06 Apr How to Create a More Eco-friendly Lawn

How To Create A More Eco-friendly Lawn

A healthy lawn is essential for everyone and property owners can encourage this by making more environmentally conscious decisions with their lawn and landscape care.

Listed are Six Ways You Can Make Your Lawn Eco-friendly:

• Mulch your grass clippings: Instead of bagging the clippings, mulch them. Doing so allows the clippings to decompose back into the earth, thus providing nutrients which in turn will eliminate the need to add chemicals. It can also help the environment because the production of fertilizers creates pollutants in the atmosphere. Also, fertilizers can often end up in natural waters which can pollute lakes and streams, killing any wildlife that exists there.

• Use electric trimmer’s, blower’s, hedge trimmer’s, edger’s, etc., instead of their small 2 cycle powered predecessors. Did you know that in less than one hour, a 2-cycle engine can create the same amount of pollutants as 11 vehicles. Imagine several of these running at the same time! While we’re not saying you should drop the 2 cycle tools and do the work manually (unless you want to). You should invest in electric lawn and garden tools which will do the same job without all the damaging pollutants a gas-powered one will produce.

• Grow grass suitable to your climate: Do you know where Kentucky bluegrass grows best? Kentucky. Well, and the Midwest. But in warmer states of the country, this type of grass will require extra care and water to give it a chance to survive. So, it’s advisable to do some research into what grass your lawn has. Then to see what it requires before purchasing and applying chemicals that claim to make any grass grow greener and stronger.

• Use yard waste and kitchen compost: Keeping a compost bin in your garden is not only a place where you can throw out your kitchen scraps but a way to add these to a pile of compost. Make sure you turn the compost every few days and in no-time you’ll have high-quality fertilizer. And the best part, it won’t cost you penny.

• Invite insects and worms: Aerating your lawn at least once per year can become a bit of a drag. A natural way of getting the soil the oxygen it needs is to give a colony of worms a new home. Once spreading them throughout the lawn and watering thoroughly, they will work their way into the soil. Ants also do an excellent job of this as well as feeding on harmful insects and distributing seeds too. Yes, the ants can be a nuisance, so you’ll want to keep them under control.

• Water more but less: This means that you should water your lawn more heavily but less frequently. This is because sprinklers are a great way of evenly distributing water consistently; it can have much of its water evaporated before t even touches the lawn. This leads to a high wastage of the natural resource. An easy way around this is to have your sprinkler set to come on after midnight. It is at this time the air is at its coolest. This allows the soil to absorb as much moisture as possible because it is not being evaporated at a fast pace.