Buffalograss

The only North American native grass in wide use as a lawn, and the reason to plant one: a fine blue-green shortgrass prairie sod that lives on rainfall in the dry West, needs mowing a few times a year at most, and asks for no fertilizer at all.

Full sun, warm-soil timing, and restraint. Sow treated seed in early summer or plant plugs on 12-to-18-inch centres, weed it hard through year one, then cut the water and skip the fertilizer entirely.

Buffalograss needs full sun and reasonably drained soil, and it does best on the heavier plains soils it evolved on — loam and clay loam suit it better than pure sand. It is not fussy about fertility, tolerates alkaline ground, and takes heat, cold, and wind. It has exactly two absolute requirements: sun, and a climate dry enough that it is not permanently outcompeted.

Timing decides everything. It is a warm-season grass, so seed goes down into genuinely warm soil — late spring into early summer, once soil temperatures are reliably above about 60F. Sowing in April, when the ground is cold, gets you a fine crop of weeds and very little grass. Use treated, primed seed (the burrs germinate slowly untreated), rake it in shallowly, and keep it damp for three or four weeks until it is up.

Or use plugs. The best-performing modern cultivars — the dense, all-female vegetative types — are not available as seed at all, and are established from plugs on 12-to-18-inch centres or from sod. Plugs cost more but close in over one to two seasons and give weeds far less opportunity than a seeded stand does.

Then do less. Once it is established, water half an inch to an inch every two to four weeks in high summer, or not at all and let it go dormant. Mow at two to three inches a handful of times a season, or leave it unmown. Fertilize with at most one light application of nitrogen in early summer, or none. Every instinct carried over from conventional lawn care — more water, more feed, shorter mowing — makes a buffalograss lawn worse, not better.

Mow at two to three inches a few times a season and never scalp it. Water deeply and rarely or let it go dormant. Fertilize once a year at most. Weeds, not pests or disease, are the whole of the maintenance.

Established buffalograss is one of the lowest-input lawns available, and its care is best understood as a set of restraints.

Mowing: two to three inches, three or four times a season, or not at all if a slightly shaggy meadow-lawn suits you — it only reaches four to eight inches. Never cut it shorter than two inches; scalping thins the stand and opens it to weeds, and it is the commonest self-inflicted problem.

Watering: half an inch to an inch every two to four weeks through the hottest part of summer keeps it green. Or give it nothing and let it go dormant and tan, which does it no harm at all — it greens up again with rain. What harms it is frequent shallow watering, which favours everything that competes with it.

Feeding: at most one application of about a pound of nitrogen per thousand square feet in early summer, when the grass is actively growing. More than that pushes weeds and cool-season grasses ahead of the buffalograss. Many good buffalograss lawns are never fertilized at all.

Weeds are the real work, especially in the first two seasons and in the dormant months when cool-season weeds green up against tan turf. Keep a spade-deep cut edge against any bermudagrass lawn, pull or spot-treat perennial weeds, and overseed or plug thin areas in early summer rather than spring. Insect and disease problems are rare; the western chinch bug is the one pest that occasionally matters, and even that is uncommon in a lawn that is not over-fertilized.

Straw-tan from first frost until late spring - the honest trade-off. It is dormancy, not death, and watering it green in winter is neither possible nor useful; the choices are to accept it, overseed it, or plant something else.

The single thing to settle before planting buffalograss is the colour calendar. It is a warm-season grass: it greens up in late spring when the soil warms, holds a soft blue-green through summer, and turns straw-tan with the first hard frost. In Nebraska or Colorado that is five to six months of tan; in central Texas it is closer to three.

That is dormancy, not death, and there is nothing to fix. Watering dormant turf does not green it up, wastes the water the lawn was chosen to save, and in heavy soil can rot crowns. Plenty of people come to like the look — a tan, low, fine-textured lawn reads as entirely natural in shortgrass country, and it stays that way with no input at all.

If it is not acceptable, there are three honest options and one bad one. You can accept it. You can overseed a small, high-visibility area with a cool-season grass for winter green, at the cost of the water and mowing you were trying to avoid, and with real competition risk to the buffalograss. Or you can plant something else in the front lawn and use buffalograss where the seasonal look does not matter. The bad option is planting it and then treating it like a cool-season lawn to keep it green, which uses the water anyway and loses the stand to weeds within a couple of seasons.

Blue grama has the same calendar, which is one reason the two are so often mixed — the blond winter look is consistent rather than patchy.

Treated seed sown into warm soil for large areas, plugs or sod for the vegetative cultivars - which are all-female clones and cannot be raised from seed. It also spreads itself by stolons once established.

Buffalograss is established three ways, and which one you use largely depends on which type you want.

Seed is the economical route for any large area. Buy treated, primed seed rather than raw burrs, which germinate slowly and erratically, and sow into warm soil in late spring or early summer at the supplier's rate onto a clean, firmed seedbed. Rake in shallowly, keep it damp for three or four weeks, then wean it off. Dormant-seeding in late fall also works and suits large unirrigated areas.

Plugs are how the vegetative cultivars are planted, and they have to be, because those cultivars are all-female clones that set no seed at all. Set plugs on 12-to-18-inch centres in spring or early summer; closer spacing closes faster, and full cover typically takes one to two seasons. Keep the gaps weeded while it fills.

Sod gives instant cover where a supplier carries it, at the highest cost.

Once established, buffalograss propagates itself: its surface stolons run across bare soil and root at the nodes, closing gaps and slowly extending the stand. That is also worth knowing at bed edges, where it will creep into a border if nothing stops it — nothing like the problem bermudagrass presents, since it has no deep rhizomes and pulls out easily, but a cut edge is still worth having.

Not human food, but a keystone of the shortgrass prairie: with blue grama it built the sod that carried the bison, it remains a top range forage, and as a lawn it replaces a high-input monoculture with a native, low-water one.

Buffalograss is not a food plant for people. Its significance is ecological and agricultural, and on the plains it is considerable.

With blue grama, it forms the sod of the shortgrass prairie — a tough, drought-proof, heavily grazed grassland that covered the western Great Plains and supported the bison herds the grass is named for. It is one of the best native forage grasses in that country: nutritious, unusually tolerant of heavy grazing, and productive on rainfall that would not sustain most pasture. Its dense stolons and fibrous roots make it a standard grass for erosion control and reclamation on dry, disturbed ground.

As a lawn it does quieter but real ecological work. Replacing a conventional cool-season lawn with buffalograss cuts irrigation dramatically in a region where that matters more than almost anything else, removes the fertilizer and the runoff that goes with it, and cuts mowing emissions to a few passes a season. It supports more insect life than a fertilized bluegrass monoculture, and a buffalograss lawn left unmown, or planted in a mix with blue grama and low prairie wildflowers, becomes genuine habitat rather than merely a smaller footprint.

It will not do what a prairie planting does — it is still turf. But for the parts of a yard that have to be walkable, it is the version of a lawn that belongs in the dry West.

The sod of the shortgrass prairie and the grass that fed the bison herds, cut into blocks for sod houses on the treeless plains, and reinvented in the late twentieth century as the West's answer to the irrigated lawn.

Buffalograss is named for the animal that shaped it. Across the western Great Plains it formed a dense, low sod, grazed continuously by bison in enormous numbers, and it evolved to thrive under exactly that pressure — low, spreading, and quick to recover from heavy grazing. That sod was tough enough to be cut into blocks and stacked into walls, and the sod houses of the treeless plains were built largely from buffalograss and blue grama turf.

After the bison, it became the foundation of plains ranching, and it remains one of the standard forage grasses of the shortgrass country. It survived the plough and the Dust Bowl better than most, and was one of the grasses used to stabilise the land afterwards.

Its third life began in the 1980s and 1990s, when drought and the cost of irrigating cool-season lawns across the West sent university turf programs looking at native alternatives. Breeding work, much of it at the University of Nebraska and in Texas, produced the modern turf-type cultivars — denser, finer, greener, and holding colour longer than the wild plains plant. Some, like the seeded types, could still be sown; the best, like the all-female vegetative clones, had to be planted as plugs or sod. Between them they turned a range grass into a genuine lawn grass, and buffalograss is now the default recommendation for a low-water lawn across the interior West — including in bermudagrass country, where it is the standard suggestion for anyone who wants turf that does not eat the flower beds.

Thin stands, weed takeover, and disappointment about winter colour cover nearly everything. The usual causes are sowing into cold soil, treating it like a conventional lawn, mowing too short, or planting it in shade.

I sowed it and got weeds: almost always sown too early, into cold soil. Buffalograss needs soil above about 60F to germinate quickly, which means late spring or early summer, and it needs treated seed. Cold-soil sowings mostly grow weeds.

My new lawn is thin and patchy: the normal first season. It spreads by surface runners and takes one to two seasons to close. Weed it, mow it high, and be patient rather than feeding and watering it, which helps the weeds more than the grass.

It went brown in October and it is still brown in April: that is dormancy. A warm-season grass is tan for five or six months in the north. Nothing is wrong, and watering will not change it.

Bermudagrass is taking it over: the commonest long-term failure in the southern half of its range, and it is accelerated by extra water and nitrogen. Cut both right back, mow higher, keep a spade-deep cut edge against any bermudagrass lawn, and deal with patches while they are small. Bermudagrass, once well in, generally wins.

It died out under the trees: shade. Buffalograss needs full sun and there is no cultivar that changes that — use a shade-tolerant groundcover there instead.

The lawn thinned after I mowed it short: scalping. Two inches is the floor.

Worn paths and dog spots are not filling in: it takes light and moderate traffic but repairs slowly. Plug the bare areas in early summer and route heavy traffic onto a path.

Irregular yellowing patches in hot dry weather that spread outward: possibly the western chinch bug, the one insect that troubles buffalograss turf — part the grass at the edge of a patch and look at the soil surface for small dark insects.

It is creeping into my beds: it does, by surface runners. Unlike bermudagrass it has no deep rhizomes and pulls out easily; a cut edge handles it.

Ideal across the Great Plains and dry interior West, roughly zones 3-9, where annual rainfall is under about twenty-five inches. Cold is not its limit - humidity and rainfall are, and it fails steadily in the humid East.

Buffalograss is a plant of the semi-arid continental interior, and its range as a lawn grass follows rainfall far more closely than temperature. It is cold-hardy into the northern plains and takes ferocious summer heat, so the practical range runs roughly zones 3-9 — but the real boundary is moisture.

Great Plains and shortgrass country (Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, west Texas, eastern New Mexico and Wyoming): home ground and the best possible fit; a lawn here can go entirely unirrigated in normal years. Intermountain West and the Southwest: excellent with occasional deep summer watering, and often planted mixed with blue grama. Transition and eastern plains (eastern Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, the Texas Gulf side): workable but harder — higher rainfall means constant competition from cool-season grasses and, in the south, from bermudagrass.

Above about twenty-five inches of annual rainfall the case weakens quickly. In the humid East and Southeast, buffalograss survives but is steadily overrun by faster grasses and weeds, and it is simply the wrong tool; it is also unsuited to the Pacific Northwest west of the Cascades, where the wet cool season and low summer heat both work against it. Buy seed or plugs sourced near your own latitude: northern cultivars are hardier and shorter-seasoned, southern ones hold colour longer and green up earlier.

Its climate story is a good one, though. As a deep-rooted, drought-dormant native, buffalograss handles the hotter, more variable summers the interior West is getting far better than the cool-season lawns it replaces, and it does it while using a fraction of the water.