How Often to Mow Buffalo Grass

A healthy Buffalo grass lawn can grow at an extremely fast rate.

In fact, a Buffalo lawn which is receiving adequate water and nutrients can grow up to a foot high every four weeks in the peak of summer. This brings us to the question of just how often should a Buffalo lawn be mowed.

Benefits of Regularly Mowing Buffalo Lawns

While Buffalo grass is not one of the most aggressive grass types for creeping into garden beds and pathways, it’s runners will still naturally grow into surrounding areas and take over if left unchecked.

Regular lawn mowing forces the grass to use its available energy to repair its grass leaf which was damaged from the lawn mowing. This process also helps the lawn stay green and healthy, in a process called ‘tillering”.

As the lawn uses this energy to repair and grow more green leaf, it will greatly reduce all its efforts to spread, meaning far less lawn invasion into garden beds and pathways.

Matching Lawn Mowing to Lawn Growth Rates

All Buffalo lawns will grow at different speeds, which will be dependent on the type of Buffalo grass being used (e.g. Prestige, Palmetto or Sapphire), the weather and time of year (i.e. summer or winter), the availability of nutrients from fertiliser, soil quality and available water.

Regardless of the speed of growth of your own Buffalo lawn, the mowing principle remains the same, always try never to remove more than one-third of the green leaf in a single mowing.

This regular mowing will ensure the lawn is not scalped from mowing, keeps the lawn looking green and healthy, and controls the thatch build-up which everyone with a Buffalo lawn is well aware of.

Regular mowing will also have the added benefit of removing many small weeds before they have a chance to grow seed heads and reproduce more weeds.

Mowing Buffalo Lawns with the Seasons

Summer Mowing

So with this in mind, a very healthy Soft Leaf Buffalo lawn may need to be mowed every 5-7 days in summer, while a lawn in average condition may only require mowing every 2 weeks through summer.

Leaving a Buffalo lawn to grow too long between cuts in summer will greatly increase mowing times, make mowing extremely difficult, produce massive amounts of clippings, grows the thatch layer and risks damaging the lawn from mowing.

If you hire a lawn mowing contractor to service your lawns, then with this doubling of service times and efforts, expect the mowing price to also double.

Winter Mowing

As we proceed into winter, the lawn will significantly slow it’s growth rates, and as such we will adjust our mowing frequency according to the growth pattern. This is most often mowing every 4 weeks. We generally don’t recommend leaving lawns for longer than 4 weeks between mowing in winter.

Winter lawns can be highly deceptive in appearances. While many winter Buffalo lawns may look like they may not be growing much in the colder months, this is because the lawn is using it’s energy to strengthen itself in it’s thatch layer instead of growing more green leaf.

So while the green leaf may not look like it’s growing much, the thatch layer is growing, and for the best Buffalo lawn care, this thatch layer always needs to be properly managed.

The regular winter mowing will also aid in keeping the lawn leaf green through winter.

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How Often to Mow Buffalo Grass