Best Grass For Low pH Soil?

[Bales9er]

Straight forward question, what type of grass (or specific seed) will do well in low pH soils? Fine fescues?

[MorpheusPA]

None. All northern grasses technically do best in pH ranges from 6 to 6.5.

If you forced me to pick, I'd say that K-31 Fescue is the most bulletproof of all the grasses, with other non-hybrid fescues being next on the list.

But no northern grass does particularly well without calcium.

[Bales9er]

K-31 is on my radar simply for it's tolerance of varying conditions. What about zoysia? I've read that can tolerate ph down to 5.0? I know it turns brown in colder temps but if that's not a concern how's that vs the K-31?

[MorpheusPA]

Zoysia still isn't all that thrilled under a pH of 6. I'm kind of wondering why, with 10K of lawn, throwing lime at it is a major issue? I started with a fully collapsed soil (kind of an advantage in that I could, literally, build the soil I wanted more or less from scratch) and added all the calcium, magnesium, and potassium from the beginning on 12K.

[Bales9er]

Because I have soil with a TEC of 1.5 and ph of 5.0...doesnt hold anything i throw at it, just throwing $$ away until i can afford to bring in new topsoil that can hold onto anything.

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[Green]

Fine Fescue as well...Fescue in general often tolerates a bit of leeway in pH.

Morph: Not sure what you mean by other non-hybrid Fescues. Any examples you can think of?

[MorpheusPA]

Anything you can get in a bag at the big box store won't be a hybrid and will be an older cultivar. They tend to feature poorer performance across the board...but also don't tend to be particularly choosy in terms of specific soils.

Now that we know Bales is dealing with a sand for soil, we can also state that no grass is going to do particularly well anyway--not one that doesn't feature extremely deep rooting and long cuts. I honestly probably wouldn't go with grass, I'd probably xeriscape.

Or buffalo grass? Well, it's a thought.

[Bales9er]

Told ya it was bad...

But in all seriousness, my only option is to bring in new soil, right?

[Green]

Morph,

Are you saying older varieties weren't created through hybridization of other varieties? First I've heard of this distinction.

Regarding newer varieties appearing in box store seed, I've seen it happening more and more lately. Remember that "Summer" TTTF I told you about? Saw it a couple of weeks ago in Barenbrug's Ace Hardware brand seed. I also routinely see Mountain View's varieties appearing in bags, such as Scotts seed.

[bpgreen]

Anything you can get in a bag at the big box store won't be a hybrid and will be an older cultivar. They tend to feature poorer performance across the board...but also don't tend to be particularly choosy in terms of specific soils.

Now that we know Bales is dealing with a sand for soil, we can also state that no grass is going to do particularly well anyway--not one that doesn't feature extremely deep rooting and long cuts. I honestly probably wouldn't go with grass, I'd probably xeriscape.

Or buffalo grass? Well, it's a thought.

Buffalo grass on low ph soil? That sounds counterintuitive.

It definitely checks the deep roots box, but it's more adapted to high ph. I'm not sure I've read anything about it growing that far east, either.

Western wheatgrass has deep roots and is well adapted to low ph, but doesn't like sandy soil, so in not sure it's a good fit. It's also now of a blue than green, so might look a bit odd.

[MorpheusPA]

I'm eternally counterintuitive. Go deep on most of our soils in the Northeast and you'll hit limestone.

Nope, older grasses are still bred grasses, but not to the levels of more modern ones. I'm hoping that throwing a bit more of a mix of types at it will help, with older types that feature a bit more in terms of genetic diversity than the extremely inbred modern types, rather than a more limited profile. We'll see. I'm probably shooting in the dark on that one.

Honestly, my preference here is to add soil (silt, not clay, as that would make a nice concrete), or to chase the pH yearly with calcium the way I do in the gardens where the constant wear of nitrogen tears away the calcium every season.