Boughter's Lawn Care Services. Fertilizing in New Castle, PA 16101 - 16105

If you have coarse, light green clumps standing above the rest of your lawn, this is almost certainly what you are looking at. The name has confused homeowners for eighty years, and nobody selling the stuff has been in a hurry to clear it up.

Telling the two apart

Kentucky 31, which is what is in a lot of older lawns around here:

Turf type tall fescue, which is what we seed:

Where the name came from

In 1931 a University of Kentucky agronomist named E. N. Fergus was in Menifee County to judge a sorghum syrup show. He stopped at a hillside farm owned by W. M. Suiter and found a stand of grass that had been holding green through a bad drought, untended, for more than forty years. He took a few pounds of seed back with him.

It went into test plots the next year and was released in 1943 as Kentucky 31. The 31 is the year he found it. The Kentucky is the state. Neither one has anything to do with Kentucky bluegrass, which is a different species entirely.

It was released as a forage grass. It was so much a cattle grass that its most famous problem is a condition it caused in the cattle grazing it. Nobody was thinking about lawns.

Same species, bred in the opposite direction

Here is the part that trips people up. Kentucky 31 and the turf type tall fescue we seed are the same species. Breeders spent decades selecting the other way from that original pasture grass, toward a narrower blade, a darker color, and a plant that fills in instead of standing up in a clump.

That is why the variety name on a seed tag matters more than the species name. A bag that says tall fescue and nothing else can hold either one.

What can be done about it

Not much that is quick, and that is the honest answer. Because it is the same species as the good tall fescue, there is no way to take it out selectively and leave the rest of the lawn standing.

That leaves two practical paths. Kill the worst patches, tear them out, and reseed those areas. Or overseed with turf type varieties over several fall seasons and let the good grass gradually outnumber the clumps. The first is faster and looks worse for a few weeks. The second is slower and nobody notices it happening.

Which one makes sense depends on how much of the lawn is affected. That is worth walking together rather than guessing from a photo.

If the clumps bother you

We seed turf type tall fescue in the fall, when new seedlings get autumn, winter, and a full spring to root before their first real heat. Give us a call and we will look at what is actually growing out there before anyone spends money on seed.

You can buy a bag with that name on it in half the stores in the county. What you cannot do is find out what is in it from the name, because the university whose name it borrows has nothing to do with the seed, and has said so plainly.

Peter Landschoot, who spent 35 years as Penn State Extension’s turfgrass specialist, has put it plainly: Penn State has nothing to do with the companies marketing these mixes, with the makeup of the mix, or with the seed. The mixes can contain just about anything — sometimes good, sometimes very poor.

The name on the front means nothing

Every company printing those words on a bag uses a different blend. Two bags with the same name can hold entirely different grass. The front of the bag is advertising. The tag on the back is the law.

Named varieties, not blanks

Good seed lists a variety by name. If the tag reads “variety not stated,” or just names a species with nothing attached, you are buying whatever was cheapest that year.

Here is what is on the tag of the seed we put down:

Three named varieties, nothing hidden behind a species name.

Two numbers settle it

Penn State’s advice: germination of at least 80 percent, and a test date within nine months of the day you buy it. Old seed on a shelf comes up thin no matter what the front of the bag promised.

What we put down, and when

We seed turf type tall fescue exclusively. It roots deeper than the bluegrass blends most lawns here were started with, and deeper roots are what carry a lawn through a dry spell.

We seed in fall. Spring seeding sounds appealing and rarely works: the ground is not warm enough until late May, which means no crabgrass control on that lawn all season, and new seedlings spend their first summer losing to weeds. Seed in September and those plants get autumn, winter, and a full spring to put roots down before they meet their first real heat.