Sod Type Recommendation - Metro ATL

Full sun-tif bermuda, centipede, st aug, zoysia
Foot traffic-tif bermuda, Zoysia, st aug, centipede
Shade tolerance-zoysia, st aug, centipede,tif bermuda
Crowding out weeds-zoysia, st aug, tif bermuda, centipede
Herbicide tolerance-tif bermuda, zoysia, st aug, centipede

You'll have to pick what is important to you.

Zoysia. Thicker and fuller. Bermuda gets thick but likes to branch out and stay thin near the surface. If that makes any sense. I like them both.

Thanks for replies. Zoysia's weed resistance (thick growth) vs Bermuda's durability. Tie-breaker goes to Zoysia for being more adaptable to a variety of sunlight conditions.

I read that zoysia, due to its thick growth, will require dethatching every couple years. Is that a fairly straightforward process?

Thanks again

Do they accomplish the same thing? I understood them as different

This grass may not be for you, but just in case, this particular Zoyzia is not as popular as some others so maybe you are unaware of it. When it is looking its best, it makes for about as pretty of a lawn as you can find. After we had our yard installed with it about 15 years ago, we almost constantly had neighbors asking what type of grass we had.

We live in Marietta and have a type of Zoyzia called Empire Zoyzia. It is a hybrid Zoyzia that originated in Brazil (and I think was a fairly new variety to the US maybe 20 years ago.). Empire Zoyzia is a wider blade more shade tolerant medium to darker green Zoyzia grass. It is best in partial shade, and does well in full sun (with one quirk explained later).
Empire is one of the better shade tolerant Zoyzia grasses and is much better than Bermuda with a heavier shade, although it will have thin spots the heavier the shade. It is not nearly as good as St. Augustine grass in heavier shade but is very cold tolerant. It also takes over Bermuda especially in shadier spots where Bermuda is thinner/bare.

What I like about it is it soft and grows more horizontally so it fill ins faster and requires less cutting. It also turns green before Bermuda in the spring and stays green longer into the late fall. We have had no issues with diseases or insects, and it can withstand heat and drought very well (although it has a strange defense against drought where it curls as I explain later). I don't have to cut it as much as when I had a Bermuda lawn.

This grass does great against weeds, except where it is medium shade or heavier whenever there are thin spots, it is susceptible to Poa Anna, so it requires a pre-emergent. In full sun it chokes out the weeds pretty well. We did have some nut grass once but it was killed easily with one application of Ortho Nutsedge Killer.

One thing strange about the grass is when it is very hot and especially in a drought, the grass blades curl up (and look like thin needles) and then and soon as the sun starts going down they open back up fairly quickly. Other grasses may do this to some extent, but this is a more prominent noticeable behavior of this grass. Once in its first year (a couple of months after the lawn was established), we were gone for a couple of weeks right in late summer when it was really hot and zero rain. This was before we had our sprinkler system and no one was tending to our yard. When we came back I thought the grass was dead since the grass leaves were curled up so tight they looked dead. But once I watered it it came back to life within half an hour. This grass does that, on really hot, dry, sunny days the grass curls up to protect itself. If you watered it on a hot sunny day (if it was curling up), within about 10 minutes it comes back to life. The root system grows pretty deep (like 6 inches) if you have good soil and take care of the lawn fertilizing at the proper times, proper amount of water, etc. This grass likes Milorganite, Ironite, and sometimes we use Lime and Safer Brand Ringer Restore fertilizer.

The only thing I am not sure about is foot traffic. This is a soft medium wide blade grass. I think the thin bladed Emerald Zoyzia or Bermuda would hold up better. We have delivery people walking across the middle of our yard from the street fairly frequently and it does fine. But if you had kids playing football for an hour or more a day in it, it would likely show wear and tear worse than a Bermuda lawn. It does grow fast horizontally so it would eventually recover.

Since the grass will sometimes curl up, you can have a tendency to over water it. If you do that and/or fertilize before April, it lets you know by getting redish/purplish color in parts of the leaves making you think it has some kind of disease. Its better to just water like 1" a week (including rainfall) and ignore it when the blades curl as that is just a natural thing that this grass does.

Our yard is mostly partial shade and this grass thrives in it. If your yard is mostly full sun, even though the grass would make great lawn, it might bother you to see it curling up more often in the hot summer. You can spot water it, but just have to be careful to not over water it for several weeks or more in a row.

I do use a Sun Joe Dethatcher (tines - not blades) every few years to dethatch, but we did not thatch at all for the first 10 years. It doesn't thatch too bad because I scalp it every spring to 1" once it starts growing pretty well. It also handles being thatched with the Sun Joe, but thatching might not really be needed. Yeah it pulls out a decent amount of thatch but the grass grows thick even with some thatch that actually keeps the soil cooler, and we have not had any disease issues.

I also cut the grass like 2-1/2" to 3" tall instead of the 1" to 2" that is recommended. It seems to do better in our yard a little taller than recommended (especially mid to late summer).

In your case, comparing Emerald to Empire, Emerald is likely going to be more durable to initial wear & tear from foot traffic and probably will look better in the heat of the summer in a full sun yard as it is already thin bladed while Empire is going to curl in some spots of your yard mid to late afternoon and look like it needs watering even though it usually doesn't. Empire is a more tropical looking medium/wide little darker green grass that will probably do better than Emerald in a medium shade. Empire will also spread and fill in faster as it will grow horizontally faster than Emerald, so Empire would recover from foot traffic faster than Emerald. When the thin bladed, thicker and relatively tougher Emerald grass gets taller and you are late on cutting it, it can be so thick it is very hard to cut where that is less of an issue with the comparatively much softer Empire grass. With your yard full sun, I would probably give the nod to Emerald just due to the curling factor of Empire.

The pictures below (not our yard) are a good representation of what it looks like when healthy and you cut it at the recommended height. It looks even better when its about 1" taller than in the pictures.