Letting Lawn Grass Go To Seed

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There’s a long running debate in lawn and garden circles about whether you should ever let the grass in your lawn go to seed or whether you should always cut it before it gets to that point.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, “To go to seed or not to go to seed?… That is the question!”

While most of us cut our grass fairly regularly before the top of the grass blades can flower and start to form seeds, there are some people who believe that actually letting your grass grow long enough to go to seed is actually a good idea for some lawns.

Generally, lawn experts tend to be against letting grass go to seed, but the theory that a lawn that goes to seed will grow more from one year to the next is at least intriguing. For most plants in your garden if you just let the plants grow and drop fruits or vegetables full of seed from one year to the next you’ll typically find more of the same plants growing next year. And, really, that’s how grass normally takes over a field: it grows, drops seeds and grows some more, right?

While all this makes sense to me, there are some good arguments about why mowing your lawn before your grass goes to seed might actually be a better idea. When you read the opinions of the lawn experts they usually advance a number of reasons why your grass should not be allowed to go to seed. Among those reasons:

Weeds: By not cutting your grass regularly you could also be allowing weeds to grow up and get a foothold in places where they may not normally get a chance to normally take root.

Seeds Aren’t Everything: Not all grasses expand entirely by dropping seeds. Many grass types spread their roots outwards to grow as well. Some grass grows like bamboo (which is a grass itself), extending out runners (rhizomes below ground and stolons above ground) to establish new grass and spread themselves. Along this same line, some experts say that mowing your lawn actually strengthens the grass and encourages it to spread more.

Your Grass Needs To Eat: Grass, like any other plant, does need to use a considerable amount of energy to create flowers and seeds. Some experts claim that the process of making seeds is so taxing that it actually removes nutrients from the soil and makes the entire lawn less healthy.

Ugly: Okay, let’s admit it… A yard filled with grass that’s six inches high and going to seed looks more like a forgotten field than a suburban lawn. Even if you explain to your neighbors that you’re just trying to get some free grass seed, they may not be real excited about living next to “the house with the overgrown lawn.”

The 1/3 Cut Rule: Every explanation of how to mow a lawn tells you that cutting your grass higher is better for the health of the lawn. Another part of this rule is to not cut too much of the height of the grass off in any one mowing. The general rule is to never cut off more than 1/3 (33%) of the height of the grass at one time because it can stress the grass and make it less healthy. So if your grass is nine inches high, you should only cut off 1/3 (3 inches) in any single mowing session. A week later you can mow it down a little lower if you want. Yes, it’s sometimes difficult to cut your grass that high (your mower deck height will often dictate this).

Seeds May Not Germinate: Some experts claim that if you let your grass go to seed you won’t actually be able to plant the new seed that’s produced. Why? Because the story goes that the grass seed companies have designed their grass so that the seeds that are produced by their grass will never fully mature or germinate. This seems a little far-fetched until you realize how seeds for commercial food crops are managed and how much money there is in a field of grass. In theory I could just harvest up all the grass seed and keep making my own grass without ever buying another bag of seed. I’m not sure what to believe about this claim.

Those are the reasons why it might not be a good idea to let my grass go to seed, while there’s only one reason I can really think of for doing it: free grass seed falling to the ground means my grass might get thicker and grow more. Maybe. I’m only slightly obsessed with my lawn, but I’m willing to let my backyard go uncut for a while longer in the name of science.

So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to cut the grass in my front lawn because, hey, I’ve got neighbors and it’s looking shabby. For my back yard, however, I’m going to pick a section of lawn that was planted with my fast grass planting method and it grow so that it goes to seed. Then I’m going to try to collect the seed when it’s mature enough and about to drop on its own. Once collected I’ll see if I can plant it and get it to germinate, probably in a similar way to how I showed it was easy to grow grass on a brick.

Update #1 – It’s now about a three weeks later and I’ve found one of the major problems in letting your grass go to seed: it takes a long time. My grass flowered about four weeks ago and I’m still waiting for real seeds. I have lots and lots of little tiny grass florets. But that’s about all I have. They’re still green, not brown, and still very soft and moist flowers… I’ve crushed them and rolled them in my hands and there’s nothing that’s really able to be planted there yet.

This sort of makes sense. There aren’t many plants that go to seed many times during one season, and it would appear that the grass in my back yard is no different. So, this experiment may very well be over before it begins if my grass doesn’t actually go to seed.

Update

I’ve been waiting about eight weeks now for an area of my back yard grass to go to seed. In the past week or so that has begun happening. All the grass in my test area is well over a foot tall and some is pushing two feet tall. I have several different types of grass in my lawn and some of the taller and thicker grass did actually flower and then make grass seed which makes it look like wheat. My experiment has taken longer than I originally expected due to the length of time it took for my grass samples to actually mature enough and go to seed. So, obviously, one of the most common question people have about grass is:

“How long does it take grass to go to seed”

And the answer is: it depends! It largely seems to depend upon the grass type, the weather, the general climate and a number of other growing factors, though you can expect most grass to go to seed in six to 10 weeks, depending upon the time of year. I live in New Jersey (Growing Zone 6) and my grass didn’t really start growing until mid-to-late April, and it didn’t really get to the point where it was going to seed until the last week of June. We have not had much rain, which could have sped up the process a little bit.

I found three general “types” of grasses that have gone to seed in the overgrown area of my back yard. No, I’m not entirely sure if they are Fescue, Rye, Bermuda or something else. I took a small sampling of all three types, laid them next to each other and numbered them for this experiment. Grass #1 doesn’t really seem to have seeds, but it does have flowers. If it does have seeds then they are simply too small for me to easily find. Grass #2 and Grass #3 clearly have seeds that are ready to fall right off the stem.

Next, I took some of those seeds from each grass type and planted them in potting soil with a little water. I numbered the cups and I’m monitoring them for grass growth. I only started this experiment on June 29th, so I suspect it will be a week or two before I see anything at all. I don’t expect a lot of grass to grow, but if I get a few blades of each, then I’ll know that the grass in my back yard can be allowed to go to seed and it would be a way of growing new grass without paying for more seed.

Even at this point, I’ve learned something: it takes a lot of patience to let your grass go to seed in your lawn on the off chance that it will actually produce more grass. I could see this being useful if you had a field and you decided to let your grass go to seed at the end of a season, but doing this in the middle of the summer just makes your lawn look ugly.

Update – August 18 – Results of Whether or Not You Should Let Your Grass Go To Seed

Okay, It’s been about a month and a half since I first tried growing grass seed that I’d “harvested” from my lawn. It’s been a busy summer for me (a new baby!) and it’s also been a rough summer for growing things (grass and drought conditions don’t mix). I was unfortunately not able to get photos of the results before a brief wind storm blew my experiment right off my steps and scattered them all over the ground. That’s just how science works, I guess.

Results
Only Cup #3 had any grass growing in it at all, and even that was sparse at best. The other two cups just never produced as much as a single blade of grass, which again leads me to believe that lawn grass may not actually be designed to be fertile enough to produce viable seeds for replanting.

Conclusion
Really, this was an enormous amount of work and waiting just to see if I could produce a few extra blades of grass. While it may be worthwhile to let your natural grass go to seed in a large wild field or meadow, it definitely isn’t worthwhile for the typical homeowner who has an acre or less of lawn. If you really want to fill in parts of your lawn then you should either try a product like Scotts EZ Seed (which can indeed grow on a brick) or use a cheap and easy method for planting grass that I’ve detailed before.

Tags: grass

This entry was posted on May 6, 2010 at 3:35 am and is filed under Lawn and Garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.