How Fast Does Bermuda Grass Spread?

Bermuda grass is well known to be the "alpha grass", which spreads and takes over everything.
This season I wanted to test it out and find out how well it can take over a lawn by just mowing, watering, and fertilizing it. Here are my findings.
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[@Job-e9c]

The Bermuda lawn is filling in nicely!

[@TurfMechanic]

It's so close to all the way there; I'm very happy

[@MayweatherjrWONandsoTrump]

One must respect the straight forward and yet high quality content and simplicity you share with us. I share the same challenges with nutsedge and fertilizing bare spot areas. Hard clay Central Texas. Always relevant information, Thank you

[@chrisfallon77]

Really nice lawn. Big fan of your channel and appreciate you sharing with us. I noticed you have a beautiful Sago palm/Cycas revoluta there! Greetings from Miami Beach

[@DirtygardenCA]

Can you document your next Kikuyu grass eradication? I'd like to see how you used Quinclorac, how long it takes to respond and if you need follow up doses. Thanks!

[@DirtygardenCA]

I sprigged some hybrid bermuda stolons into a small plant pot a couple months back. It has now filled that with crazy stolon runners, I now have it in a container 14" x 9" to see how long it will take to fill. I'd say Bernuda fills at least twice as fast, probably even more than KBG takes to fill. Id like to eventually use it for a test plot. Sprigging is amazing. I've seen guys on the lawn forum (TLF) go from bare dirt to mowing in just about a month.

[@jasonkerr2080]

Turfmechanic...I used round up on my lawn accidentally it says it kills roots do I have to dig the grass all up and seed again

[@marcaustin]

good vid. I patched one 8x10 area of my front yard in may with bermuda grass seed. It has grown up well but i havent noticed any side growth yet. Meanwhile - the native bermuda is spreading nicely after i removed a ton of weed pressure with a Trimec/QUinclorac mix in late April.

[@DirtygardenCA]

You might not see side growth but there's a very good chance there are rhizomes underground that are growing laterally and eventually will push it's way up.

[@farquadshmoogle9120]

@TurfMechanic. dont you have Bermuda in a pot? could you not cut off sprigs from it and put them into the big bare spot???????

[@TurfMechanic]

yes, the bermuda I have in the pot was sprigged from my lawn so it's an exact genetic match. I could do that, and I could use my ProPlugger to move plugs from dense areas to the bare dirt spots...but I run a KZbin channel so I wanted to demonstrate the speed of natural Bermuda spread via irrigation, mowing, and fertilization alone. The sprigging and plugging are other topics that I can make other dedicated videos on. The sprigs and plugs method along with fertilizer would have been the way to go if I wanted to fill in the space as fast as possible.

[@BenjaminT.Minkler]

I knowingly changed the strain of KBG seed I was using on one of my larger yard areas - going from a cheap 'home improvement store' lighter KBG to a better darker 'Midnight' type - at first last year it seemed okay, almost if the new better seed didn't take; but then this year I can clearly tell there is a splotchy/marbled look to the coloring that just isn't looking good - so not a very good move, and altho it would have sucked to do, I should have done a complete kill-off renovation(and now I still most likely have to, wasting that first round of good more expensive seed) and really killing off the old strain would have allowed me to aerate/smooth/amend the top soil to get way better results with the new stain with less competition from the old pre-existing grass .....of course even just waiting and letting the old lawn spread and fill in on its own(as shown in this video) would have been better than what I have now

[@TurfMechanic]

man, that's the worst, loss of time and seed. As you surely know already, if you wait for more seasons to pass and possibly overseed more of the midnight into the lawn then it will eventually even out, I have a bag of KBG seed that contain three different varieties, it can be hard and long to get it to match without the reno.

[@savagerider750]

How low does that snapper cut? It looks sub 1 inch

[@TurfMechanic]

First of all I love that mower and it's one of the cheapest ones you can buy. I got mine on Amazon back in early 2020 and it's still working flawlessly. Even the battery has held up just fine. For your question though the mower has 7-height settings ranging at the lowest from 1-3/8" to the highest at 3-3/4". What is not advertised though is that you can go lower than the lowest setting. By pulling the height adjustment handle around the hard stop I can bring the setting even lower. I don't know exactly how low it gets when I do that but I like to think of the "zero" setting as approximately 1-inch. Also, if I were to weight the mower down because it's so light (which I've never done before) I think I could shave another tenth of an inch off the cut too but with rotary mowers that starts getting risky if the lawn isn't perfectly flat. For this Bermuda I was cutting at that 1" height in May and June but now in July I'm up around 1 3/4".

[@toddblankenship7164]

Not related to this video SORRY, but i have some questions as a new subscriber and new lawn lover(just planted my first lawn out front at my house) I live central British Columbia Canada. The questions I have are 1. Can i rehabilitate my back yard lawn right now in the heat of July as long as I water often? 2. We have three boys and they are on the back yard lawn often will Kentucky blue grass hold up or is there a better "durable" type good for cold climate? 3. We are filling large family/kid pools and using water mats that will sit on the lawn for usually a week before emptying to refresh the water, and of course we move the stuff to fresh locations but the lawn does seem to suffer and go yellow/green under the pool etc and also i find weeds sneak in those spots. is there anything i can do to minimize this? also should I be aerating annually because of the compaction this pool water weight is probably doing? 4. When we drain said pools we are putting ALOT of water onto the lawn not to mention just the continuous water mats that run full time during the day (its basically a water park) is there any concern of washing out nutrients in the soil? I have lots of questions but we'll start there.

[@BenjaminT.Minkler]

I'm sure Brian will jump in here and give you a reply ....but I'd just like to say I was doing almost the exact same thing in Iowa with our young boys and pools and stuff in the backyard - mostly I pretty much had to wait until they grew up and moved out before I could have a nice yard, haha - the problems I had: 1a) the kids wanted money, so wanted to mow the lawn(for pay) and at first they did okay, but then as years went on they wanted more money to do it and/or did it less often or just a quicker worse job 1b) this allowed the weeds to really grab hold 2a) pools often just got left, or other activities always happened in the same spots 2b) this lead to dead dirt spots 3) KBG(which I also had/have) is great grass! and I cut mine short and often to keep a clean usable lawn for kids and dogs, also one of the better for abuse, just not as strong as tall fescue(but fescue has a rough sharp 'poky' texture) and KBG is able to repair itself, but really not as quickly as it can be destroyed 4) I was able to redo my front yard too, as it didn't see hardly any use; but also hardly got any water, so I eventually just went with tall fescue there and would mow it taller(it looks good from a distance for curb drivebys, and is dark) not as nice as I once had it, but it is easy to take care of anyway to try and keep a lawn with that much use, I ended up just putting out some annual rye grass seed over and over again on damaged spots...then once the kids were pretty much done with it, I worked for a few years killing weeds and over seeding KBG

[@TurfMechanic]

lots of questions here and they all remind me of my old house in Klamath Falls Oregon. We kept that yard like a water park all summer long for years. First of all, my opinion is the lawn is meant to be used. Don't ever keep the kids and their fun off the lawn just for the sake of having a better looking yard. If I were you I would absolutely renovate starting right now, late July. Up in BC your days are already starting to shorten so putting KBG seed down now means it will start growing in August which is a perfect time for northern lawns like yours to take off. KBG is probably the best grass for your area unless you want to mix in perennial rye, it's highly durable to foot traffic (boys). I would guess you get a lot of rain annually even if you have dry spells so irrigation in hot/dry summer weeks/months will be necessary but the KBG is best for cold climates. It'll go dormant during the winter and be best for the spring/fall. For the pools and water mats, it's all about moving them as often as possible. If you leave them on full for a few days then you'll get yellowing but it'll bounce back in time. If you leave them on dry then you'll probably temporarily kill grass under them due to heat. This is the solarization method of killing off vegetation. As for aeration, for climates like yours I have lots of videos over the years advocating for core aerating twice per year, end of winter and end of summer. I would advice both for you. Possibly early April and late August. As for the draining of pools on the lawn, yeah, leeching of nutrients and runoff can be an issue but if you have good CEC in your soil and don't use many if any chemicals, pesticides, and fungicides then you should have good soil microbial life to make mineral locked nutrients and make them plant available again in short order. If you want to go the extra mile after aeration topdressing the lawn with azomite and/or worm castings and possibly garden quality compost will increase soil CEC and help lock nutrients in the soil thereby minimizing nutrient loss due to leeching. If you really want to talk about a lot for a long time, check out my "book a call" service sometime. turfmechanic.com/book-a-call/

[@TurfMechanic]

this is a great reply Ben, thanks, and Todd, if you are reading this, Ben is right about the Perennial Ryegrass (PR) seed. I didn't mention that in my reply but you can get some good PR seed for fairly low cost and so long as you always buy the same bag, anytime you find a dead spot due to kids it can be fixed with seed extremely fast, much faster than KBG will repair itself. You can literally have a nearly perfect looking lawn from bare dirt and seed in only 7 days. PR is very accommodating to herbicides too and it's one of the grass types that I affectionately consider to be one of the easiest lawns to maintain...so long as you can irrigate it during drought and heat which I think you can. Also, Ben is right, with the kids keep that lawn cut short (not reel mower short) and it's a better surface for kids to play on and much easier to clean up, you gotta mow a bit more often but that's not a bad thing when you care about the lawn.

[@toddblankenship7164]

@@BenjaminT.Minkler thanks a ton for the info!

[@toddblankenship7164]

@@TurfMechanic much appreciated! thanks.