Lawn Care (the Lazy Way...)

This gardener has never gotten bent out of shape about lawn care. First of all, I think gardening should ideally be about “gardening”, not about trying to keep 10 million blades of grass exacty the same color and length. Second, if you saw my lawn…..well, let’s just say that I’m rather fond of the low-maintenance approach – and it shows.

However, though my front yard is now devoted entirely to perennials, spring bulbs, shrubs and small trees, I do love a soft, green lawn, and keep a large area devoted to turf in the back yard. Aesthetically, it provides the “negative space” that designers and painters like to talk about. It’s easy on little feet (or it was when I had “little feet” around) – and it’s a necessity for little-leaguers just mastering the bare-hand catch. It photosynthesizes very efficiently and thus cools the air above it better than any hard surface. But though I love a lawn, my own sward is far from perfect-looking.

Dandelions never get sprayed; instead they get pried out with a really big, thick-handled screwdriver (sometimes). And I ignore the clover completely; after all, its job is to fix nitrogen and add nutrients to the soil below the grass. I do fertilize my lawn with a “chemical” fertilizer, but not when the manufacturers and distributors would exhort me to do so, so I can have the earliest green lawn on the block. Instead, I follow the guidelines for lawn care set out by the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food in Publication 64: “Provide adequate, but not excessive fertility. Excessive nitrogen application, particularly in spring, results in lush, succulent growth which is more susceptible to diseases. Fertilizer application in hot weather may also burn the grass, or provide conditions which favor brown patch or other summer diseases.” That means I feed my lawn, if I get to it (and I rarely do), at the times recommended by the biochemists at the Guelph Turfgrass Institute: November (most important) with a slow-release fertilizer, then mid-June, then Labour Day.

Mowing the Lawn

Around 10 years ago, Metro Toronto mounted a big ad campaign to encourage gardeners to leave the clippings on their lawns. “Look at a forest,” went the message, “Trees, shrubs, leaves and wildflowers. But no rakes. Mother Nature grows outstanding green spaces without our many-tonged friend. How? Organic matter turns into natural fertilizer when left on the ground. One bag of grass clippings equals 100 grams of fertilizer rich in phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium. And best of all, it’s free.”

I’m happy to say that in the decade since then, (with the help of a tough bylaw that prohibited disposal of grass clippings), people in my city now leave the clippings where they fall. Mulching mowers have become popular and the lawn companies are all onside.

Here are a few tips on lawn-cutting:

· Set your mower blades at 2 or even 2-1/2 inches (5 – 7.5 cm). This helps the roots stay shaded in hot weather, conserves moisture, and crowds out weeds by denying them light. Cutting your lawn too close in spring and summer weakens the top of the grass plants, which in turn weakens their root structure. A “shaved” lawn allows weeds to get the sunlight they need to thrive, and it also turns brown faster in hot weather and periods of drought.

· Mowing regularly – every 5 days in spring and every 7-10 days in summer – means shorter clippings. Since grass is 90% water and filled with nutrients, it’s ready-made fertilizer. But if you haven’t mowed for a while and the clippings are longer than you’d like to leave on the lawn, use them as a shallow mulch for veggies or flowers, or layer them in the compost, along with dried materials.

· The last mowing in fall is the only time when a close cut is recommended, about 1 inch (2.5 cm) high. This removes the growing points of the grass and encourages new growth from the base, which results in a thicker lawn the following spring. It also prevents snow mould, a winter fungus that can occur when long grass stays wet.

Lawn Propaganda

Years ago, when I had a regular newspaper column, my mailbox in spring would fill to overflowing with press releases from companies who assured me that, yes indeed, they had the best product for ridding a lawn of all its un-lawnful elements—dandelions, quackgrass, clover (ergo, honeybees), etc. Some of my mail came from companies that were owned by companies that also manufactured wall-to-wall carpeting, and I think that’s significant. Surely if something is flat and soft like a carpet, can be sold by the yard like a carpet, absorbs spills like a carpet and can be walked, run over and tumbled on like a carpet -- it might actually be a carpet.

Well, why not? So if a spot appears, spray it away. And if it becomes an adventitious home for pesky critters, bomb’ em. And if it awakens in spring with its normal color for April – an ugly shade of brown —shoot it full of nitrogen and iron until it turns the emerald color it was last June, so you can be first to have the “greenest lawn on the block” or a “better lawn than your neighbour”.

But what about the lawn? Maybe it likes taking its own sweet time to metabolize soil nutrients. And maybe the resident earthworms would bump up the turn-around time on ultra-fertile castings, if they weren’t always diving deep to dodge showers of carbaryl, chloropyrifos or diazinon. And maybe the lawn would rather not have the lawn-chemical-folks defending the herbicides and pesticides needed to keep it looking “healthy” by telling us: “Hey, what’s the fuss about a little carbaryl on the lawn when, after all, it’s in your pet’s flea collar. And for goodness sake, we use lindane to kill kids’ head lice so why get all stewed about aerial-dusting crops or attacking spider mites with it?” (This was several years ago, when lindane was still used in shampoos.) When my kids were small, one of them did contract lice and I did use THAT shampoo, but I took careful precautions so the situation wouldn’t happen again. Why? Because the lindane-containing bottle clearly stated it was hazardous to use on junior’s head more than three times. But more importantly, I relied on common sense to figure out I couldn’t depend indefinitely on a potentially dangerous chemical fix to a problem that should be addressed by altering my child’s environment.

And all that being said, I’m quite happy with my lawn -- and all its warts. After all, it’s a living, breathing organism -- not a carpet.

Adapted from two columns that appeared originally in the Toronto Sun

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