AboutLong Island Gardener Expertise How to grow the Perfect Lawn? If you live in the Northeast/Atlantic Coast, I have intelligent answers on grass selection, fertilizers, soil care, weed control, and lawnmowers. Although I have degrees in related fields, a person's real gardening skills are learned from trial and error. More important, I am strict about not using chemicals in the garden. Organic gardening is not just earth friendly and healthier for you, your children and your pets. It's less expensive and easier. You read that right. Less expensive and easier.
Experience Homeowner for 15 years, 30 years of gardening for personal pleasure, college credits in horticulture and botany, volunteer docent at the local botanical gardens, and a whole library of gardening and landscaping books at home some 100 years old.
Question What is the best grass for new jersey all year round
Answer My plain vanilla all purpose best all around grass for the Northeast goes to..... TALL FESCUE.
I LOVE Tall Fescue.
I mean, what can you NOT LOVE about this Grass?
It's not a '10' in the looks department, but it makes up for that in SO MANY WAYS.
And nothing you put down will look as good unless you arrange your entire life around the Lawn. Quit your job. Water carefully, Weed indefatigibly, Mow on schedule over and over and over.... And believe me, I live this way. Because my Lawn must be perfect. My Lawn is so perfect I am glad I have an excuse to grow White Clover in it (fixes Nitrogen). But I don't have Tall Fescue in front. Just in back, around the garden, where people love to walk and hang around flowers and admire things while discussing unrelated topics and occasionally eating out there. Tall Fescue can handle that.
But I could never do that in the front. Because in the front, where only the mailman walks, I have Green Velvet Bentgrass. I obsess over this Grass the way a personal injury lawyer obsesses over his next ambulance. No Grass should live this well.
So it is a great relief that I do not have to worry about anything when visitors show themselves to the garden to stroll and mix and snoop around. Because they're strolling on Tall Fescue.
University of California posts your answer at its website, with a page, 'The UC Guide to Healthy Lawns: Choose and identify your turf species.'
ipm.ucdavis.edu/TOOLS/TURF/TURFSPECIES/
In one of their links, 'Turfgrass selection for the home landscape,' they list the pro's and con's of all the most important Grasses you could choose from:
anrcatalog.ucdavis.edu/pdf/8035.pdf
Drought-tolerant, high-traffic Tall Fescue hybrids -- Festuca arundinacea -- don't care about BBQs and Frisbee players. Tall Fescue performs best in fertile, well-drained Soil, pH around 5.5 to 6.5. New Seed varieties abound, but Rutgers University tests Grass varities every year and issues recommendations from time to time.
They also do Soil testing, last I checked, which is absolutely necessary to bring out the best in any Grass you choose. And if you're figuring you'll just make-do by giving it an 'All Purpose Balanced Fertilizer', consider that o.d.'ing on some nutrients halts uptake of other nutrients. If you're going to do it, do it right.
