Quality Grass Sod from Our Family Farm
Call us at 281-431-7441. Houston Grass has seven high quality grass varieties for you to choose from. Our grass sod comes from our family farm in Bay City, Texas, where our family has been growing grass since 1981. Here’s Houston Grass Owner Michael Romine describing each of our grass sod varieties.
Summary of the Houston Grass Sod Varieties Video
We carry seven different grass varieties. The main grass that we sell is St. Augustine grass. Most of the acreage on our farm is dedicated to growing St. Augustine grass. We also deliver Palmetto St. Augustine, which is a more shade tolerant variety. Our farm also provides us with two varieties of Bermuda grass and three varieties of Zoysia grass.
St. Augustine Grass Varieties
We carry two varieties of St. Augustine grass sod. There is the Raleigh St Augustine, which is what we primarily sell to the homeowners in the greater Houston area. There is also the Palmetto St. Augustine, which you would use if you needed a more shade tolerant grass.
Say you had an area that it received at least four hours of direct sunlight and filtered sunlight throughout the day, but not much more than that, a Palmetto St. Augustine grass would be a good choice for lighting conditions that way. Whereas, the Raleigh St Augustine grass may require more like six hours of that direct sunlight, and sometimes that is hard to come by underneath some of these older oak trees in front of these more established homes.
Bermuda Grass Varieties
We also carry two different types of Bermuda grass; we carry TexTurf 10 and Tifway 419. The Tifway 419 Bermuda grass is the finer-bladed grass. It is generally what you will find out on the golf courses, in the fairways, and mowed real short on the tee boxes as well. The greens are usually hybrid types of Bermudagrass — we do not carry any of those. The Tifway is what you would find in those sort of circumstances.
The TexTurf 10 is another one we sell a lot to homeowners. I would say, for the homeowners, that Tifway 419 is probably what we sell a little bit more of, because it is a little bit more aesthetically pleasing of the two. The TexTurf 10 has a little bit coarser blades, it still does not have seed heads, like the common Bermudagrass does, but it is a little coarser than the two.
Neither one of those Bermuda grasses has any shade tolerance at all. So, if you have any shade at all, that you’re thinking about putting this close to a two–story house, or close to a fence, or under any kind of tree that may be of any size at all eventually, I would definitely steer-clear of the Bermuda grasses.
Zoysia Grass Varieties
We also carry three varieties of Zoysia sod. We carry the Palisades Zoysia, Cavalier Zoysia and Emerald Zoysia. Two are the finer bladed, those are the Cavalier and the Emerald Zoysia, and the Palisades Zoysia is the more coarse-bladed.
I would probably say that they have similar tolerance to the Palmetto St. Augustine. They are real thick and lush. People that do not like the coarse feel of St. Augustine, tend to really like the look and feel of the Zoysias. They feel more like carpet and they give more, more squishy I guess, under your feet. You almost leave footprints in it as you walk across it in your yard.
The disadvantage to the Zoysias, other than a slight thatching problem because they are so thick, is just merely price. They are expensive compared to the other varieties of grass that we carry.
We’re very proud of our grass sod products and services at Houston Grass. Please come by our office and take off your shoes and “barefoot test” our grass. We’re located just off Highway 6 in Arcola, TX, which is just a few miles east of Sienna Plantation in Missouri City. Call us at 281-431-7441 or use our quote form to contact us today!
Grass Varieties for Seeding or Plugging
A lot of people will ask us about seeding these different varieties of grass, or just call and ask if we sell grass seeds or grass plugs. We do not sell any seeds of any type. We only sell sod, the 16 by 24 inch pieces of grass. There are lots of reasons for that.
There is no seed for most of these varieties of grass. A lot of these grasses are sterile and don’t produce a seed. There are seeds for some of these varieties, but nobody’s really found an economically viable way to harvest them. So, they’re not out there.
There are some of the Zoysia varieties, not the ones that we sell, but there are a couple of them out there with commercially available seed. Common Bermuda grass seed is used on the roadsides or a commercial site. When they’re hydroseeding and painting the dirt blue, most of what they’re putting out there is fertilizer and Common Bermuda grass seed.
A lot of people consider Common Bermuda grass a weed, so it’s not something that most people want in their yard. Most people are calling us asking us how to get it out of their yard so seed is not really a viable thing in our mind.
If you were to put something out like the Zoysia seed on bare dirt, you would be fighting the weeds for a significant amount of time. You’d be fighting weeds until you got a full Zoysia coverage to block out that sunlight from the dirt and stop natural weed seeds from germinating. In the meantime, you’re going to have a science project of weeds in your yard that you’re going to have to contend with. You’ll also have soil erosion — every time a big rain comes you’re going to be losing dirt,
However, if you take solid sod and lay it out there like carpet it’s a beautiful lawn overnight. So, we do not sell any seeds of any sort. We sell the 16 by 24 inch blocks of several different varieties of grass because it’s the best way to grow a new lawn in the Texas Gulf Region.
People will ask us about grass plugs if they’ve got a large area and they’re trying to save money or time or both. The way we plant new fields is we cut the grass into four inch square pieces we call plugs. We have a machine that cuts a little divot, drops that plug in there and a roller comes over the top of it and smashes it down.
Then the farm waters the plugs and they grow out to fill in the empty dirt. That’s the way the farm plants new grass on 10 to 20 acres at a time.
The difference between the farm and a homeowner is that our farm has access to all the chemicals needed to kill emerging weeds but not the grass. Our farm workers have a chemicals applicators license.
If you put seeds or plugs in your yard you’re going to get every weed in the world out there. You’re going to have to find some way to combat those weeds or they’ll take over the whole yard and you’ll be left with nothing but weeds. But, you have to have access to some of these specialized chemicals to be successful.
Just going down to Home Depot and buying a bag of weed and feed is not going to take care of these weeds. There are weeds that can only be killed by two or three different chemicals. Homeowners can’t get their hands on those chemicals — it takes someone from a service like Tru Green with a chemical applicators license.
I mention these things because as you can see, if you start adding up the prices of all these chemicals and everything else it takes to go along with it, all of a sudden you’ve negated all of your savings that you thought that you were getting up front by not buying solid sod.
If someone is asking about this and can’t afford to solid sod their yard, normally what we recommend is you lay grass sod out 30 to 40 feet out away from the house all the way around and then you lay grass sod at a focal point, say the front yard or a side yard or something like that and then let it spread out over time, or do a little at a time or something like that.
You really have to do up by the house and all the foundation work, the flat work, so you don’t lose all your dirt to erosion. But, if you can wait a time or you live in an area that an HOA is not making you plant every square inch day one, then that can be an option as well.
