I plan to sell my house in 2009. The grass, front and back, is a bad mix of whatever. Rather than having it torn up and relaced with rolls of grass, I'd like to tear it up and replace it with plugs of groud cover. I am completely ignorant of ground cover and would appreciate suggestions.
Dick
suggestion 1 is tell folks where you are
I would think that grass would have better sales value that some other ground cover. Ask some local realtors for their opinion. If I were buying and saw something other than grass I'd wonder about upkeep or the cost of removing it and replacing it with something else.
You might try overseeding it with some grass mix selected to do well in your area, water it well and mow often.
snipped-for-privacy@panix.com (Dick Adams) wrote in news:g5u77s$9r0$1 @reader1.panix.com:
how big an area? groundcovers can take awhile to spread. my preference would be for thyme, or chamomile. my yard has a lot of wild strawberry, bugle (both green & purple), & um, plantain. most people think plantain is really ugly, but the honeybees love it & the chickens can't destroy it (ok, most people don't have chicken-proof as a groundcover criteria). have you looked at Steppables.com? lee
Charles wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
yeah, i don't know what i'll do about my "lawn" if we decided to sell. we've pretty much allowed native groundcover plants to take over & there's very little actual grass type plants in the front anymore. the back has more because, well, it travels from the pasture & hay seeds get dropped, seeds in manure sprout, etc. so there's grass, but it's not pretty. the front is mostly wild strawberry, which is a very low growing plant that stays green in hot dry summer & has pretty red leaves in the fall. and spreads like crazy... we even sometimes get strawberries if we can find them before the wild birds & chickens.
if the house is even remotely suburban, that's probably the best course, because it takes a few years to establish any alternative groundcover to the point it looks decent & can keep weeds down on it's own. selling a house where the newly groundcovered yard needs constant hand weeding isn't going to be easy, not that selling *any* house is very easy right now. lee
It takes a long time for most groundcover's to cover an area. Planting grass would be faster, and probably less expensive. I found that it takes 3 years to change a poor lawn into a thick green lawn. In any event, use plants that grow well in your area to speed things up.
My front lawn was planted with pink clover (Persicaria capitata, not really a clover but with clover-like flowers). This was done about 8-9 months ago on 18-inch centers; rooted plants -- not plugs -- were used. Now, the ground cover is thick enough to crowd out most weeds. It took a lot of water to reach this state, but I can start to cut back on the water since the pink clover totally shades the soil.
Note, however, my climate. Pink clover is hardy only to about 15F. As an evergreen ground cover, it likely will not tolerate a persistent cover of snow. (Actually, when we get frost, it turns red; it then reverts to green when the weather warms in the spring.) I suspect that, if the past winter here had 15F temperatures, my pink clover might not have spread as quickly as it did. "kzin" is quite correct; you really need to tell us where you are so that we know what your climate is.
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