I became a new home owner a few months ago. Perhaps unwisely in retrospect, I bought the house in the Spring and it had no lawn. The builder claimed they hydroseeded in the Fall and it would come up first thing in the Spring. I waited around long enough for a lot of crabgrass to come up, but no grass. I did finally seed myself and it has turned out okay. I do have quite a bit of crabgrass, but that is easily dealt with. Over the past couple months I've been forced to learn more than I ever wanted to know about grass. I learned a lot from this forum.

Anyway, after that long introduction, here is my question. It's the one I've been curious about that I haven't been able to find the answer to. I'm in the Manhattan, KS area. According to the zone map, I should be able to grow any cool season grass. However, everyone here grows tall fescue. All the stores sell almost exclusively tall fescue. You can find the other cool season grasses here and there, but it's rare. Do you have any idea why this particular area seems to be a tall fescue only zone? Is it the soil or something about the climate? A few people here have said that the area has the worst of both worlds in that it gets very cold in winter, but also very hot and dry in the summer. If that were true, I could see why fescue is used exclusively. But when I actually checked historical weather data, it looked like it doesn't go much above 90 here in the summer and the hottest months are also the wettest.

This post was edited by CPTK on Tue, May 14, 13 at 0:06