Click below to listen to my 2 min. Garden Bite radio show/podcast: Trees and grass, can they relate?
I have often quoted information from my friend, Faith Appelquist, an arborist with her own company Treequality. She puts out a great newsletter and in one of them she discussed grass and trees.
Friday is Arbor Day and I thought this would be a great topic. Faith says, “trees and turf grass were never meant to live together”. Trees evolved in the forest with twigs and leaves as a ground cover. Grass evolved in the prairie with full sun all around.
So what happens when we put these two plants together? Nobody’s happy. Grass and trees will fight for the same resources: sunlight, water and nutrients.
Take a look at your own landscape and see the areas under trees, turf grass isn’t welcomed by the tree or the homeowner who mows it with those beautiful, IMPORTANT, surface roots around it.
Turf grass seed mixes, she says, may say they are a “shade mix”, but that’s not really possible if they are mostly made up of Kentucky blue grass and perennial ryegrass.
If you really want grass, go for fine fescues, these grasses can take less sunlight, water and fertilizer and require less mowing. Fescues also tend to stay green longer, even during a summer drought.
Here’s Faith’s advice: not saying it’s super easy… Find 90-100% fine fescue blends or buy individual species and mix them together: they are hard chewing fescue, sheep fescue and creeping red fescue. (These links are simply to show you what the grasses look like, this is not an endorsement to buy from this place – buy local if possible)
There are also great mixes such as the low mow or eco-grass I’ve talked about before and also the grass that I’ve planted under my crabapple tree and around my Hackberry, Pennsylvania sedge, a native grass that needs no mowing.
