What grass seed should I plant?
What this tool does
LawnSeedPicker is a free grass seed selector. It asks seven questions about your yard and returns a species recommendation, the seeding rate in pounds per 1,000 square feet, and the planting window for your region. The calculation runs in your browser and your zip code stays on your device.
The seven questions are:
- Where's your lawn? Your zip code, which sets your region (cool-season, transition or warm-season) and your seeding window.
- What are you doing? Starting a new lawn, overseeding an existing one, starting over from scratch, or patching bare spots. This sets the seeding rate — a new lawn takes roughly three times what overseeding takes.
- How much sun does it get? Full sun (6+ hours), partial sun (3–6 hours), or mostly shade (under 3 hours).
- Who uses the yard? Kids and pets, dogs specifically, normal foot traffic, or light use.
- How much work do you want to put in? Minimal water and mowing, a reasonable amount, or whatever it takes.
- Open to clover? Grass only, grass with a little clover, or a clover-forward eco-lawn.
- Know your soil? Sandy, clay, loam, or not sure. Optional.
The 13 species the picker chooses among
Every species below is drawn from a database of USDA plant fact sheets and university extension publications. Seeding rates are for establishing a new lawn, in pounds per 1,000 square feet, at 100% of that species. Tolerance ratings use a five-step scale — very poor, poor, fair, good, excellent — mapped from the wording in the source documents. Where sources disagree, the range is kept rather than averaged. Where no source states a rating, the cell reads n/a rather than being filled in.
| Species | Type | Growth habit | New-lawn rate lb/1,000 sq ft | Shade | Drought | Heat | Cold | Wear |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kentucky bluegrass Poa pratensis L. | Cool-season grass | Rhizomatous | 2–3 | Poor | Good | Fair | Good | Fair |
| Perennial ryegrass Lolium perenne L. | Cool-season grass | Bunch | 4–6 | Poor | Good | Poor–fair | Poor–fair | Excellent |
| Tall fescue Lolium arundinaceum (Schreb.) S.J. Darbyshire | Cool-season grass | Bunch | 6–8 | Fair–good | Fair–excellent | Excellent | Fair–excellent | Fair–excellent |
| Hard fescue Festuca brevipila (Tracey) | Cool-season grass | Bunch | 4–6 | Fair–excellent | Good–excellent | Poor–fair | Good | Poor |
| Chewings fescue Festuca rubra ssp. commutata | Cool-season grass | Bunch | 4–6 | Excellent | Excellent | Poor–fair | Good | Poor |
| Strong creeping red fescue Festuca rubra ssp. rubra | Cool-season grass | Rhizomatous | 4–6 | Excellent | Excellent | Poor–fair | Good | Poor |
| Sheep fescue Festuca ovina L. | Cool-season grass | Bunch | 4–6 | Fair | Good | n/a | Excellent | Fair |
| White clover Trifolium repens L. | Legume | Stoloniferous | n/a | Good | Good | n/a | n/a | Good |
| Bermudagrass Cynodon dactylon (L.) Pers. | Warm-season grass | Rhizomes + stolons | 1–2 | Very poor | Excellent | Excellent | Poor–good | Excellent |
| Zoysiagrass Zoysia Willd. | Warm-season grass | Not stated in sources | 1–2 | Good–excellent | Good–excellent | Good–excellent | Good–excellent | Good–excellent |
| Buffalograss Bouteloua dactyloides (Nutt.) J.T. Columbus | Warm-season grass | Stoloniferous | 3–5 | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Bahiagrass Paspalum notatum Flueggé | Warm-season grass | Rhizomes + stolons | 5–10 | Poor–good | Excellent | Good–excellent | Poor | Good |
| Microclover unverified Trifolium repens var. (dwarf microclover selections) | Legume | Stoloniferous | 1–2 | Poor–good | n/a | Good | Fair–good | n/a |
Gaps in the data, stated rather than filled
- White clover has no seeding rate here. No USDA or extension publication we hold states a white clover rate in pounds per 1,000 square feet for lawn use — the published rates are for forage and cover-crop stands in pounds per acre, which is a different job. Seed vendors publish lawn rates; extension does not. Rather than convert a forage rate and present it as a lawn rate, the field is left empty.
- Buffalograss ratings are descriptive only. The sources describe its drought, wear, cold and salt behaviour in prose without assigning a rating that maps onto the five-step scale, and none of them addresses shade at all.
- Microclover is the one unverified record. Dwarf microclover selections are a commercial category rather than a botanical one, and the figures available for them come from vendors rather than extension programs. It is included because people ask for it, and flagged because the provenance is weaker.
- Four further cells are unrated: sheep fescue for heat, white clover for heat and cold, and microclover for drought and wear. No source we hold addresses them.
Where the numbers come from
The database draws on 28 publications: 10 USDA NRCS plant fact sheets, 12 university extension documents — Penn State, Rutgers, Cornell, UMass, NC State and Clemson — and 6 vendor documents. Vendor figures are recorded for comparison and are marked as such; they never establish a rate on their own, and a species is only treated as verified when an extension or USDA source supports it.
An example of how a number gets set: tall fescue's 6–8 pounds per 1,000 square feet clusters across seven extension sources. An older Rutgers sheet from 2004 gives 4–6, which sits below that cluster and is recorded as a low outlier rather than folded into an average. USDA's figure for tall fescue is given per acre for erosion control and forage, a different use, so it is excluded from the lawn rate entirely.