re: Centipede mow height

Thats pretty cool. Those mowers have peaked my interest.

What made u switch from the centipede?

quote:

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What made u switch from the centipede?

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Well I used to hate lawn care. When I lived on the south shore I had St Aug and I once told a friend of mine that I was going to pour gas on it so I didn’t have to mow anymore. Now I find it a relaxing hobby on a quest to get a golf greens lawn. It takes time as nothing in lawn care is instant and can take years to correct.

I started getting into it a couple years ago and had my centipede looking really good, but one spring coming out of dormancy my front lawn just looked terrible like it wasn’t going to recover from whatever happened to it over the winter. That’s when I decided to replace about 4k sqft with empire zoysia. I hired a crew to do it and fine level my lawn. I was going to do it myself, but at the time I wasn’t confident enough that I could grade it right to get it as level as I wanted it.

It was expensive and having 3/4s of an acre I couldn’t afford to do it all at once. After seeing what the people I hired did I should have done it myself anyway. I thought they were going to be out there with laser levels and do this and that and I was pretty disappointed as they screwed up on a lot of stuff and didn’t do what was discussed beforehand.

So this time I just did it all myself. I rented a stump grinder because I had two very large stumps after having them cut down and I had a lot of surface roots that I needed to get up. Well I ended up doing my elderly neighbors stump and missed a lot of the roots I needed to get. So I had to go rent a smaller grinder the next weekend. Then I had a lot of mulch from grinding the stumps and some parts of the land was compacted. Off again to rent the biggest tiller they had and went to town on that.

Next was a bobcat to move the dirt. No way I was shoveling 15 yards of sand around. Next will be adding irrigation to the side yard which is the largest area and will add more to the rest later on.

Long way to answer your question is even after having trees cut down and canopies thinned multiple times I still have a lot of shade and wanted a nicer turf that was more shade tolerant. I grew up with St Aug and didn’t want it and it can’t be mowed low. So zoysia was the natural choice.