On April 22 I planted some ‘Sena’ manilagrass with the help of staff from the GolfEast company. We were careful to plant at an exact rate, and we documented the grow-in through digital image analysis. The objective of this project was to measure the grow-in time—that is, how many days would it take after planting at this rate to get full grass coverage.

I made this video to show the results.

I expect four things will influence the establishment time for manilagrass, assuming it is planted in full sun.

• the grass variety
• the planting rate
• how the grass is managed after planting (topdressing, irrigation, fertilizer, etc.)
• the temperature

For more about this topic, you can see:

• My blog post describing the start of this experiment
• Commercial sod production in Thailand (video), 1 month from planting to harvest
• Another video of zoysia sod production in Thailand
• The surprisingly confusing topic of bushels of sprigs or stolons per area—warm-season grass planting rates
• Turfgrass establishment: sprigging and stolonizing by Tom Samples and John Sorochan at the University of Tennessee