Best grass seed? what are ELITE grass seeds

so you're planning out your fall renovation you're doing some seeding and over seeding some aeration and overseeding and you've been thinking about what kind of grass seeds should you get whether it's tall fescue kentucky bluegrass perennial ryegrass and you just don't know should you buy some of these elite varieties of grassy or should you just grab something off of the shelf at the store well i kind of want to give you my opinions on some things today that might help you make a buying decision and we're going to talk about those so check it out so you're going to hear the term elite grass seed or elite kentucky bluegrass or elite perennial ryegrass or whatever they're talking about the cultivars of grass seed if you're not aware there's a thing called the national turfgrass evaluation program long story short basically what they do is they take hundreds and hundreds of different varieties of grass seed plant them in different regions of the country from the north to the south and they evaluate them for how they perform how well they resist disease how well they resist drought heat stress their color all of these different categories that they look at in these different varieties of grass seed the elite varieties of grass seed are the ones that perform at the top of that range so does it matter well yes it absolutely does some of the cheap grass feed that you can buy off the store shelves honestly a lot of it is filled with annual grasses and you don't want an annual grass an annual grass is a quick fix you throw it on the ground it pops up it fills in looks okay for a year and then it dies off and the next year you're looking at your lawn going what happened so you don't want anything that's got any annual grasses in it if you're buying it like a high traffic mixture for example but let's take a closer look at these and i'll explain to you why an elite variety of grass seed is important and i'll show you even though they're elite they're still not all the same so just over my shoulder here um i've got 13 different kinds of grass seed that are planted here some of them are mono stands some of them are blends of different grass seeds but for the most part this row right here these are tall fescues or turf type tall fescues with the exception of this one this is the gci turf cool blue so that does have a little bit of blue grass mixed into it i believe it's like 10 percent this second row over right here this is going to be our perennial rye grass row so then this third row over these are our kentucky bluegrasses so those are all elite varieties of grass seed but this far left row is my big box store off the shelf grass seed this one right here is a scott's kentucky bluegrass mix which it does say on the bag of this grassy that they are that it does contain elite varieties of grass seed um and then in the back right here the one the dead high traffic mixture um from ace hardware and it did not survive all these grass seeds have been treated virtually the same they're all watered the same every you know every time i come out water they're all watered the same amount they're all cut the same days they're all on the same fertilizer plan now the only difference is when i started the two big box stores i just used a scott starter fertilizer with that and the rest of them got the next diy grass or seeding and overseeding pack so as you can see they're all pretty close to the same color but some of them have some brown in them so all this brown you're seeing in here and a little bit over here that's all done by me i induced some tremendous stress on these just to kind of see what would happen so what i did was i let them all grow really really tall i didn't mow them or trim them for about three weeks and i mean they were they were tall so i cut these all very short and what i was trying to simulate was someone who they left their lawn get away from them they didn't mow maybe it started raining the next week really bad and so now you're two two and a half weeks in before you get a chance to mow and you don't account for that and they go out and they cut it back down to the same you know inch and a half or whatever that they were used to mowing at and oops you killed off some of your grass so most of these elite varieties of grass seed survived that very well with exception to two of them did pretty bad however one has recovered significantly so i'll point these out to you and i'm sure you can see the one that's sticking out like a sore thumb so this is the stellar 3gl perennial ryegrass very popular very common perennial rye grass looks absolutely beautiful when it's healthy just like these other two right here very good in color but it didn't handle that stress and i failed to mention the day that i did this it was about 100 degrees so it got the heat it got the scalp right in the middle of summer and it said nope i can't handle that i'm going dormant and it's starting to come back you know i started watering it pretty good after a couple of days and all this all this grass is still rooted in here very well so it's not an issue where the roots have completely died off and that's that's not going to come back so this will come back green it's just waiting for its time it's saying no right now also this tall fescue right here you can see it's pretty brown on the side right here this one looked identical to this it completely checked out went very very brown and actually i'll bring you in close and let you look down from the top you can see a little bit better so this is regenerate tall fescue and this did the same thing that the perennial rye grass did it went completely brown and then as i've been watering continuing to water it it's coming back to looking like a normal stand of grass from a distance now if you get up close you can see all the brown down in here still but this is regenerate tall fescue and it's holding true to its name so now if you look at all four of the these bags of kentucky bluegrass i don't think just looking at them based on color that you would be able to tell me that this is scott's kentucky bluegrass and this is everest kentucky bluegrass and everest is supposed to be an incredibly dark variety of kentucky bluegrass however if i turn this around you can see that this scotch isn't quite spreading as quickly as this everest has this everest has filled in this whole bag at one point there was about you know an inch or so gap of dirt around the edges on these and this everest has filled that in completely all the way around whereas the scots is still a little bit thin on the sides there's still a you know inch there and about two inch gap there that it's working on filling in the rest of it here in the middle is incredibly dense thick turf with all of these kentucky bluegrasses this stuff is thick now if we're talking color if i put if i put some iron on these yeah this is going to look a lot darker than this scots is so i guess to go back and answer our original question is elite varieties of grass seed important yes are they all created equally no some of them don't survive different stresses as well as others some of them aren't going to survive diseases like brown patch or dollar spot or summer patch as well as others are as far as color goes they are all so close in color that it really doesn't matter can some of them be pushed to a darker color than others if you're applying you know your your micros and iron and stuff like that to them yes this everest right here will outshine these other ones as far as dark dark color there's a little bit of a difference and i'll put a picture up of all of these just about a month ago month and a half ago when i did my last treatment of fertilizer which they're in desperate need for more right now so in this picture this is about a week after all of these grasses were sprayed with some iron and three or four days before the iron went on these they all had a full application of biostimulants some rgs some humic acid they had a little bit of green punch aerate and some dethatch from the next diy line so as you can see in this picture yeah you can tell a little bit of difference in color in the tall fescues in the kentucky bluegrasses but the perennial ryegrass is my opinion all three of these elite varieties were about the same color now with these kentucky bluegrasses i'm not fully going to judge them on their color just yet technically i planted all of these last fall and i grew them in my garage over the course of the winter and of gave up on them for a little while and then have tried to bring them back this spring summer and now moving into fall the thing about kentucky bluegrass that a lot of people will tell you is it doesn't come in into full color maturity all of that until at least the second year so i would say it's at the one year mark right now so next year is when i will judge these based on their color and i'm going to keep these all going until at least next year until at least next fall to see how they continue to perform what their green up is going to be like they're all staying outside they're not going back in my garage but they'll go dormant this winter we'll see how quickly they green up um next spring and then what the final look and texture and feel and color and all that stuff is going to be by the end of next year because i got to give these kentucky bluegrasses a fighting chance against my perennial rye grasses without a doubt these perennial ryegrasses are the darkest green color they look fire um once they got dark i mean they just don't let go of their color as quickly as the kentucky bluegrass for the tall fescue is these have all been treated identical and these perennial perennial ryegrasses are way darker than everything else right now as far as color goes i guess to recap on this if you want something that's going to look like this ace high traffic in a year or two when it's been treated identical to all these other beautiful grasses and i'll be willing to bet you this stellar continues to recover and comes back green here within another month or so if it doesn't if that dies off i'll let you guys know that it died off however with everybody's renovation plans that are coming right up very soon and you're trying to figure out what kind of grass seed that you want to go with i would recommend that you spend some time evaluating their performance for your region so we all want a beautiful dark green grass and i agree it's easy to get fixated on color as your priority however i will tell you this and this is something i've learned managing these before color watering mowing fertilizing your soil ph all of those things along with the problems you face in your area of heat drought um obviously drought goes along with watering but disease issues if your area is susceptible to dollar spot or brown patch or powdery mildew or something like that all of those things are going to affect your grass well before color even comes into play if your grass isn't healthy and thriving it's not going to be able to push the color that it should be able to so i want you to pick a grass seed that's going to thrive in your region and i'm going to link the the intep test down below and you can get on there and pick the closest area to you that has similar climate to what you have and look at your favorite grass seeds and pick the one that will be the healthiest and i promise you that will also make it the darkest green as always guys i appreciate you for watching get outside and get your lawn to the next level bye

Channel: Next Level Lawn Care

Views: 86,525

Keywords: best grass seed, grass seed reviews, overseeding, planting grass seed, growing grass, grass seed 2021, elite grass, grass seed reviews 2021, best grass seed 2021, grass seeds reviews 2021, the best grass seed, how to plant grass, grass seeds 2021, elite kentucky bluegrass, grass seed home depot, scotts kentucky bluegrass, top 5 grass seeds, scotts tall fescue, kentucky bluegrass, best grass seed on the market, tall fescue, scotts grass seed, grass, how to choose grass seed

Id: YhKa1cJUYx0

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021