Buffalo Grass: 4 Tips for Caring for a Buffalo Grass Lawn

Buffalo grass (Bouteloua dactyloides), or buffalograss, is a low-maintenance, warm-season grass known for the blue to gray-green color of its leaf blades and its drought tolerance. It’s a native lawn grass in North America, competing with blue grama as the most prominent turf type across the shortgrass prairie of Nebraska, Texas, and other heartland regions of the United States. Some prominent types of buffalo grass include ‘Cody’ and ‘Texoka’.

Buffalo grass derives its name from the fact that it commonly fed bison and buffalo across the Great Plains in the nineteenth century. Since then, it’s become far more domesticated. Buffalo grass lawns are very common, as well as golf courses grown from buffalo grass seed.

Buffalo grass spreads through both its rhizomes (underground, stemlike roots) and stolons (above-ground connections between plants). This leads to a root system that’s durable and self-reproducing after seeding. This grass is dioecious—meaning buffalo grass has both male plants and female plants. Seed heads from the male plants assist female flowers with grass reproduction. The more you mow your buffalo grass, the easier it is for this seeding process to proceed rapidly and robustly.

Caring for buffalo grass can be fairly straightforward, although there are a few actions you can take to keep it looking its best. Here are four tips to help ensure everything from seed germination to long-term maintenance goes well.

1. 1. Fend off weeds. You’ll need to practice vigilant weed control with buffalo grass. The healthier and more robust you keep every square foot of your buffalo grass, the less likely you are to need to pluck weeds from your garden. If you’re dealing with an onslaught of rapidly spreading other grass types—like Bermuda grass or fescue—or more broadleaf weeds, it may be time to take some herbicide to the problem.
2. 2. Get the soil just right. Planting buffalo grass in the right type of soil is essential. Sandy soils are out of the question, nor should you overwater the grass. If you can’t rely on an inch or two of monthly rainfall, a combination of direct sunlight and regular watering to the point of making your soil moist will do the trick. Fertilizing at the start of early spring can also help.
3. 3. Mow frequently. Regular mowing is key to buffalo grass lawn care and tidy landscaping overall. Keep in mind that buffalo grass curves as it grows, so you don’t necessarily have to mow it all the time to keep it from getting too high and ungainly. Still, frequent mowing helps preserve the buffalo grass as ground cover while allowing its clippings and seed heads to build a stronger growth habit in the soil.
4. 4. Take care of thatch. As its growing season draws to a close in late spring to early summer, your buffalo lawn may enter a period of dormancy, leading to a lot of dead plant matter (or thatch). Even though buffalo grass is very drought-tolerant, thatch can be brought about by too little moisture in an arid summer or by the cold chill of winter. So long as you rake up all this thatch, your yard is very likely to green up and look like a new lawn again the following spring.

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