St. Augustine Mercedes

Jimmy Neighbors – posted 31 May 2001 10:40

I’ve purchased a pallet of St. Augustine, which my supplier refers to as “Mercedes”. Apparently, this is a proprietary name, because I can’t find any information on it. Is “Mercedes” close kin to “Raleigh”? Thanks.

seed – posted 31 May 2001 17:03

Jimmy, Mercedes was developed commercially by Patten Seed Company and it is listed on their atrocious web site http://www.pattenseed.com/

(It’s not intuitively obvious, but you need to click the logo in the left frame that says “Super-Sod” in a design evocative of the “Coca-Cola” logo, then you need to click the “St. Augustine Grass” then “Mercedes.” There you will find basically no useful information.)

Mercedes is actually a University of Florida clone called FA-40 that highly susceptible to the southern chinch bug and it is a light yellowish green with white stigmas, thus it appears as a slightly smaller version of Raleigh. And there is a reasonable expectation of a little higher cold tolerance than say Floratam, because of the morphological similarity of Mercedes to Raleigh as well as Texas Common.

Mercedes was included in the 1989 National St. Augustinegrass Test but the data are not listed by the National Turfgrass Evaluation Program. In fact, it did fairly well in the test, and by 1992 it was performing 5th out of 25th entries. The data appear to be biased towards dwarf, bright green grasses.

Phil

Jimmy Neighbors – posted 31 May 2001 18:16

Phil, thank you very much for your informative reply!