Rewilding My Lot

Around the perimeter of the back yard is a 6-ft strip of Thunder Turf, which is a mixture of three short prairie grasses: Buffalograss (Bouteloua dactyloides), Blue Grama (Bouteloua gracilis), and Curly Mesquite (Hilaria belangeri), sold by Native American Seed. 

Now that I have been working on this garden for just over three years, I know more than I did initially. The Thunder Turf strip is the area that I tackled first, and with hindsight there are things that I could have done differently. Now that I’ve had some more time to consider, I’m going to try to address some of the challenges.

The back garden was originally covered with bermudagrass. To prepare the Thunder Turf area, I pulled up the bermudagrass with my bare hands, and even though I shook the sod as much as possible, there was soil lost during that process. I should have replenished the soil before I proceeded further but I did not. That, plus confounding factors such as flooding erosion and foot traffic, has resulted in an area with extremely thin, poor quality, uneven soil. The native grasses have grown, but not as well as I’d hoped.

Here’s one of the worst areas in April 2026 (the north side).

This is a summary of what I’ve done since then.

At the end of April 2026, I spread several bags of mushroom compost (not enough!) over the Thunder Turf and leveled it.

Then I mowed so that mature seeds from the grasses would be released onto the ground.

There was still considerable work to be done in this area, but I couldn’t get back to it until the beginning of June. By that time, rain had caused the grass to grow and green up, but there were still bare patches. I did another round of “top dressing” and leveling with mushroom compost.

This time, instead of mowing, I added more Thunder Turf seeds to the bare patches.

We were fortunate in May and June of this year to get several inches of rain. This photo of the west side was taken at the end of June — the grasses have grown taller but I won’t mow that area until the fall.

An advantage of Thunder Turf is that there are three different grasses in the mix, so in each micro-environment (e.g., the amount of shade, or water from neighbors’ irrigation) they can sort themselves out as to what grows best.

These are Curly Mesquite seed heads.

Nearby there are also seed heads for Blue Grama (background) and male Buffalograss flowers (foreground).

Female Buffalograss seeds are chunkier and grow on shorter stems than the male flowers.

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With hindsight, I should have been doing something like this (particularly the top dressing) more often, so now I plan to make this an annual activity. Over time, I hope to increase the health of that soil and improve its unevenness.

Thunder Turf only needs to be mown twice a year — in late spring and fall. The fall mowing in particular should be timed for when there are mature seeds present to aid reseeding of bare patches.