The Best Quality Grass Seed
Why The Best Grass Seed Quality Matters for Fescue Overseeding
The best grass seed can make a big difference in the success of your fall overseeding service. There are many brands and varieties of turf grass seed, but certain types of grass like fescue seed are purchased every year by homeowners and professionals that work on fall lawn seeding every year. With so many options, it’s valuable to know how to identify the best grass seed by investing in blue tag certified grass seed with a high quality grass seed label. There are four important variables that can be measured on a grass seed label and that indicate whether or not it’s the best for your lawn.
First, a the label will show specific varieties of the grass that are blended into the mix of seed. These seed varieties are like different subspecies of the grass you are cultivating. They may have slight phenotypic variations between them, but more importantly, they have different strengths and weaknesses that provides your lawn with back up grass in the event a disease or other issue hits one variety harder than the others. Ideally, the best grass seed will be at least triple blended for fescue.
Second, turf labels will show the tested rate of successful germination for the varieties included. This is most commonly between eighty and ninety percent. The higher the rate of guaranteed germination, the more viable your seed is, and the more growth you can expect from your seed should it be cared for properly.
Third, and in many respects most importantly, a label will indicate the percentage of weed seed that makes up the total amount of seed in the bag. If you want the best grass seed, this number should always be 0.00% with absolutely no weed presence. This may seem extreme, but it is the only way to know that you won’t be contributing to any weed problem in your lawn.
A fifty pound bag of fescue seed has over eleven million pieces of turf grass seed inside. While even 0.01% sounds like a miniscule fraction, when considering how many seeds this is a percentage of, it’s important to recognize that this still over a thousand weeds being introduced to lawns per bag. That’s a big number! High quality certified grass seed will be clean of any weeds. “Other crop seed” is another part of a label to monitor, and while you want this number to be as low as possible, it is much harder to find completely clean.
The fourth factor to consider when selecting the best grass seed is to what the total weight of the bag is actually to be attributed. More and more types of seed are being coated in starter fertilizer, fungicide, or other material that aids in its successful germination and development. This is valuable to anyone looking for additional benefits, but this coating can actually be the source of half of a bag of seed’s weight or more. As a result, it’s vital to identify this in order to adjust the rate at which seed is being applied. Even if it is high quality seed, half of its weight coming from a coating means that you will have to purchase twice as much seed as you would otherwise need.
Finding the best grass seed is very important for anyone interested in establishing a healthy and uniform fescue lawn. Any professional turf management company providing aeration and seeding services should be able to explain their seed quality and should be using the best available. If you would like to explore having your lawn seeded this fall, be sure to call PPLM today!
