Caring for Bermuda Grass

What’s Different About Caring for Bermuda Grass

Call 281-431-7441 for more information.  Caring for Bermuda grass is different from caring for St. Augustine or Zoysia grass.  There a many good reasons to pick Bermuda grass sod for your project and some good reasons to pick another variety of grass too.  Your best choice of grass sod depends on the details of your project location, the traffic expected on the grass, and your care of the grass.  Houston Grass Owner Michael Romine answers this question in the video.

Summary of Michael’s Advice on Caring for Bermuda Grass

Zero Shade Tolerance

Caring for Bermuda grass starts with locating it in full sun.  A characteristic that should be kept in mind when considering any of the Bermuda grasses, whether it be the TexTurf 10,  Tifway 419, or even Common Bermuda, is that none of them like the shade. All three Bermuda grasses require 100% sunlight.  If you plant this grass up next to a two-story house, and the sun rises and sets just a little bit on the wrong angle, or there’s a tree that starts to get a little bit bigger, it’s going to create a problem in the future.   Some of our other grass varieties can do well on as little as three or four hours of direct sunlight, but Bermuda grass is absolutely not one of those. It needs full, 100% sunlight all day long.

Well Suited to High Traffic Applications

Bermuda grasses do great out on sports fields and golf courses, and places like that, because they do recuperate real fast from cleats and divots, and all that. But they absolutely do not tolerate any shade at all.

Large Bermuda Grass Sod Rolls - Houston Grass
Large Bermuda Grass Sod Rolls – Houston Grass

Caring for Bermuda grass includes more frequent fertilization than for St. Augustine or Zoysia grasses.   St. Augustine and Zoysia grasses will do well with fertilization two to three times a year.  Bermuda grasses needs to be more like fertilization four to six times per year for it to be the greenest that it possibly can be. That’s to say it can’t sustain itself and be a decent grass with less fertilization. But to have it look the best that it possibly can, it’s going to require more like four to six fertilizations per year.

Good Drought Tolerance

Caring for Bermuda grass includes watering it.  It should be noted that the Bermuda grasses, in general, have good drought tolerance. By good drought tolerance, I mean if you shut the water off to everything and you had all the grasses planted side-by-side, the Bermuda grass tests have shown that they would last a little bit longer than some of the other grasses out there, so that’s something. However, most homeowners aren’t interested in doing any drought studies, and they just want a nice, green yard.

We recommend giving your Bermuda grass one inch of water per week. If it doesn’t fall out of the sky, if it’s not raining regularly enough, we water twice per week with a half-inch at each watering. Normally it takes about four hours to put out one inch of water with a sprinkler. It’s best if you can do that over two waterings, a half-inch at a time. So say you water on Saturday, and you do it again Wednesday or something like that, you’d water about two hours each time. That if it’s not raining at all. That’s what it takes to sustain nice, green, lush grass. And that goes for pretty much all of the varieties that we have out here. That is something to certainly keep in mind as well.

The Use of Herbicides with Bermuda Grass

One thing to note about Bermuda grasses in general, is that the turf is a bit thinner than St. Augustine grass. It’s not quite as dense so it doesn’t do as good a job shading out any seeds that are blowing around out in nature.

Those seeds are going to fall down on the dirt, and the sunlight is going to penetrate through the dirt a little bit easier than it does with Zoysia or one of the St. Augustines. So you’re going to have to contend with the weeds a little bit more. The best way to fend off those weeds is to use a pre-emergent herbicide.

To my knowledge, I don’t believe homeowners can put that out. So you may have to hire a lawn care service with a chemical applicators license to put out pre-emergent herbicide to keep those weeds at bay. That creates a barrier on the soil that never lets those seeds take off. And that’s usually something to keep in mind if you’re going to go to Bermuda grass route. I like to give everybody a heads-up. Also it should be noted that for the first year, you don’t want to put any kind of chemicals out at all. You just want to mow those weeds and not apply chemicals. If you do apply an herbicide to a new Bermuda grass lawn, you can stunt the root growth of the new grass while it’s trying to take root.

If you’d like to learn more about using and caring for Bermuda grass sod in your next Houston area grass sod project, please call us at 281-431-7441.  We can give you a quick answer to your questions or a quote for your project.  You can also use the contact form to send us a question or request a quote.

Call 281-431-7441 for Houston’s Best Bermuda Grass

Houston Grass is located on the south side of Houston in Arcola, TX.  Our office is just off Highway 6 on McKeever Road and a few miles east of Sienna Plantation.  We have sample plots of most of our grass varieties and you can take off your shoes and barefoot test our grass.

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