A Vital, Safe, and Living Yard
First of all, let's just get it out in the open. We can't help ourselves. We love great green swaths of monoculture plantings. Most of it is just to be looked at; sometimes it is an active playfield for children and pets. It is also big business. As a nation we spend between $30 and $40 billion a year on our lawns. Increasingly people are becoming aware of the oversize demands and impact that lawns make on our resources and environment. Consider this:
- Nearly 32 million acres of the United States are covered with turf grass. This officially makes turf grass our nation's largest irrigated crop.
- 50-70% of the United States residential water is used for landscaping - most of it to water lawns.
- 78 million households in the United States utilize garden pesticides.
- 67 million lbs of synthetic pesticides are added to lawns in the US each year
- We use three times as much pesticide on our lawns per acre as we do on our agricultural crops
- A single lawn mower can create as much pollution in one hour as a car driven for twenty miles.
Now, and with my first paragraph in mind, I'm not saying we should eliminate lawns, but we do need to make them safe. And this is accomplished by organic land care.
You could say that the "organic movement" originated back in the mid 1900s, when synthetic pesticides and fertilizers became readily available to farmers. But before then everything was grown organically, only no one called it that. The point is that we don't need to poison ourselves to create attractive lawns and landscapes.
The soil foodweb: There is a new science that has developed an understanding about how life in the soil works. One teaspoon of healthy garden soil, or about as much as you can balance on your pinky, contains about 1 billion bacteria including between 20,000 and 30,000 species, several hundred yards of fungal hyphae, several thousand protozoa, and a few dozen nematodes. The vast majority are beneficial species. Simply put, the bacteria and fungi provide nutrients to the roots of the plant. The plants exudates provide food for the bacteria and fungi. That's the loop.
Soil in a chemically-treated lawn is virtually sterile. Dead. No healthy micro-organisms, no worms aerating the soil. It really is dead. The grass is dependent on its next "fix" which provides too much food, the plant has a spurt of growth, the lawn needs to be mowed more often and the growth is weak and the plant becomes more susceptible pests. (It is important to note that chemical fertilizers turn to salts in the soil. These salts alone can sterilize the soil.)
All we need to do is to work with nature, not trample it. Feed the soil and the soil will feed the plants. And we do this by applying a quarter inch of compost and/or compost tea and a very modest amount of fertilizer.
To maintain a healthy and safe lawn, in most cases here is the formula:
- Test the soil. If the pH is below 6.5 you will need to "sweeten" the soils. This will also help determine if it needs organic fertilizers
- Aerate. The soil under most lawns is compacted. A lawn aerator pulls up little plugs of soil and deposits them on the soil surface. It will look like a flock of geese called your lawn home for a few weeks, but the little cores will quickly decompose.
- Add organic matter. Spread a thin layer of screened compost over the lawn after aerating. It will fall into the little holes where it will nurture grass roots.
- Mow high and leave the clippings.
- Water deeply, but infrequently, to encourage roots to grow deep and strong.
- Dethatch if the thatch is greater than ½ inch.
Many newer homes have a deficient soil environment to begin with. What contractors often leave behind is a compacted and barren subsoil. In these cases it may take several years to build back a living healthy soil that will nourish the grass. This is also the case for lawns that are being converted from chemical to organic treatment.
Identify Problems: Common causes for grass problems include too much shade, wrong soil pH, compacted soil, and overly wet or dry soil. If any of these apply to your situation, fix them or your grass will struggle no matter how much fertilizer you apply. Or choose other options for trouble spots, such as shade-tolerant ground covers, mulch, or gardens filled with more suitable plants.
