St Augustine Grass Lawn Care Tips and Identification – Lawn Green Lawn Care
St Augustine Grass Identification and Lawn Care Maintenance is not as simple as it seems. An understanding of the nature and types of grasses is important to knowing how to care for different turf grasses.
In Australia, the local common name (or vernacular) for St Augustine turf is Buffalo turf grass.
In the North American continent, there is a group of St Augustine grasses called theST varieties. This group of St Augustine grass includes ST26, ST85, ST91 and ST135.
There is quite a bit of confusion (at least here in Australia) amongst lawn mowing contractors and landscaping contractors as to what ST is short for. Many people mistakenly think that ST refers to Shade Tolerance.
In fact, ST is short for, or stands for St Augustine Type. The ST varieties of St Augustine were developed by an American called Hugh Whiting.
If ST referred to Shade Tolerance then how could it be possible to have 135% shade tolerance. Mmm??
Hugh Whiting (when his company H&T Whiting Turfgrass Developer LLC operated in Australia) developed a few Bermuda grass (also known as Couch grass) varieties / cultivars including CT2.
CT2 refers to Couch Type 2. The same applies to Hugh Whiting’s Zoysia cultivars where ZT95 refers to Zoysia Type 95.
The care of St Augustine grass requires an understanding of the type of grass it is. St Augustine grass, or Buffalo grass, is a warm season grass that ONLY has Above Ground Runners (known as Stolons). So, for this reason St Augustine grass does not cope with being mowed short or scalping. So it is important NOT to cut the St Augustine lawn too short and not to shave the lawn edges with a whipper-snipper or weed eater.
By virtue of only having Stolons, you tend to find that St Augustine grass does not invade garden beds under edging or mowing strips like Bermuda grass or Kikuyu does.
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