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Sara Agnew
Senior Information Specialist
573-882-6843
agnewsj@missouri.edu
Published: Nov. 13, 2006
Story Source: Brad Fresenburg, 573-442-4893; Nadia Navarrete-Tindall, 573-289-2018
COLUMBIA, Mo. - Teenagers may consider poverty grass the secret to liberating them from weekly lawn-mowing chores. After all, poverty grass is naturally short and can survive in just about any soil.
Even under the best conditions poverty grass won’t grow taller than 3 or 4 inches, said Brad Fresenburg, University of Missouri Turfgrass Specialist.
Here’s the catch: poverty grass isn’t much to look at. Its fine curly leaves don’t compare to the beauty of the plush green foliage most people expect from a lawn.
But Nadia Navarrete-Tindall, a MU native plant research scientist, wasn’t willing to give up on the humble, cool-season grass. Surely, someone would find value in a rugged, low-maintenance grass that can survive with little attention or water.
Someone did: The United States Golf Association.
The USGA recently awarded Navarrete-Tindall and the MU Division of Plant Sciences a $30,000 grant to be used in a three-year study of the advantages of using poverty grass in the rough areas of golf courses - those nasty areas of the course where the soil is tough and the grass scragglier. To also help fund the study, the United States Department of Agriculture chipped in a one-year $10,000 grant with the possibility of $15,000 more in the second year of the study.
Fresenburg said the grants will be used as "seed money" to get the project off the ground.
Poverty grass has never been evaluated in a controlled plot. Navarrete-Tindall said she hopes the study will include other native species that grow well with poverty grass and could make a golf course more attractive.
"I have been working with native grasses for the past four years," she said. "As its name suggests, poverty grass grows in very poor soil and in a wide range of soils. It is very short and very drought-tolerant."
Fresenberg said the study also will include evaluating poverty grass’s seeding rate, germination percent and tolerance to different herbicides, traffic and shade.
"It’s a grass that has never been put into a situation where it has been managed as a turfgrass," he said. "We have to figure out how it will react."