The new home’s lawn will need updating soon. Its a mix of patchy fescue and crabgrass. Since I want to go green in a big way with our new home, just reseeding the fescue won’t do. I think the way to go is to plant zoysia grass.
Zoysia Farm Nursery sells zoysia plugs that should cover half my lot for less than $600. Zoysia will never need replacing, reseeding or any of the other headaches that come with fescue. It uses up to 80% less water than fescue and requires 1/3 of the mowing. It will grow thick enough to eventually choke out the weeds and existing fescue).
The only drawback I can see is that it goes dormant in the winter. With a yellow house, though, it might match better in the wintertime!
You should check out clover: http://www.wikihow.com/Grow-a-Clover-Lawn. If we have another bad summer this year I’m redoing our backyard with clover.
Suzzanne saw a goat running free coming back from the lake house. The perfect 1-2 punch, an automatic mowing/fertilizing solution.
About 2/3 of my front yard in Charlotte was zoysia grass, and I loved it! Nice to walk on, easy to take care of, very hardy. The drought didn’t faze it; when there wasn’t enough water, the grass simply went dormant. As soon as it got a good rain, the lawn greened up again. If I didn’t mow for 2-3 weeks, the zoysia still looked fine (the fescue and weeds made the yard look bad). I intend to plant zoysia at my next house.
As for turning brown in the winter, so what? It is winter time, after all. Most of the other plants have died back or dumped their leaves, so why should the grass be any different? Look at it this way: you won’t have to mow the yard during the winter months.