Best Fescue For Kansas City

forrestkc – posted 04 August 2005 20:32

I live in a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri on the Kansas side. My soil is a dark clay loam, heavy but very rich soil (much more fertile than the old rocks and red clay of Hot Springs, Arkansas, where I am originally from). About 70% or so of my front yard is full sun. Part of the front yard has a slight sloop to towards the street. The Kansas City area has a four season climate. We average about 40 inches of rain a year with most of the rain falling during the growing season. This varies widely year to year though. One year we may only get 25 inches, the next year nearly 50 inches. Our springs are typically wet, and our summers are typically dry. This varies as well. This last June we got almost 12 inches of rain and July we only got about an inch and a half all month. Summers are typically very hot and very humid at times, but unlike the South, our summers typically don’t really get too oppressive until about mid to late June. We generally get a couple of heat waves where high temperatures are in the low 100s for a week or so (usually one in July and one in August). Other than that, summer high temps usually average in the low nineties with a break from the heat now and then. Our winters are fairly dry, very windy, and vary between cold and really cold. We usually have at least a handful of winter days where the temps go below zero. Occasionally we will get a winter though where temps go below zero almost every night for weeks it seems and only get in the single digits during the day with wind chills 30 to 40 below. As far as snow fall goes, this varies as well. One year we may only get 10 inches all winter long, the next, we might get over 30 inches (I think our record for a winter is 60 inches).

Early last April, I tilled up my front yard and sodded it with Tall Fescue Sod (with 10% Bluegrass to hold the sod together). For the first month it was down I kept it absolutely soaked. After that, unless we had good rain that week, I watered it once a week during the spring for about 3 hours. Once it started getting hot and dry in late June, I switched to watering it twice a week for about 3 hours each time. The sod took root fairly quick and looked absolutely great after it had been down for about 3 weeks. It continued to look great up until about 3 weeks ago when we got a heat wave with about a week or so of high temps in the low 100s. Since then, despite all my watering, most of the sod in the sunny part of the front yard has burned up.

I figure once the summer heat lets up I will over-seed the areas in the front yard that have burned up with a tall fescue. My question is what variety will stand up to the heat best during the summer? Or would I be better off going with a different type of grass. I chose Tall Fescue over Bluegrass originally because I thought Tall Fescue would be a lot more heat and drought tolerant. I thought about zoysia at the time, but up here its super expensive and only stays green from about late May through early September. Occasionally I will see a lawn with Bermuda in it up here, but it only seems to look good around here for about 6 weeks during the hottest part of the summer. Thank you in advance for your advice.