The Attempts to Design a Garden That Can Live through a Cold Winter

People love living down south for one good reason – the weather keeps their gardens in bloom, and the grass green all year round. Does that mean that anyone who doesn’t have the good fortune to set up house in one of the warmer states is forever condemned to a bare garden that doesn’t make it through the winter? There is a way out though. And that would be to design a garden with hardy winter-resistant grass. A wide variety of grass seed mixes exist to suit cold northerly climates. You just use them each spring to sow your lawn, and the moment the ice and snow melt in the spring, you’ll be greeted with fresh green grass sprouts. A lot of hard-nosed scientific research goes into the creation of these wondrous seeds that put forth beautiful blades of grass that are capable of weathering a tough winter. Scientists go through every part of the ability of a variety of grass to resist a variety of challenges – heat, drought, cold, disease and pests. The best kinds of grass need to brave all of these and yet grow densely and evenly – in the kind of season they are designed to take. Once the lab has grass seeds that perform well in controlled conditions, they are sent over to the breeders who try them out in the real world and measure their performance against other varieties of branded seeds. Homeowners in the northerly climes can trust these seeds to design a garden that will make it through the winter intact. Of all the different varieties of winter hardy grasses there are, which ones are you to pick for yours? As a general rule, grass seed blends that contain rye grass in high percentage are best avoided. It’s not that rye grass doesn’t do well in the cold – it does exceptionally well. It’s just that annual rye grass sprouts very early and grows so robustly, that no other variety of grass, especially perennial grass, gets any breathing space. The grass to go for when you design a garden for cold weather is bluegrass. Kentucky bluegrass is named that way for reason – the blades of grass the seeds put out are blue tinged. Who would like to design a garden with bluish grass? You’ll probably love it, most people do. Other kinds of grass seeds that are good at surviving the cold are the perennial rye of course; you could also consider Buffalo grass and Brent grass. You can sow them in the spring to design a great garden. Look it up on the Internet; there are some great gardening forums out there that give you unbiased opinions about how each variety of grass and grass brand performs for your area. Pick the right assortment of seeds for your garden, and you should be golden.