How to calculate your lawn seed sowing rate – How much lawn seed do I need to buy?

One of the first steps to creating your new lawn is to calculate how much lawn seed you need to buy!

What is a sowing rate?

When you’re trying to figure out how much lawn seed you need you'll have to work out your Sowing Rate.  A ‘Sowing Rate’ is the total amount of seed you need to effectively cover the area of lawn that you’re creating. This basically tells you how much grass seed per m2 you need.

Different lawn seeds have slightly different sowing rates.  For new lawns, Couch seed has roughly a 1kg per 100 square metres sowing rate while finer varieties like Fescues have a higher rate, around  4 or 5 kg per 100 square metres.  

At Great Aussie Lawns we put the details of each lawn seed sowing rate on the product page so that you can calculate it based on a 100 square metre calculation.  If your project is smaller you can calculate it by dividing so it’s nice and easy to see how much you need.

How do I work out how much lawn seed I need?

The average Aussie Lawn might roughly be 200sqm.  If you were sowing our Advanced Seed Royal Bengal Couch you’ll need around 2 kilos using the 1kg per 100sqm calculation.  If you’re sowing a seed like our Rapid Green Defiant XRE Tall Fescue you’ll need around 8-10 kg of seed for the same sized 200sqm lawn.

Our Pasture seed blends for sale are slightly different and have a sowing rate per hectare and the details of these can be seen on each Pasture seed product page.

How do I calculate the sowing rate for my lawn?

Before you can calculate how much lawn seed you need you’ll need to know the area of the lawn you’ve got.  You can simply pace this out and work out the per square metre area or you can calculate it more accurately using the image below:

If your lawn isn’t a regular shape, draw it up as accurately as you can and use a combination of the shapes we’ve shown.  Add them together to determine the rough size of the lawn.

How do I calculate my fertiliser rate?

It’s important to use a Starter Fertiliser when sowing your lawn seed.  A Starter Fertiliser has the right balance of requirements for optimum germination of the seed.  Again, you can find the rate of application on our Great Aussie Lawns product pages.   Our Landscape Range Starter Fertiliser has rate of 2-3kg per 100sqm area. 

How much lawn seed do I need if I’m oversowing my current lawn?

As a rough guide you use around half the amount of lawn seed for oversowing but of course this is dependent on the type of grass.  Again, the exact rates for the different seeds will be on each product page at Great Aussie Lawns.

So now you know how much grass seed per square metre you're going to need!


Other Pages you might find helpful:

Step By Step Lawn Guide

Overseeding a Lawn

This month's Specials