Continuing the life of a grass-blundering fool, I’m still committed to the slow expansion of Bermuda grass, even though I’ve plugged parts of my lawn with St. Augustine where things have gone bad.
You’re not supposed to seed a Bermuda lawn because of color mismatch — or so I am told on the lawn care forums. The patch growing on the west side of my lawn has this deep, dark emerald color that I wish I could match. But, just to test the theory out on seed coloration, I bought two random bags of grass and put the seeds on both sides of the pot:
Supposedly, the Pennington “Smart Seed” variety was supposed to grow at 2x the rate. The seeds themselves were a different shape and color than the seeds from the Scott’s bag. Below in the photograph, I put the Pennington on the left of the pot and then the Scott’s on the right side of the pot. (The pot just has some potting soil in it, but I don’t think this affected the result too much.)
Sure enough, around 2.5 weeks out, the Pennington grass is growing much much more quickly. The Scott’s grass is there if you look close enough.
More importantly, though, the coloration on this grass is nowhere near the deep dark emerald color that I have growing on the lawn now. The forums are correct about seeds. I plan to transplant some of these seeds into an isolated zone to tinker with the fertilization parameters in different areas and test out different shade levels. Let’s see how that goes.