Idaho Fescue Seeds (Festuca idahoensis)

Soft, beautiful, bristly, bluish-silver, mostly unfazed by drought and hard times…Idaho fescue is maybe the most significant grass of western North America. 

Occurring across almost the whole of the West, from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast, Idaho fescue shrugs off grazing and trampling. It fills out its dense clumps soon after fire. It persists in the face of invasive weeds, waves pleasingly in the wind, changes color with the seasons…green in cool and wet times…silver-blue in seasons of change…golden in dry cold and heat.

It’s a rangeland grass. It’s a prairie grass of mountain or coast. It’s a wild lawn grass.

Idaho fescue enjoys the companionship of wildflowers, for which it leaves spaces around itself. For meadow-makers West of the continental divide, it is perhaps the greatest of grasses. It doesn’t over-power the landscape as a huge monoculture of itself. It is much happier growing in separated clumps. 

It germinates in cold, grows fast in the spring -- almost as fast as cheatgrass and knapweed -- and is one of the better grasses for competing against them. Food for butterflies? Yes. Just look at the various Polites skippers which lay their eggs amongst it, food for the caterpillars. Shelter? Yes. Pry apart the dense tufts in winter to behold the clusters of hibernating lady beetles…and look beneath the hummocks of Idaho fescue in summer to see the surface nests of some bumble bees. Slope stabilization? This is a grass of rocky slides and thin hillside soils, holding fast with thick fibrous roots drilled many meters into the hardest of ground. 

Every part of this plant is excellent.

Approximately 7,000 (8.0 grams)