Don’t Forget Your Lawn!
Your flower beds are bursting with color, your vegetable garden is producing bountiful food for your table, and your trees are proudly swaying in the wind. Your grass? Well, you mow it, but it isn’t looking too good.
As gardeners, we tend to focus most of our energy on our plants, shrubs and vegetable gardens. But for most of us, the lawn makes up the vast majority of our yard. Fortunately, grass is hardy and low maintenance, which is why it is the single most popular covering for your ground. However, that doesn’t mean you can set and forget it, with a trim every now and then.
Get to Know Your Grass
Grass grows at its optimum growth rate in the first 6 weeks of spring. Make sure that you provide water, fertilization and mowing. Talking about fertilization, most people may not know that the best time to apply it is not during spring, but during the late fall. This is because fertilizing in the spring stimulates the top growth too much. With lots of spring showers, it will create thin-skinned grass which will be highly vulnerable to disease.
Get to Know Your Soil pH
Healthy soil means a healthy, vigorous lawn. If your lawn is deteriorating and weeds are taking over, it could mean that your soil is out of whack. A pH of 6.5 to 7, or neutral, is what you are striving for. Pine needles are a major cause of increasing soil acidity, killing the grass around pine trees. Clean up needles regularly to help prevent acidity.
To test, or when planting a new lawn, get a few patches of dry soil from different areas of your garden and put them through a soil test to determine the level of pH. Most local garden centers will provide such services. It is recommended that you ascertain the type of grass you wish to plant on the collected samples of soil because certain grasses will grow better at certain pH levels.
Learn to Mow All Over Again
Before you cut your grass for the first time in the spring, try changing the height of cut on your mower blade so that the grass is cut at 3″, giving your grass a nice, high cut. You don’t want to overcut your grass as the major food source lies in the tip, and removing it simply means more food will be used to grow new tips and less food for root development.
Cut your grass less, and leave it slightly higher. The lower your grass is cut, the faster it will grow back, using lots of energy to do so. Higher grass means greater shade beneath, discouraging weeds and allowing the soil to retain more moisture. Sure, it won’t look like the neat suburban golf course-look you may be used to, but everybody is starting to realize how wasteful and unsustainable a low-cut and often-watered green lawn is.
Mulch, mulch, mulch! One of the best fertilizers for your grass is … grass. Buy a lawn mulcher mower to chew up and grind back out the grass clippings. They will mix into the soil, renewing it. This way, you need less chemical fertilizer and save landfill space. Some of the basic gardening techniques for organic lawn care is cutting high, keeping soil pH healthy, and mulching.
Also, make sure the blade is sharp. Trimming your grass with a blunt and unmanaged blade will cause mangled grass cuts, causing massive water loss in the plant and making your grass more vulnerable to diseases. Most likely, you’ll end up with a brown looking lawn. Always try to set a fixed schedule to sharpen your mowing blade from time to time, perhaps every spring.
Strong Healthy Grass Means Fewer Problems
Fertilize every fall with a lawn fertilizer. If you’re thinking of chemical-free, look for a protein-based natural fertilizer to use. Cattle or chicken feed, crushed dog food, grass clippings and seaweed are good examples. If you’re mulching, your lawn is already getting a good amount of fertilizer! If you’re looking for a liquid organic lawn fertilizer, spraying nutrient-rich compost tea is one great idea.
Do not panic when you see weeds start growing in your lawn. Try to identify what weeds are growing and learn what harm they will inflict on your current healthy lawn. The most common weed you should pay attention to is crabgrass, which is very well known as an “annual-weed.” It generally reappears every year if your lawn has a clear history of crabgrass.
Many weeds thrive at pH levels different than what your grass thrives at. For instance, dandelions love a pH level of about 7.5. Sprinkle some sulfur into the soil to rebalance the levels.
If your lawn is healthy (which means your soil is healthy and rich), it will crowd out weeds and be more resistant to pests and disease. Keep pesticides and herbicides to a minimum. While chemicals offer a short-term solution, it often interferes and damages microorganisms in the long run that contributes to healthy soil.
Source: Goorganicgardening.com, a blog on organic gardening tips, composting and having fun out in the yard.
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