see at least some dormancy. If it's cool enough, you might have a short period of dormancy or no dormancy, but I really don't know for sure.

    I did something similar in terms of planting in sections. I planted different seeds in sections of my hellstrip to see which I liked. That's how I decided against crested wheatgrass. I decided to go with both streambank and western because each had qualities I liked.

  • chris32599
    Original Author
    15 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    I got the REVEILLE seed from a place in Colorado called Gardner Turfgrass Inc. It has just started to hit the market... I sent me some to try... I will see....

    bpgreen you know alot about altrnative lawn grasses, not many people do.... I too have been siding with streambank and western wheatgrasses...because of there drought tolerance and color.... I don't know alot about sheep fescue or the another I see some info about hard fescue...

    Keep up the good work....and I hope you don't mind my questions, I am just tring to get all the info I can to make the best choice from the start.... I don't want to rely on info from seed companies since they try to make them all sound good....

  • bpgreen
    15 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    I don't mind the questions at all. I had a lot of questions when I started and still have questions from time to time. Several people here have answered my questions, so now I can answer other people's questions. Next season, maybe you'll be able to help with answers.

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