CENTIPEDE GRASS -- The Devils Gift to Man

For the first 40 years of my life I lived in Asheville, NC and Greenville, SC, and I must say that I always had a good looking yard. The secret to having a nice looking lawn in those two areas was having fescue grass, fertilizing it and keeping it mowed and that it.

We moved to Lexington, SC late in 1984 and purchased a new house that had not been landscaped in anyway. When spring of 1985 arrives we are told by neighbors that it is a must to have centipede grass due to the heat and soil conditions in the Lexington area. To make a long story short we put in centipede grass and have been struggling with it ever since. First of all we found out that there was not a sufficient amount of rainfall to keep the grass green and living during the hot humid summers that we experience here in Lexington. So it was drag the garden hose and water the grass --- drag the hose and water some more. After a couple of years of this we installed a sprinkle system and now we are all set to have one of the best looking yards in the subdivision. However, there were a few things that we were yet to learn about centipede grass as there are a couple of things that will make you wish you had never seen a lawn of centipede grass, such as: brown patch, dollar spot, large patch, fairy rings, nematodes, ground pearls, moles, voles, gophers, chinch bugs, fungi, grubs, chlorosis, yellowing, iron deficiencies, excessive nitrogen, not enough nitrogen, high soil pH, low soil pH, excessive thatch & etc. Or course we have had all of these at one time or another.

The good news is that information is available on how to take care of centipede grass. You can find it all over the internet, ask a neighbor, or check with one of your local lawn maintenance companies such as Trugreen, Lawn Doctor or Lawn-O-Green. The following is some of the advice we have received concerning this subject: bag your clippings, don't bag your clippings, water often, don't water until you see it dying, cut it short, cut it long, don't use lime, put lime on twice a year, use a general fertilizer with a 3-1-2 nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium such as 12-4-8, use only 16-4-8 fertilizer. The list goes on, but I am getting tired just thinking about it.

The biggest problem that I have encountered is not with the centipede grass, but getting it mowed when it needed to be mowed.