“let's see, a 50 lb bag is roughly 16â€x 30â€, or abou 3.33 square feet. An acre is 43,560 square feet so the bag of grass seed will cover approximately 0.0000657 acres.â€
Annual ryegrass and perennial ryegrass produce highly digestible and palatable forage. The forage of both of these grasses can support high dry matter intake levels and are suitable for animals with high nutritional requirements, including lactating dairy cattle.
As the name suggests, annual ryegrass is a short-lived grass used to provide quick color, short-term erosion control or temporary stability for a season. Turf-type perennial ryegrass is used in those same ways, but it comes back year after year in northern climates to establish a permanent lawn.
Generally, a rate of 30 to 40 pounds per acre is used if ryegrass is seeded alone. In mixtures, 6 to 10 pounds per acre is recommended, depending upon uses and companion species.
Plant only oats, wheat, or rye through September 20. Seed 120 pounds of oats, 90 pounds of wheat or rye, then overseed with ryegrass after October 1. Ryegrass overseeded just before small grain is grazed allows cattle to walk in seed. After September 20, seed ryegrass with small grain at recommended seeding rates.
You can plant annual ryegrass in fall or spring. The plant will set seed more quickly if sown in fall, so care must be taken to mow before the plant blooms. To use the plant as a winter annual, seed during fall in USDA growing zone 6 or warmer; and in zone 5 or colder, seed in midsummer to early fall.
Rye for grazing: Since rye is a cool-season annual crop, it will grow in cool temperature until air temperature drops to 39 degrees F. In the fall, rye can be grazed when it is six inches tall and it's important to remove livestock when three to four inches of growth remain.
And since it doesn't require a prepared seedbed, annual ryegrass is perfect for broadcast applications without re-tilling. All you need to produce a thick stand of annual ryegrass is 20 to 30 pounds of seed per acre. It's not always required, but some light tilling can help encourage germination.
Annual Rye Grass infected by the bacterium Rathayibacter toxicus, can cause fatal poisoning to all livestock. It can be difficult to find hay that contains no rye grass and luckily most horses can handle SOME rye in their hay and pasture.
This perennial grass is highly digestible for ruminants and is valuable not only as pasture but as hay and silage as well. Perennial ryegrass is also used for home lawns and other areas requiring attractive turf such as golf course fairways and tees or baseball fields.
Allocate approximately 1 acre per cow to provide you with 30-45 days of grazing in early spring, provided you fertilize in February or March with 50 pounds of nitrogen per acre.
Rye tends to be a bit more reliable due to greater winter hardiness. If grazed lightly or not at all in spring, both rye and triticale can produce very high, single cutting hay yields. Because of its early development and declining palatability, rye should be cut quite early – early heading at latest.
Ryegrass is a lush, desirable, cool season pasture for horses. It requires high rainfall or irrigation, good soil fertility, and good grazing management to persist. Phalaris sown with white, red and sub clover and/or lucerne is quite acceptable for horses.
Grazing can begin in the fall once plants reach 8 to 10 inches tall and can be grazed to a height of 2 to 3 inches. Annual ryegrass grows so rapidly in the spring some paddocks may need to be grazed beginning at 4 to 6 inches.
In the upper Midwest, cereal rye is a popular cover crop that can provide forage for beef cattle. But, an important key for successfully feeding cereal rye forage is to match the nutritional content of the forage with the nutritional requirements of the animal.
Perennial Ryegrass Lawns is best sown at approximately 3 1/2 to 5 pounds per 1,000 square feet when grown in a single stand. The grass can germinate in 5 to 12 days depending upon moisture conditions.
perennial ryegrass: Lolium perenne (Cyperales: Poaceae): Invasive Plant Atlas of the United States.
Another trick to help with disease tolerance is to mix the annual ryegrass seed with another blend of grass like bluegrass, fescue or perennial ryegrass seed.
Compatibility of species mixtures may be advantageous because of genetic diversity and improved tolerance of pests and environmental stress.
Tall fescue is more drought-resistant than perennial ryegrass because of its deeply embedded roots. It grows in full sunlight to partial shade, but cannot withstand extreme cold. Perennial rye tolerates full sun as well, but lesser shade than tall fescue. It has a low tolerance to extreme cold and drought.
Kentucky bluegrass has better disease, drought, and wear tolerance the perennial ryegrass, but is very slow to germinate. The ratio by seed number is even smaller since Kentucky bluegrass contains about 1.4 million seeds per pound whereas perennial ryegrass contains about 240,000 seeds per pound.
The rye grows vigorously enough that it can out compete most weeds. If the rye is healthy, it will completely choke out some of the most common and pesky winter lawn weeds. When used as a cover crop in agriculture, the rye grass is plowed directly into the soil, adding nutrients that will be used by the next crop.
Resilience: Drought: Perennial ryegrass has little tolerance to drought (Carroll 1943, Beard 1973, McKernan et al. 2001, Thorogood 2003) and therefore tends to be a short-lived species along no-input roadsides.
Scotts Turf Builder Grass Seed Sun & Shade Mix (view at Amazon) is the best grass seed overall. The seeds have a special coating that makes them more absorbent, allowing your turf to thrive year-round in the sun or shade.
When to Plant Perennial RyegrassFor proper establishment, you'll get two chances to plant: Once in the late summer (or early fall) and once again in the early spring. Prepare your seedbed at least six months before the expected planting date to make sure any soil amendments you add have time to react.
