Just Plugging Away

 Saturday was spent doing something a little different.  Planting grass plugs in the back yard.

 

Ric has been determined since we moved to this property that he was going to have a lawn in the back yard, I was content with something lower maintenance, some xeriscaping perhaps, but Ric really wanted a lawn.

 

We have been through various attempts at starting a lawn involving different seed and turf with no success.  Our soil is too poor and our water supply limited, but then we came across a possible solution, Turffalo Tech Turf.

 

I heard about the Turffalo products on a TV show on our local PBS channel KENW.  The show has a local angle and one week featured Curt Jaynes from GardenSource nursery in Portales about 11 miles from us.  Curt mentioned a new grass that had been developed that required half the water of other grasses and (just as important) only needed half the mowing.  The grass was said to be suitable for our hot, dry temperatures and poor soil.

 

Recently we spoke to Curt about the grass he had mentioned and it turned out to be Turffalo Tech Turf.  You can read more about Turffalo Tech Turf on the Turffalo web site, but basically Turffalo Tech Turf is a hybrid of buffalo grass, a native grass in our area.   The Tech Turf grows much denser than ordinary buffalo grass, which helps prevent weeds invading your lawn once it is established.

 

Our shipment of Tech Turf arrived on Friday and so we now need to get it into the ground.  The grass comes in little grass plugs that need to be planted 12” apart, as we have a 30 ft x 60 ft back yard that comes out to a lot of grass plugs!  We managed to plant about ¼ of the yard on Saturday, the initial rows took longer as we figured out the best system for planting them, but the more we did the faster we got.

 

For the next few days though we will be literally plugging away, planting little grass plugs.  Once the plugs are all in we will need to keep them watered until the lawn is established which will be about 30 days.  Not too long, although our dogs Tripster and Missy might be tired of only having the side yard to run around in by then.  They get walks twice a day and so they will still get plenty of exercise.

 

The Turffalo Tech Turf is a turf grass and so is not suitable for pasture land as far as we know.  We had thought of planting some of the Tech Turf in front of the house, but as we let the alpacas out to graze every now and then we didn’t want to risk them eating it if it was not suitable for them.

 

Of course when we prepared our ground we used composted alpaca poop as our fertilizer.  Fingers crossed that will help our grass grow.  I’ll keep you posted.

 

Rosemary