Bermudagrass vs St. Augustinegrass | Warm Season Turf

what is up everybody and welcome back to another episode of dawn's lawns if you're new to my channel please consider hitting that subscribe button and hitting that like button if you enjoyed today's video so today's video we're going to compare some of the benefits some of the downsides and some of the joys of having st augustine and having bermuda grass if you recall i had a full saint augustine lawn here and this last spring i decided that i was going to rip up a section and turn it into this bermuda section and now i've kept it at around 5 8 of an inch around half inch for the last uh probably month and a half two months a couple things that i've learned with this process is that bermuda is a tough mother trucker really hard to do any kind of damage that's permanent to bermuda i have scalped the crap out of it around sections with my weed eater and it just bounces right back i've not watered it for a week and it just turns kind of a pale color and then you start watering it and boom it gets back to being this nice luscious green color i posted on instagram the other day something about how you can tell that bermuda grass is a lot more drought tolerant and quite honestly that is a fact saint augustine is a grass that's going to need more water okay some of that has to do with the size of the leaf blade okay so during the day this leaf blade is expiring some of its moisture and during that process the leaf blade will fold up and you can tell that it's a little more drought or heat stressed okay so because of the type of grass st augustine is it's a stoloniferous plant so it spreads above the ground and bermuda is a rhizomatic and stoliniferous plant so it can go underground through rhizomes and above ground with stolens i keep the two edged that way they can stay somewhat separate i know bermuda will travel into the saint augustine but as long as i keep an edge there the saint augustine will stay out and that really does keep them separate because i do like having tall grass the saint augustine you know and i've also really enjoyed having this real mode real low bermuda so like i said the bermuda grass is a lot more drought tolerant its leaf blades are a lot smaller so it can handle the heat and not being watered a lot better the saint augustine's leaf blades are really thick really wide it's stoloniferous so it stays above the ground so the heat really hits it hard and makes it thirsty a lot quicker with that being said bermuda also loves some nitrogen okay especially during the hot months so i've been hitting this bermuda section with a half pound of nitrogen a week for the last month which means that's two pounds of nitrogen in the month of july so that has been feeding this bermuda to really get it thick and thick and thick before winter because this is its first season i really wanted to push it hard now you could you know overseed with ryegrass but it's it's first season these are my babies right here i'm not gonna overseed i may actually be able to keep my bermuda through winter it may not even go dormant so that's kind of my thought process there for me because of where i live am i going to try to keep bermuda from going dormant or am i going to try to overseed or am i just going to go with the flow it's babies they're babies you know we're just gonna see what happens and i'm gonna see if i can keep it from going dormant and just kind of go with the flow this winter it is its first season so i'm not gonna push it into dormancy and i'm also not going to overseed with rye the bermuda is way more drought tolerant it is a hungry grass it likes to be fed nitrogen regularly st augustine can do with lower levels of nitrogen feedings and like say this section right here i have barely fed it anything at all um i might have hit it with some green punch and green effect this year that is probably about it maybe vigoro one time but that is it okay so it's only had two three feedings max and those are low rates they're not even full one pound rates or anything like that that the bags would recommend another difference between the two uh two types of grass is that bermuda grass is going to be more disease tolerant or disease resistant compared to st augustine where you can kind of see i've got a little bit of something something going on right over there but that is just another feature that bermuda has over st augustine and that is that bermuda can tolerate disease a little bit more and handle it a little bit better it is a very fast growing grass so it will experience an injury let's say the dogs dig up a spot or something it will fill that back in a lot faster than old saint augustine will and part of the reason that saint augustine is so susceptible to diseases is that it is such a thicker denser taller grass much like some of those turf type tall fescues are sensitive to diseases it's because of that height and the thickness there's just so many blades that causes lack of airflow down in there and disease will start to just manifest itself and grow bermuda is also a lot more tolerant to wear and running and playing on hints why we got it right here around our playscape and in the main part of our lawn if you come over here and you look you can see that my saint augustine maybe if you can tell gets beat up by the dogs through here you can tell now in this spot you can see the dogs really wear it out so you can tell that the saint augustine gets worn out from those dogs but as soon as they get on the bermuda there's no damage whatsoever like i said also that the bermuda really recovers quick it spreads really fast and fills in any spots that do get hurt very quickly so another point for bermuda another big difference between the two is the color there are varieties of bermuda grass that are really really dark mine's pretty dark saint augustine typically will have an emerald type color don't mind my garden it's looking pretty bad right now but st augustine will be more of an emerald green whereas bermuda will be more of a dark green so that is another difference between the two obviously if you're not feeding either of them they're gonna get pale they're gonna lose some color but if you're keeping them very well fed you'll be able to see that difference much like in my yard if you haven't had an opportunity to go view my bermuda lawn transition video i have well video series i have that whole playlist linked down below linked above somewhere it's on my youtube channel you can go watch that and see how i turned my lawn from full st augustine to having this awesome 5 8 inch cut bermuda grass i hope you guys enjoyed today's video as always hit that like button tap subscribe follow me on instagram and twitter at dawn's lawnswine i'll see you in the next video best of luck in the lawn you

Channel: Don’s Lawns

Views: 121,011

Keywords: Don's Lawns, Corpus Christi, Texas, St. Augustinegrass, fertilizer, mowing, lawn maintenance, n-ext products, product review, Bermuda, Bermudagrass, warm season turf, turfgrass, new homeowner, lawn care nut, lawn care, diy lawn care, home putting green, backyard putting green, grass comparison, best grass for hot climate, best grass, warm season grass, best grass for warm climate, bermuda, st. augustine, reel mowing, drought tolerance, darker lawn, buffalo grass, couch grass

Id: q5TdqxZQNkI

Length: 8min 15sec (495 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020