The Best Time Of Year To Plant New Grass, According To Golf-course ...

Ed. note: Welcome to Super Secrets, a new GOLF.com series in which we’re picking the brains of the game’s leading superintendents. By illuminating how course maintenance crews ply their trades, we’re hopeful we can not only give you a deeper appreciation for the important, innovative work they do but also provide you with maintenance tips that you can apply to your own little patch of paradise. Happy gardening!***

To every thing, there is a season, and a time to every purpose.

But since this is a column devoted to turf care, here’s what we want to know: When is the best time to plant grass?As with so many agronomical questions, an exhaustive answer could fill volumes.

Lifestyle

So let’s narrow the discussion to two main subjects: cool-season grasses and warm-season grasses. In the United States, generally speaking, the former grow in northern regions, while the latter flourish farther south.

We asked superintendents in both parts of the country about the practices they follow when seeding a golf course, and what lessons might apply in our own yards.

The best time of year to plant grass in cooler climes

True to their name, cool-season grasses, such as bentgrass, fescue and perennial rye, do best when they’re planted as autumn approaches and the mercury starts to drop, says Len Curtin, superintendent of George Wright Golf Course, just outside Boston. The sweet spot, he notes, is when soil temperatures are between 45 and 68 degrees, an optimal range that allows for both robust root development and healthy leaf growth.

In New England, where Curtin has worked for most of his career, courses tend to do their grow-ins around the last week of August. It takes roughly 7 to 14 days for the seeds to germinate, and another 7 to 8 weeks for the grass to get established. By that time, air temperatures have started to get autumnal, cool but not too frosty, just the kind of conditions cool-season grasses love.

Does springtime work, too?

Temperatures are cool in the springtime, too, so why not plant these grasses then? A few reasons, Curtin says. For starters, the soil is still too cold, especially in the early spring, so the root systems struggle to develop and the turf never becomes its healthy best (the roots of cool-season grasses are happiest when soil temperatures are in the neighborhood of 60 degrees).

Lifestyle

As spring wears on, and soil temperatures rise to a more suitable range, the roots have a better chance to prosper. But by then, the weather has also gotten warmer, which isn’t great for the grass itself. What’s more, that warm weather also brings out weeds like crabgrass and goose grass.

“So as your grass comes in, it will be competing with those weeds,” Curtin says. And it won’t have much hope. “Those weeds will essentially starve your turf to death.”