Landscaping with a Green Thumb: The Organic Lawn
Tired of spending hours on your lawn? Worried about using chemicals in areas where your children and pets play? Ready to do your part for the environment? Then it's time to rethink the size of your lawn and the way that you care for it. These tips will help you get started.
Resize Your Lawn
For many Americans, a manicured rolling green lawn is what "the yard" is all about. However, lawns are the most unnatural part of the landscape. The "perfect" lawn requires regular mowing, watering during dry spells, and lots of chemicals: fertilizers, pesticides, weed killers, and more.
Increasingly, people are deciding to minimize their lawn, replacing it with paths and garden beds filled with plants, shrubs, and ground cover. They then "go natural" with the lawn that remains, allowing it to become a safe and healthy play area for their kids and pets.
Turning Lawn into a Flower Bed
If you wish to replace part of a well-established lawn with flower beds, you will need to get rid of the grass. The labor-intensive approach would be to dig up all the sod by hand, which has the unfortunate side-effect of removing some good topsoil. If you can be patient and wait for next season, you can have enriched, moist soil ready in the spring by following these steps:
- Decide on the placement of the flower bed(s). You may want to use a can of spray paint to help you visualize their size and shape. You could also lay out a hose in the shape of each desired bed.
- Mow the grass in the proposed flower bed areas as short as possible.
- Cover each designated bed with black plastic, and pin the edges down well with stones or metal "earth staples" (available at nurseries and garden centers). The plastic will block both sun and water, effectively killing the grass (as well as any weeds) over the course of the summer months.
- In the fall, remove the plastic and put temporary chicken wire fencing around each bed. Fill each chicken wire "container" to the top with fallen leaves.
- In the spring, remove the fencing and any undecomposed leaves. The ground should be moist and relatively easy to dig.
- Loosen the first six to eight inches of the soil, incorporating the decomposed leaves and two to three inches of compost or well-aged manure. Let the bed rest for a few days, then start planting.
Once you've minimized your lawn, consider conserving energy by doing away with that gas-powered mower. The typical gas-powered mower produces about 80 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. It also produces noise pollution—90 decibels' worth. An electric mower will keep the air clean and runs much more quietly. Current models run on rechargeable batteries, so there's no cord to worry about. Even better, try a reel mower, which requires only your own energy to run. Keep the cutting blades sharp and set them to a height of three inches to keep the lawn vigorous. Let the grass cuttings fall and decompose, providing natural fertilizer.
In the fall, don't bother raking—or using an ear-splitting, polluting leaf blower. Just chop up the leaves with your mower and let the fragments settle into the grass, where they will decompose and add humus to the soil. You may have to make several passes, and you will have to mow frequently to keep up with the leaves. Bits of leaves will be visible until they fully decompose, but the benefits to your lawn are worth waiting for. If there are just too many leaves for this approach, rake, shred, and compost the leaves for an excellent free mulch you can spread under trees and shrubs.
Stop Using Chemicals
Going organic means no more chemicals on your lawn, period. The following are hazardous to children and pets:
- Weed Killers. Train yourself to ignore weeds, pull them by hand, or use a natural pre-emergent weed control product in the early spring. Products made with corn gluten meal provide nitrogen to green up your lawn, while inhibiting the germination of annual weed seeds safely (e.g., WOW!, Safe Earth Natural Weed Control, and Espoma Organic Traditions).
- Pesticides. Stop using pesticides. They are poisons that kill the good bugs along with the bad. Even pyrethrins, an insecticide made from natural organic compounds, should be avoided, since they can irritate eyes, skin, and respiratory systems, and are particularly harmful to aquatic life. Instead, let the natural enemies of lawn pests keep them under control and/or try milky spore, a naturally occurring bacterium that kills the larvae of several lawn pests, including Japanese beetles.
- Chemical Fertilizers. Chemical lawn fertilizers are so overused in America that they are a major source of water pollution. They leach into groundwater supplies and enter surface waters through runoff. Runoff from lawn fertilizers has even been implicated in the death of the coral reefs. Plus, think of it this way: fertilizers encourage your lawn to grow, which means you just have to mow it more. Your lawn will be fertilized naturally as lawn clippings and mulched leaves decompose.
Keep the Grass Healthy
Every few years, you should overseed your lawn to get new, healthy plants started. Grass that is dense has few weeds and serves as habitat for ants, spiders, and ground beetles, which keep lawn pests in check. In most parts of the U.S., the best time of year to overseed is September. Mow the existing grass short before overseeding (this is one time when you should break the three-inch rule), and be sure to rake the lawn well after overseeding to help the seeds reach the soil below. Choose a grass seed mixture that's right for your climate and conditions—note that there are special mixtures for lawns used as play areas. You might also consider overseeding with clover; it fixes nitrogen, which keeps the lawn green. To help the soil hold water, you can spread a thin layer of screened compost over the lawn once or twice a year. The compost will also lightly fertilize the lawn and help to balance the pH.
Grass does best with about one inch of water every 10 to 14 days, but the Earth-friendly gardener tries to avoid watering it except during the hottest days of summer. You will know that your lawn is thirsty if you leave footprints when you walk on it. When your lawn needs water and no rain is forecast, run the sprinkler—but no more than once a week—and let it run until one inch of water has fallen. (Use a rain gauge to help you determine when the sprinkler has run long enough.) Deep watering like this will cause the grass roots to extend farther into the soil, making the plants healthier and better equipped to withstand drought.
The best time to water is early in the morning. Don't water during the hottest part of the day, because you will lose much of the water to evaporation. And don't water too late in the day, because the overnight dampness can lead to mold and fungus problems.
With drought becoming a regular occurrence in many parts of the country, local authorities must sometimes enforce watering bans. If you are asked to stop watering your lawn, the grass will probably turn brown. It may look awful, but it's not dead. And look on the bright side: You won't have to mow it until it starts raining again!
Related articles:
The Ornamental Garden
The Vegetable Garden
Composting
