Everyone loves a beautiful green lawn, but not so much the time, expense and hassle or keeping it weed-free, watering and cutting it. Jackson Madrick, the founder and inventor of Pearls Premium Lawn Seed, developed a product that eliminates a lot of those steps.
- Pearl’s Premium rarely, or never, needs watering; grows very slowly and thrives without chemicals. The secret: roots that grow very deep, tapping into naturally-occurring moisture and nutrients to produce a healthy, barefoot soft lawn.
- Saves hundreds of dollars in lawn watering, fertilizer and mowing each season
- Grass grows so slowly, only needs cutting once a month
- Thrives without chemicals and pesticides
- Eliminates hours of lawn mowing and lawn maintenance each month
- Stands up to heat (sunny mix); grows in deep shade (shady mix)
- Creates a lush beautiful organic lawn
- Eco friendly lawn stays green all year long
Read Transcript
LESLIE: Well, everyone loves a beautiful, lush, green lawn but not so much the time, the expense and the hassle of keeping it weed-free and green. Watering it, cutting it, there’s so much to do.
TOM: Well, our next guest has invented a product that claims to eliminate a lot of those steps. He’s Jackson Madnick. He’s the founder and inventor of Pearl’s Premium Lawn Seed.
Welcome, Jackson.
JACKSON: Hi there. It’s nice to be on your show.
TOM: So, as the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. And I read that you have an interesting story about how this product came to be, which began with a view of a pond from your living-room window. Tell us about that. What did you see?
JACKSON: Well, our pond was choked with invasive weeds. And then the town was using herbicide to get rid of the invasive weeds. And then the herbicide was getting into the town’s drinking water. And I joined this surface-water quality committee in town. It took some intensive courses on lake-and-pond management. And I found out the number-one enemy of lakes, ponds, rivers and watersheds and the ocean is lawn-care fertilizer that runs off and fertilizes the pond and not your lawn. And there’s lots of health risks and environmental risks.
So I wanted to see if there was such a thing as a better, lower-maintenance lawn care or seed mix that didn’t need water, hardly needed mowing and didn’t need chemical fertilizer. And it didn’t exist, so I hired four of the smartest PhDs on Planet Earth in turf science. And we spent eight years researching grass until, finally, we created a breakthrough lawn grass that has some amazing properties.
TOM: This is amazing what you guys have created, because this grass seed rarely or never needs watering. It grows very slowly and it does so without chemicals. And you say that the secret is, really, the root depth. I guess it goes so deep and that’s why they grow slowly that it really doesn’t need the watering systems that we have in place today?
JACKSON: Yeah. It needs basically one-quarter of the water of other grass.
TOM: Wow.
JACKSON: And certain seeds, in exact proportions covered under two U.S. patents, that grows very slow. So you mow it only once a month instead of once a week. It puts all its energy into the roots, so it grows up to 4-foot roots in a year when most grass grows only 3- or 6-inch roots. And from the deep roots, it out-competes most weeds without chemicals. It also is evergreen. It stays green in the heat of summer and the cold of fall. And you don’t have to tear up your lawn. You just put the seed right over existing lawn to out-compete the grass and out-compete the weeds without chemicals.
LESLIE: I mean that’s amazing. But is there sort of a one-formula-fits-all out there or do you really have to look at what the conditions are? Is it a lot of sun? Is it a lot of shade?
JACKSON: Our grass grows in all 50 states of the country and in all climates of the world. And we have three mixes. We have a sun mix for 6 to 12 hours-a-day sun – a full, blazing sun. We have a sun/shade mix for 2 to 8 hours-a-day sun. And we have a shade mix for 2 hours-a-day sun down to absolutely no sun at all, where it will grow beautiful under trees where grass has never grown before.
TOM: Well, that’s fantastic.
So, now we’re in the fall season. I think a lot of people think that because you plant everything else in your garden in the spring that that’s when you plant grass. But that’s not true. The fall is the time, right now, when you should be planting that grass seed, correct?
JACKSON: Absolutely. That’s a common error that people don’t know about. That in the Northern half of the country, you plant September and October. You can plant right up to the end of this month. And it’s the best time of year. The second best time of year is early April. But down south, in the Southern half of the country, you can plant in October, November, December and January as the best time of the year to plant in the Southern states of the United States and California.
TOM: You mentioned that this is a slow-growing grass seed. If we plant now, will we have grass the first year or what should we expect in terms of the thickness and the height of the grass?
JACKSON: Oh, yeah. You can go to our website, PearlsPremium.com, and order it. And it’ll go out – you’ll get it in a few days. And you can plant it right away. It’ll sprout in about a week and you will have a gorgeous lawn in two weeks. And so, this is a great time of year. You will have – before the leaves come down and before the snow, this grass will go into the snow green. And when the snow melts in the spring, if you’re in areas where you have snow, it’ll come out of the snow green. None of that brown that you get with many grasses in the cold weather or the hot weather.
LESLIE: So, Jackson, say you’ve got a beautiful, green lawn but maybe you’re looking for a way to water it less or make it fuller. Can you add it in or is it sort of something that could damage the existing grass or make it not viable? How do you know if it’s OK?
JACKSON: Well, that’s a very good question and that we get asked a lot. You don’t have to tear up your lawn. All you do is you cut your existing lawn short. Rake away the clippings or vacuum up the clippings and spread the seed and a little bit of organic fertilizer the same day you put down the seeds. And it’ll sprout in a week and it will out-compete all the grass and all the weeds. You don’t have to tear up your lawn. You just put it right over the existing lawn. And the simple instructions are on the back of the bag. And again, this is a great time of year to plant up north and then in the next few months down south.
TOM: Well, I’ll tell you, if you’d think about, Jackson, all the work that people put into maintaining a lawn, this is going to give people a lot more weekend time.
The product is called Pearl’s Premium Grass Seed. Their website is PearlsPremium.com. I love the fact that you saw a problem and you stuck to it and you hired the best pros and you solved it. You solved something that’s been taking up a lot of time of our homeowners across the country. It’s been adding a lot of fertilizer where it doesn’t need to be added to the water stream. And it’s delivered the most beautiful, green lawn yet as a result of all of that. So thank you very much for that effort and we’re happy to introduce this to our listeners.
PearlsPremium.com. Take a look, order some today. Get it installed, get it laid down, get it planted like Jackson just suggested. And then let us know how it looks next spring. Can’t wait to hear more.
Jackson, thanks so much for stopping by The Money Pit.
JACKSON: Thanks so much. I love being on here.
