Turfgrass Guides
Practical guides to NTEP turfgrass ratings, grass cultivars, test-site evidence, and choosing grass seed for your location.
NTEP Basics
- What Is NTEP?
Learn what the National Turfgrass Evaluation Program is, what it tests, and how NTEP data can help you choose better grass cultivars for your lawn.
- How to Read NTEP Ratings
Learn how to interpret NTEP turfgrass tables, quality scores, locations, years, LSD values, and cultivar comparisons without taking results out of context.
- What Is a Turfgrass Quality Rating?
Understand what NTEP Turfgrass Quality measures, what the 1–9 rating means, and why PoaIndex uses quality as its primary cultivar comparison metric.
- What Does NTEP “Commercial Availability” Mean?
Learn what the asterisk beside some cultivars in NTEP reports means—and why it does not prove that a grass cultivar is available for sale today.
Choosing Grass
- Grass Cultivar vs. Variety: What Do the Names Mean?
Learn what cultivar, variety, experimental designation, blend and mixture mean when reading NTEP reports or shopping for grass seed.
- Kentucky Bluegrass vs. Tall Fescue
Compare Kentucky bluegrass and turf-type tall fescue for appearance, drought tolerance, traffic, shade, maintenance and cultivar selection.
- How to Choose Grass Seed by ZIP Code
Learn how climate, turfgrass species, NTEP test locations and cultivar performance can help you choose better grass seed for your ZIP code.
How PoaIndex Works
- How PoaIndex Selects NTEP Test Sites
Learn why PoaIndex combines the closest usable NTEP test site with stronger regional multi-year evidence when ranking turfgrass cultivars.