We moved to our current home in March of 2001. My husband looked at the yard and saw a barren mess; dusty in summer, brown in fall, mud-pit any time in rained. It has taken me over a decade to coax the natural beauty out of this place and turn our yard into a spot to relax and play, rather than just a space we have to walk through in order to get to the cars from our house.
Our soil is about 90% clay, 10% rock and anything growing in it when we got here was weeds or crabgrass. This picture was taken sometime around 2003, when I had already put two years of constant work into the yard. I begged plants from anyone and everyone I could get them from. I tilled and tilled and tilled some more, picked up rocks, tried to fertilize, spent a fortune on grass seed. Used a mulching mower… all those things I’d heard were supposed to give you a nice yard.

My greatest frustration was the lawn. I couldn’t get grass to grow, no matter what I tried. I bought bag after bag of seed, all promising a beautiful, lush green lawn and guaranteed to grow. I covered the yard in straw. I covered it in mulch. I covered it in chopped up leaves. I dumped compost on it several years in a row. I even bought bags of potting soil and poured those on the yard in desperation, determined that I would have grass SOMEHOW.
It didn’t happen. Everything I tried worked for a while- I would have beautiful, promising patches of green- only to watch them die the next year, or get choked out by the masses of crabgrass as soon as it emerged in late spring. I finally just let the crabgrass take over and mowed it. At least it was green… until late summer anyway.

It wasn’t until around the time I had my daughter (she’s 5 now) that I finally sat down, did the research and figured out how to get real grass in our lawn. I didn’t want my little one playing in a yard full of rocks and crabgrass, I envisioned her tiny feet walking barefoot in a thick green carpet green- so full and deep that she could tumble over and it would cushion her falls. Children playing in our yard previously had been hurt on the tiny little rocks that seemed to appear year after year from just under the surface of the soil (ahem-dust). I’d rake them off; a new crop would replace them the next year. There was also the matter of our yard dropping off into a steep ravine; a dangerous 10 to 20 foot spill into larger rocks and blackberry briars. My husband and I fenced the yard. We did it with garden fence and T-posts, since a wood or chain link fence wasn’t in the budget. Then I tackled the crabgrass.

I had learned from years of trial and error that you don’t till clay soil to plant in it. It just turns it up- it dries out, loses all its nutrients and becomes little hard balls of concrete and dust. I had planted irises around the edges of the yard to help keep all my soil amendments from washing down the hill, but it was still in pretty sad shape. I’d learned the grass seed wasn’t going to ever give us the lawn we wanted. I found my salvation in an online nursery that sold Zoysia grass plugs by the 100-count.

Infomercial-style claims aside, this stuff actually works wonders folks. I took the pictures below today. It’s the 1^st day of August; Missouri is once again under a moderate to severe drought and 99% of the lawns on my street look like the one on the left. They are dried out, crunchy and turning to dust. In the August heat, seeded grasses like annual rye grass or Kentucky blue go dormant. These cool-season grasses can’t hack it when the heat and dry is on; they take a nap and go brown. You get pretty, green grass in the spring months and early summer with these. I’ve seen sodded yards do the same.
Grasses like Zoysia and Bermuda grass are grown from plugs, not seed. We actually burned our drill out using it to put in all those tiny little holes for our plugs when I first put in the lawn, but I’d go buy a new drill again, it was worth it. We spent about two days, putting in 200+ plugs. It was a pain in the butt and I had serious doubts that the effort would pay off. Everything I’d tried up to that point had ended in crabgrass. The Zoysia didn’t disappoint. The first year it spread enough to cover the entire planted area sparsely. It didn’t quite give me the thick, toddler fall-breaking carpet I’d hoped for when our daughter was two- but it’s there now. The picture on the right, I took of our yard today. I’ve mowed it a total of 3-4 times since the beginning of the summer season and I’ve watered it ONCE. No kidding. Once.
This stuff can tolerate heat and drought like nobody’s business.
I did do my best to shade this yard so my daughter doesn’t have to be coated in sunscreen every time she steps outside. It gets full sun in the morning hours, but is in shade most of the afternoon and especially during the hottest part of the day- from 2 till 5pm. Zoysia spreads like mad, but it doesn’t grow very high and get stalks like regular grasses, so I have to mow about half as much as my neighbors do.

I do apply a pre-emergent crabgrass killer/fertilizer in the spring and I de-thatch in the fall and spring while I’m raking the leaves out of the yard. I pull the occasional dandelion or weed, but the grass chokes most of those out and they seldom get a foothold. Sometimes the dog leaves yellow spots if she pees too much in one place. In spring I’ve watered these areas down a bit more, so the burned spots can recover. (Female dogs are harder on lawns that males- since they tend to put all their pee in one spot, rather than spreading a little here and there.)
For maintenance, that’s IT. I don’t dump a bunch of chemical fertilizer on it half the year. I don’t spray for weeds or bugs. I don’t mow very often, in fact I have to trim the area outside the fence much more often than I do the yard. I wish my flower beds and the sidewalks were HALF as easy to maintain. The best part about these warm season grasses though, is still having a green gorgeous lawn in August when everywhere around us is dead and brown. During the severe drought a couple years ago, I watered the yard 3 times. My trees and flowers I had to water daily.
BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE… If you’re sick of looking at brown grass, order your Zoysia plugs NOW in time to plant for fall and you too can have that gorgeous, green lawn that will be the envy of your neighbors in the hottest days of summer! 😉
And now for the fine print, or that stuff they say really really fast at the end that nobody really pays attention to.