What Are the Grass Sod Varieties at Houston Grass?
Call 281-431-7441 for more information. In this video, Houston Grass Owner Michael Romine talks about some of the best grass sod varieties for projects in the Houston area. Michael knows what he’s talking about because he was raised in the grass business — on his family farm near Bay City, TX.
The Romine family has been in the grass business since 1981 and they know what grass sod varieties work in the Houston area. Those are the varieties sold through Houston Grass!
We now carry seven varieties of top-quality grass sod at Houston Grass. Call us at 281-431-7441 for help in selecting the best variety for your project.
Summary of the Grass Sod Varieties Video
What are the grass sod varieties at Houston Grass? We carry seven varieties of grass sod. We have plots of most of them at our office in Arcola if you ever want to come take a look and feel of them.
We sell two different types of Bermuda grass. We carry TexTurf 10 and Tifway 419. Both Bermuda grass varieties require full sun to survive and they’re ideal for athletic fields and high traffic areas where their ability to quickly repair divots and gouges is useful.
We sell Palmetto St. Augustine and Raleigh St. Augustine. They both look very, very similar, but you’ll want the Palmetto St. Augustine if you’ve got some shade to contend with.
The Raleigh St. Augustine is the grass variety that we keep in stock and it’s the most popular grass variety we sell. You can show up any time — we recommend calling us first — but we keep Raleigh St. Augustine in stock and you can come by our office to buy the 16 by 24 inch pieces of it, half pallets of 225 square feet, or any quantity you want.
The rest of the grass sod varieties that I’m mentioning all have to be paid for and purchased a day or two in advance. We order them fresh from our farm, and you have to purchase full 450 square foot pallet quantities. We don’t sell portions of pallets for anything except the Raleigh St. Augustine. So, those are the two St. Augustines, the Palmetto St. Augustine and the Raleigh St. Augustine.
We also have three varieties of Zoysia. We have Palisades Zoysia, which is a medium-blade grass. It provides a thicker turf that’s more carpet-like than the regular Raleigh St. Augustine.
We also carry Cavalier Zoysia and Emerald Zoysia, and those are our two fine-bladed Zoysias. As far as Zoysias go, as long as you get plenty of sunlight, Palisades is a great option and easy to take care of. It’s about like taking care of Raleigh St. Augustine. Anybody that’s ever taken care of that and been successful at it, can take care of the Palisades.
The two fine-bladed Zoysias take a little more care and some more input. They’re a little more finicky, I would say, than the Palisades, but they are a great alternative if you want Zoysia and you have some shade.
Shade Tolerance of Our Grass Varieties
The Palisades Zoysia has about the same shade tolerance as the Raleigh St. Augustine, so you need six or seven hours of direct sunlight each day. The two fine-bladed Zoysias can survive on say four or five hours of direct sunlight. They are a little tougher to make look good, in my mind though. Palmetto St. Augustine can also do well with four to five hours of direct sunlight each day.
Grass Varieties for Seeding or Plugging
Can I Save Money by Using Seed Instead of Sod
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.
What About Using Grass Plugs
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.
Call Us with Your Questions
Let us help you pick the best variety of grass to meet your needs and your budget. Call us at 281-431-7441 for answers to your questions or a quick quote for your project.
We also offer professional installation and we can deliver your grass to your project site.