What is the difference between meadow fescue and other lawn grasses?
When choosing a lawn grass, you should be guided primarily by the purpose of the lawn. Will it be used as a playground, for sports, or will it become a lawn that will decorate your summer cottage? Meadow fescue is a perennial grass that grows very quickly, is not afraid of frequent mowing and has soft shoots. Even after repeated mowing, fescue does not thicken, its stems do not become prickly.
Meadow fescue for lawn can be an excellent choice if:
- The lawn will be used to decorate the site. Fescue tightens the soil very tightly already in the first year. The bright green vegetation looks like a fluffy carpet. This is a very ornamental plant, and most designers use it for landscaping areas, creating lawns in any landscape.
- You need to quickly germinate the lawn. Already in the first year, if you plant it in the spring, by the fall the lawn will delight with dense greenery and freshness. Ten days after planting, when watering, fescue grows efficiently, and in a month you will get a full-fledged, thick and juicy green carpet.
- You want to make a lawn between the fruit trees. In order for the garden with trees to have a well-groomed look, it was not necessary to cultivate or dig it up from weeds. In this case, you only need to trim between the trees.
- You plan to have a lawn for over ten years. If you take proper care of: watering, mowing, raking the mowed, so that the mown grass does not mulch the soil, fertilize - the lawn will delight you for more than fifteen years.
- You rarely appear at the dacha. Fescue easily survives drought. If you need to equip the lawn in the country, where you are not constantly, the grass will survive two weeks without watering. But it is better to avoid such breaks, as the very bright sun can burn out. In such cases, it is better to form the lawn in the shade - it will be juicier and brighter.
- You do not want to choose plants for the soil that you have on the site. Fescue is not whimsical, and if the fertile layer has a sandy base, the grass will still germinate perfectly.
With all the pros, the cons of using fescue as a mono crop are obvious:
- Fescue does not tolerate trampling. If you plan to actively spend time on the lawn, children and animals will play there, you will have picnics - the grass will quickly be trampled down and bald spots will appear, which will dramatically worsen the appearance.
- Sowing is best done in the spring, so that the grass has time to take root, germinate and gain a good root system.
- If you do not mow the lawn during the summer season, the fescue will begin to gather in small bumps, since fallen long shoots will mulch the root zone, bald spots will form.
The use of meadow fescue in grass mixtures
Fescue in grass mixtures has different percentages. She is often the basis for such sets of herbs. Depending on what kind of lawn you want to get - it is added more or less.If the lawn is planned as a place for active recreation, its composition is less, if the lawn is used as decoration, in curbs, as a strip dividing different zones - its amount in the mixture is much larger than the rest of the seeds. Most often it is mixed with ryegrass and meadow bluegrass. In some cases, it is mixed with white clover.
Proper care, which consists in watering, systematic mowing, and fertilization with special preparations, in spring and autumn, will make it possible to enjoy the beautiful green lawn for at least fifteen years.