Your standard blanket of green grass has gotten a bad rap over the years, especially as we’ve started to understand the connection between the disappearance of pollinators and the expansion of lawns. There’s been a big movement to get rid of turf grass altogether and replace it with the blooms pollinators need, including prairies.
But a lot of people, me included, just want a nice patch of green grass. Walking across a healthy green lawn in your bare feet is like walking across a cool carpet. And when you need to send the kids and dogs outside to play? Where better than a healthy, soft lawn?
Never fear! Lawn grass grown the right way can feed bees, support soil health, and sequester carbon!
Now, if you want to get rid of your lawn because you hate mowing or you’re fed up with trying to get your grass to look nice, then go for it! The more native flowers we can get out there for our pollinators, the better.
But don’t give up just because someone says lawns are evil. They’re not. They’ve just been treated badly. Since the 1950s, lawncare companies have encouraged homeowners to douse their yards in chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, telling us that this magical process is the only way to achieve the “perfect” yard, and by extension, the admiration and envy of our neighbors.
When I first bought my house, I faced a lawn disaster. The previous owner used a lawn service. I didn’t continue that, because I didn’t want the chemical fertilizer and weed killers. And guess what happened the first summer? The grass disappeared and the yard exploded in weeds. I was in a panic. What would the neighbors think?!
Not knowing what else to do, I ran out and bought some standard fertilizer. It helped. A little. By fall I was mowing more weeds than grass again. This went on the next summer and the next.
I finally decided to start over. I hired a guy to come and scrape off what was left of the sod and reseed. By the next summer, it was a little better but still a mess.
And all this time, I kept thinking, “There has to be a better way.”
I went online and searched for “organic lawncare.” I found lots of articles, but most of them were either vague or technical or meant for golf course managers. None were for the average homeowner.
Then I found The Organic Lawncare Manual by Paul Tukey. Since I bought this book, I’ve read it through several times, and I still refer to it today, especially chapter 9, “Listening to Your Weeds.”
His main message: Treating your lawn the traditional way—with chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides—is not only bad for the environment, it’s bad for your lawn. It’s like taking drugs to get energy fast instead of improving your diet and exercising. Take away the drugs, and everything collapses.
We don’t want fertilizers that just give the grass a quick fix. Instead, we want to feed the soil, more specifically the microbes, with healthy organic matter, then they feed the grass. If you want to practice regenerative agriculture, lawncare is a great place to start. The crop you’re raising is turf grass.
Since this book first came out in 2007, there’ve been more discoveries and a better understanding of how the whole soil-plant bio web works, but the advice Tukey gives is, in my opinion, still rock-solid.
The basics
So here are my eight basic principles of organic lawncare to get you started. (Note: All these rules apply to cool-season grasses grown in the northern U.S., like rye, fescue and Kentucky bluegrass. I don’t know much about warm-season grasses like centipede, Bermuda or St. Augustine grass, but I could look into those.)
1. Mow high. If you do nothing else, set your mower at 3 inches and leave it there. I keep mine at about 3.75 inches. This idea of scalping your lawn into a putting green is ridiculous. Grass gets its energy through photosynthesis, with the grass blade acting like a solar panel. Chop off most of the solar panel, and what do you suppose happens? It collects a lot less energy, which really stresses the grass. Keeping your grass long and strong also means it casts more shade, keeping its roots cool and discouraging weed seeds from germinating. And healthy grass is a lot more able to crowd out weeds. Now, some warm-season grasses gown in the South do prefer to be cut short. But for the most part, on cool-season grass, set that mower high.
2. Don’t bag your grass clippings. Letting your grass clippings fall back into your grass not only adds back valuable organic matter, it can be the equivalent of up to an extra pound of nitrogen on your lawn each summer. To do this, you need to use a mulching mower, which chops the clippings into tiny pieces so they break down faster. You can and should use a bag, though, if you’re mowing lots of weeds that have gone to seed to keep those seeds out of your lawn.
3. Water deep and infrequently. If you’re watering your lawn for 15 minutes a day, stop that right now. Your grass needs about an inch of water a week—rain included—but it should come all at once. A deep watering encourages the roots to grow down in search of water, and nice deep roots mean a healthier grass plant that needs less water and less fertilizer overall. Don’t know how to measure how much water your grass is getting? Do the tuna can test. Take a tuna can (or a cat food can or other shallow, wide container), measure an inch from the bottom, and mark it with a marker. When you’re ready to water, set the can out where the sprinklers will hit it. Check it every ten to fifteen minutes and note how long it takes to hit that one-inch mark. That’s how long you need to water your lawn minus any rain you got.
4. Use an organic fertilizer. Organic here doesn’t mean made without chemicals, it means the fertilizer is made from organic matter, like soybeans, corn or kelp. Unlike chemical fertilizers that only give your grass a quick fix of the macronutrients nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in the form of harsh chemicals like urea or ammonia, organic fertilizers feed the microbes in the soil. Then those microbes make the NPK and other nutrients available to the grass. And since the nitrogen is released slowly, organic fertilizer can’t burn your grass! It’s what I like to call idiot-proof.
I’m noticing more organic fertilizers around. I used Safer brand Lawn Restore II, a soybean-based fertilizer, at first, but it’s gotten hard to find in the last few years (and expensive), so I’ve switched to Purely Organic lawn food, which seems to be made from pretty much the same ingredients. I’ve used both of these and have gotten good results, so I highly recommend them.
5. Understand that no grass will grow in the shade. Different grass types grow better in shade than others, but just know right now that no turf grass will grow well or at all in very shady areas. Make plans to put something else there, like a shade garden. I’ll cover seeding a lawn more in a future post in late summer, which is the best time to seed cool-season lawns.
6. Make your peace with weeds. As Tukey says in his book, the weeds in your lawn are telling you about your soil. Plants are nature’s great opportunists, setting up wherever the conditions are most favorable for them. My soil is very high in phosphorus and potassium, which weeds with taproots, like dandelions, adore. I’m also figuring out ways to deal with dandelions without using chemical weed killers. I dig them up using a weed popper or a hand weeding tool, or I just pull on them as I go by. But the real trick is to make conditions more favorable for your grass than your weeds. And don’t sweat clover! It’s not a weed, and bees love it!
7. Get your soil tested! I talked about this in an earlier post. It really does make a difference whether your soil is full of clay or sand or silt or loam. If your soil is sandy, you’ll probably have to water and fertilize more often, but using organic fertilizer will help because it adds organic matter to the sand to bind it together and hold onto water and nutrients. If you have clay soil, you may not have to water as often, even during the hottest days of summer, because clay holds water, but clay can also be hard for grass to get its roots into. Organic matter helps here, too, loosening clay’s grip.
And include a check for iron and/or high calcium levels on your soil test. Iron is crucial to good photosynthesis—iron deficiency leaves your plants pale and weakened. Too much calcium (over 500 ppm) in the soil binds up iron, making it unavailable. If your grass and plants are looking pale or yellow, you may need to add iron.
8. Lawncare is a marathon, not a sprint. Traditional lawncare advertises “fast green-ups” and quick fixes for weeds and diseases. But it’s not that simple. Just like any other gardening, lawncare is an ongoing journey of learning and experimenting, seeing what works and what doesn’t. It’s lawncare is care for the long haul. You won’t see improvement overnight. It might even take two or three years like it did for me, but if you get started right, each year should be better.
Lawncare doesn’t have to be complicated. Start with these simple steps, and you’ll be on your way to having a healthier, greener lawn. I’ll have more lawn tips throughout the summer, but in the meantime, let me know your lawncare questions!