What is bermudagrass?

Bermudagrass is a warm-season perennial grass that gets planted on purpose for lawns down South, but in a Pennsylvania lawn of bluegrass, ryegrass and fescue it’s a weed. Good bermudagrass identification matters, because it’s one of the hardest grasses to get out once it settles in, and the products that handle crabgrass do little to it.

It loves heat and full sun, and it spreads sideways two ways at once: aboveground runners called stolons and underground stems called rhizomes. That’s how a small patch along a hot driveway edge turns into a wide, wiry mat over a few summers.

For most homeowners the giveaway is color. Bermudagrass goes tan-brown after the first hard frost and stays that way until late spring, so you end up with straw-colored patches in an otherwise green yard.

Bermudagrass identification: what to look for

Get down and look at a patch in midsummer, when it’s growing hardest. A few features separate it from your lawn grasses:

• Runners on top of the ground. Wiry, jointed stolons creep across bare soil, over sidewalk edges and into mulch beds, rooting at each joint.
• Short, flat, gray-green leaves. The blades are short and narrow, stacked along the runners, often with a bluish cast.
• A fringe of hairs at the collar. Pull a leaf back from the stem and you’ll see a ring of short white hairs (the ligule) instead of a papery collar.
• Finger-like seedheads. From midsummer into fall it sends up thin stalks topped with several narrow spikes spread like fingers, similar to crabgrass but daintier.
• Tough rhizomes. Push a shovel in and you’ll find white, scaly underground stems that snap instead of pulling free.

If a patch is brown from October to May but green and thriving in August, when your bluegrass is stressed and dull, you’re very likely looking at bermudagrass.

Where it grows in Pennsylvania

Bermudagrass is near the northern edge of its comfort zone here. It’s more of a lawn problem in the warmer southeast corner of the state, but it does turn up in central PA, usually in the hottest, sunniest and driest corners of a yard.

Check south-facing driveway and sidewalk edges, strips next to foundations and patios that soak up heat, and thin turf on sandy or compacted soil. It also shows up on ballfields and roadsides. It usually arrives in hauled-in topsoil, on equipment, or as runner pieces carried from somewhere else. A hard winter can thin it out, but the rhizomes almost always come back.

Bermudagrass look-alikes

A few other grasses get confused with bermudagrass, and the difference changes what you should do:

• Large crabgrass has finger-like seedheads too, but it’s an annual that dies at the first frost. It has no rhizomes, a papery ligule and wider, hairy leaves.
• Nimblewill is another warm-season grass that browns out in winter and creeps by wiry stolons. It has no rhizomes, a very short papery ligule and slender, single-spike seedheads.
• Creeping bentgrass forms fine, matted patches that spread by stolons, but it stays green in the cool months and has a papery ligule.
• Zoysiagrass is sometimes planted and also browns in winter. It’s stiffer, denser and prickly underfoot, with a single short spike for a seedhead.

How to get rid of bermudagrass

Be realistic: in a cool-season lawn the goal is usually to suppress bermudagrass and shrink its patches over a couple of seasons, not wipe it out in one shot. Plan on repeat work.

Hand and mechanical. Pulling only works on a new runner or two, because any rhizome piece left behind regrows. In beds you can fork it out when the soil is moist, sifting out every white piece, and you’ll still need to go back. Edging beds and walks every few weeks keeps runners from jumping across.

Cultural. Bermudagrass is weak in shade and struggles in dense cool-season turf. Mow your lawn at 3 to 4 inches, do most of your fertilizing in fall, and overseed thin spots in late summer or early fall so your grass is thick going into the next season.

Chemical. Extension turf programs suppress bermudagrass in cool-season lawns with repeat applications of selective products, such as mesotrione combined with triclopyr or topramezone combined with triclopyr. Fenoxaprop can also slow it down. Applications are made while the bermudagrass is actively growing but before summer heat stresses your lawn, typically late spring and again late summer into early fall, spaced a few weeks apart. Summer treatments work poorly and are hard on heat-stressed lawn grass.

For heavy infestations, the more reliable route is renovation: several glyphosate applications spread through the growing season, each one after the bermudagrass regrows, followed by seeding or sodding in early fall. In many landscape beds, grass-selective herbicides such as fluazifop or sethoxydim can be used around labeled ornamentals.

Whatever you use, read and follow the product label, because the label is the law, and make sure it’s labeled for your site and your type of lawn grass. Applying herbicide for hire in Pennsylvania requires a PA Department of Agriculture pesticide applicator certification, so a lawn-wide program is a job for a licensed lawn-care company.

Keeping it from coming back

Thick, tall cool-season turf is your best defense. Bermudagrass needs sun on open soil to spread, so the more your grass shades the ground, the slower it moves.

Keep a crisp edge between lawn and beds, because runners love to dive into mulch. Ask where new topsoil and sod come from, clean the mower and tiller after working an infested area, and don’t move soil from a bermudagrass patch to another part of the yard. Where runners creep into patio and walkway joints, sweep the joints out and refill with polymeric sand so they have less loose material to root in.

Walk the lawn in late spring. The brown patches that are slow to green up are your map of where to focus that season.

Questions we get about bermudagrass

Similar weeds

Large CrabgrassDigitaria sanguinalisNimblewillMuhlenbergia schreberiCreeping BentgrassAgrostis stolonifera