Sherm your yard looks great.I read the Bermuda bible and they say hybrid tif 419 should be cut at 1/2-1 1/4.In my neighbor hood and tif 419 yards I would say 80 percent of yards are over 3 inches.Some look great and some look too tall.i have seen tif 419 yards cut with reel mowers 1/2 that look like golf course greens.i would love to cut my yard like that but my wife doesn't want me to cut grass every 2 or 3 days because I'm 66 years old now.So now I just raised my mower to 2.2 inches tall and it looks better also.
I raised my mower blade up last summer end of July and the yard did stay a lot greener.
Try to read the Bermuda bible.looks like your yard is doing great.i can see you take great pride in having a nice yard.let us know what you decide on cutting height. Take care Tom

Thanks Tom for the response. You are right I do take a lot of pride in my yard. It's a trait I got from my father. It drives my wife a bit crazy because I am always standing at the window admiring it.

I have read the Bermuda Bible and it has really helped me out a lot this year mainly with fertilizer schedules and how much to spread. If I had a reel mower, I would mow it low like a golf course. if my gas mower ever dies, I would probably invest in a manual push reel mower.

I really am just trying to see if there is something I need to know before deciding to leave my mower at 3 inches. I like the look but I am concerned with how much it lays over when I walk on it. I don't know if that is a valid concern or not. Ideally,I would like to lower it and have my grass continue to look like this.

Lawn looks great and I feel ya on the wife thinking we're crazy, it happens! haha I'm not an expert by any means but I'll give my two cents!

I'm in the same exact boat. I got a late start on lawn maintenance, so I never got a chance to cut it super lower in the Spring to give my grass a chance to learn to grow horizontally.

I'm in DFW area and when I "scalp" (new home and the grass is superrrr bumpy) parts of my grass it really struggles to recoup due to the hot summer. So I've been cutting pretty high.

From what I understand, if you cut high:

-It won't be as dense
-Can look "shaggy" if you let it get to high
-More susceptible to getting weeds (when its more dense it chokes weeds out)
-Requires more water?

So my vote would be to cut it high for the rest of the season then start off real low at the beginning of the next.Good luck!

I'm not a bermuda grower but I do have some in parts of my yards. It seems to me that it spreads faster when the temps are in the high 80s to low 90s. When the temps get consistently in the 90s to high 90s, it seems that it slows down a little. I guess what I'm saying is if you want to keep it a little higher for now, nobody is coming to arrest you; however, you do not have to wait all the way until next spring to bring it back down. You can do that in September when the summer heat starts to fall back.

This "cool" weather spreading is the habit of St Augustine, so I was a little surprised to see it in bermuda. When the weather breaks like that, I would continue with weekly watering, fertilize it on schedule, and mow it low.

When you first mow it low what happens is you mow off all the blades and you are left with the vertical stems. Those are unsightly for sure, tough to walk on, and they open the soil to the sunlight allowing weeds to germinate. What you need to do here is to work those stems down. Eventually there will be horizontal stems and the vertical stems will go away. Then the blades of grass come out of the horizontal stems giving it the horizontal habit.

ChaoticUT, search this forum for "leveling" and see what you find. If your lawn is a year old, you can start to smooth out the lawn any day now. It is a process and involves some sweat (and possibly beer and pizza for the participants), but you can make it look like a putting green if you want to.

Thanks for more input.

Chaotic, the only thing I really got a late start on with my lawn is the scalping in the spring time. Everything else I did was pretty much on time. I have taken care of my yard in the past so it was already pretty good. I had very little weeds besides poa which has died off.

I think I am going to cut it back down to original height when I get off of work tomorrow. It doesn't look "shaggy" to the naked eye as you described but I do not like the way it lays down when I walk on it. I don't have that problem when it's 2.5". It will be time for me to fertilize again next weekend so hopefully that will help it green up again like it is now. I have to believe the crazy growth and greening I saw over the past week was due to the fertilizer.

@dchall -- I've had a chance to look over all the leveling threads and they are awesome! I have been slowly leveling the really deep spots in my lawn and when I have the funds and time I'll level the whole lawn! Right now I'm just working on amending the soil and adding some of the good stuff to it! I'm in a low level price point so the yard was the last of the builders worries.

@Sherm -- the "lay down" could also be a sign of it just being watered? Either way the yard looks great and I'm sure whatever route you go will work out for you. Once this Texas heats pass by I'll probably lower it back down a bit like you. I'm always fighting the battle of what this forums suggest and what the wife thinks looks best... guess who usually wins that battle? haha

Interesting thread. ChaoticUT, you say that cutting lawn shorter in the spring will allow it to "learn" to be short? That is one thing I have never accomplished. But then I never tried doing it in the early spring. I keep my lawn about 3", which makes it more drought tolerant, but it DOES look less dence. And I always thought that my grass just wasn't meant to stand up straight. I always attributed it to (and it still may be) poor drainage.

The higher you cut Bermuda the greener it is. Look at a golf course. The green is a light green, the next cut is a little taller and greener and the next area is still taller and greener. So Bermuda cut at 1" will never be as dark as one cut at 3".

Mowing low in the spring doesn't make it learn to be low growing. Mowing it low every 2-3 days, all summer long, makes it learn to be low.

neilaz,

The "green-ness" of Bermuda is not a function of height.

I would put mine or my buddies Tif 419 at ~1/2" against anyones cut at 2" or even higher.

As dchall said, cutting it short every couple of days makes it dense which leads to another advantage--no weeds, even without any treatment at all.

(By the way, this has worked for my old common yard as well as my new 419 lawn which will soon be the subject of my very own "build" thread.)

As to the comments on golf greens must be talking about northern golf courses that use Bent Grass and other cool season grasses in the fairways and rough.

Tifway-I aka 419 is a semi dwarf Bermuda grass developed specifically for golf courses in a joint venture by the USDA, Georgia Coastal Plain Experiment Station, and the U.S. and Southern Golf Associations in Tifton Georgia.

It was breed to be cut very short. If cut every other day the grass blade and stolons will grow horizontally along the ground forming a very tight turf of sod. If allowed or not mowed frequently enough both stolons and grass blades will start to grow vertically to compete for sun light. When it does that it will thin out as the grass below it gets shaded out and starts to die off.

You can grow Tifway-I higher than 1 inch if you wish, but understand the consequences. Those with rotary mower have no choice. With a rotary mower \, even with a reel mower you are going to have to raise the cutting height as summer goes along and the grass thickens up.

Even golf courses wiht Bermuda fairways have to raise cutting heights a bit as summer progresses except for the greens. For the greens they have a secret you cannot duplicate very easily. They verticut, punch holes, and top dress with sand every few weeks.

What happens as summer progresses the growth rate explodes. The grass thickens up so tight it literally pushes itself up growing layer upon layer. If you take your fingers and dig through the grass you will see what I mean. It will be layers upon layers of stolon growth making a tight fabric like material. You really have to dig hard to get through to find dirt.