Lawn

I visited a local reader and when he mentioned that he used worm castings on his lawn I asked for more info, please.  So he wrote to tell me exactly what he puts on his good-looking lawn:

•  "WOW pre-emergence weed control" - this is basically 100% corn gluten with a slow nitrogen release, and I apply it with a hand-cranked hand-held spreader when the forsythia bloom each spring.

• "100% Pure Earthworm castings" - again, I apply it with a hand-crank, hand-held spreader about a month after I’ve put down the corn gluten.

• "Gardener’s Gold Premium compost" - goes down at the same time as the worm castings.  (About every three years or so I’ll pick up a small 10-lb. bag of fish emulsion and I’ll mix that into the compost before I spread it onto the lawn).

Then he concluded:  "And that’s it; that’s all I do for lawn care - I don’t apply anything else during the year. As I think I told you, I use no chemicals in this garden at all.  I do mulch the fall leaves into the lawn with a mulching mower.  I hand-weed throughout the growing season when/if necessary (and that’s pretty rare - the corn gluten really does suppress the weeds).  I also keep my lawn high - I let it grow to 5 inches or so and then cut it down to three and a half inches - that keeps the sun off of the soil and helps discourage weed germination as well.  In the hottest part of summer, if we’ve had no rain for 10 days I’ll give it a half inch of water via a sprinkler.

"I’m continuously mystified by the far more complex and expensive lawns regimens that I read and hear about."

And can I just say, his garden looks maaarvelous, and in no small part because he avoids a huge swath of lawn like the one you see here.  His garden is mostly borders, and they’re filled primarily with conifers.  The model of the sustainable garden looks good every day of the year, and costs the gardener very little in time or money.

Photo credit.

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Did you know that: 

• More herbicides per acre are dumped on lawns than on the fields of agribusiness.
•  In the U.S. an estimated 7 million birds are killed yearly by lawn-care pesticides. 
• Phosphorus run-off from lawn fertilizer causes algae blooms that suck oxygen out of lakes, asphyxiating fish.
• A single golf course in Tampa, Florida uses 178,800 gallons of water every day, enough to meet the daily water needs of over 2,200 people.
• On average, 7,600 Americans are injured every year using lawn mowers, about the same number as  firearms.

I learned all that from American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn by Ted Steinberg.  Reviewers have aptly compared it to Fast Food Nation - it’s that well written and that important.

Addicted to green

Who’s to blame for all this? The American love of lawns began with the upperclass emulating the landed gentry of England and spread to middle class neighborhoods after World War II, especially in new communities like Levittown, NY, where residents were encouraged to apply fertilizer a remarkable 5 to 6 times a year because super-green lawns "stamp inhabitants as good neighbors, desirable citizens".  The invention of the power mower and advertising for perfect lawns by industry giant Scotts sealed the new ethic of the American lawn for decades to come.  Proof of Scotts’ marketing power (and the malleability of the American consumer) is the fate of clover.  Where previously it had been routinely included in grass seed mixes for its nitrogen-fixing properties, when it was discovered that the new wonder-herbicide 2,4-D killed clover along with crabgrass, Scotts turned on a dime and declared it to be an undesirable weed, and public opinion quickly followed. 

Most worshipers at the Church of the Perfect Lawn are men, and Steinberg thinks it’s because compulsive lawn care gives them a feeling of control - a feeling so often missing on the job.  So ad agencies write copy like: "Show the world who’s boss" and "You’re the boss when you buy a Lawn-Boy," pitches that appeal to notions of manliness, and it works all too well.

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Listen up!  Kojo Nnamdi’s interview with Safelawns.org crusader Paul Tukey should be required listening for everyone who tends a patch of lawn.  That way, when people ask me about how to have a perfectly good lawn without the use of toxic products or constant watering I can just answer:  "What he said."  Here’s the link. 

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 Here’s Organic Gardening editor Scott Meyer in his April 2008 column, titled "High on Grass":

I’m not declaring a War on Lawns.  I have a lawn, and I live in the suburbs, where the most hard-core grass growers congregate.  I don’t even want to get rid of my lawn, because grass is the most reliable and easiest-to-maintain (yes, I mean easiest) groundcover for large sunny areas. Lawns are also the ideal setting for baseball, soccer, tag, and other games that break out where kids gather.  And in the case of my lawn, the clover and onion grass that spring up amid the turfgrass feed fast-growing (and fat-growing) baby bunnies spring to fall. [Bolding added.]

I am, however, advocating an intervention. 

He goes on to enthusiastically endorse the SafeLawns.org campaign, saying you don’t even have to write a check to help.  "You just have to quit using the chemicals.  Go cold turkey."

Well said, Scott!  Now when I tell people that lawns CAN be low-maintenance - if grown organically - and I get the inevitable look, I’ll just quote you.

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There’s just too much lawn-bashing going on nowadays.  While I’m among the throngs calling for less lawn and encouraging homeowners to lighten up, add some clover, grow it all organically and let it go dormant in the summer, I shop short of painting it as all bad, as though by definition it’s a monoculture kept alive by toxic products and mowed with super-polluting gas machines.  And it’s true that I’ve recently removed every last blade of turfgrass from my own garden, but I don’t want my stories about the transformation to contribute to the demonizing of this garden feature that isn’t going anywhere, ya know. So can we NOT just substitute the old conventional wisdom about lawns for a new and politically correct one? 

I’ll be linking to this article every time I mention removing my lawn so I can stop but-but-butting every time.  A standard disclaimer seems in order.

IN DEFENSE OF LAWNS

• They CAN be grown and maintained in a healthy, environmentally friendly way.  Just ask the folks at SafeLawns.
• Organically grown and maintained lawns are reasonably low-maintenance.  And after all, compared to what?  Ground has to be covered with something, and what else ya got?
• They CAN contain a variety of species, even some that provide a little for wildlife in your garden.  I’m thinking particularly of clover, which not only is loved by the bees but is self-fertilizing because it "fixes" nitrogen.  That link explains how.
• Functionally, they’re absolutely essential for a variety of reasons.  Where else can your kids play if you don’t have a lawn?
• Designwise, they offer a place for the eye to rest, sometimes called a negative space.  The borders surrounding lawn can be busy as all get out but the overall effect isn’t busy because of that nice calming lawn.
• On my hilly site, lawn has held rainwater like a trooper, though I understand that if it’s grown in highly compacted soil it doesn’t perform that function as well.  But then it’s the fault of the soil, isn’t it?

Glad that’s on the record.

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Here’s why I ask.  This is in my next-door neighbor’s back garden by Holt Jordan.  With its sprinkling of evergreens, fabulous stonework, and two ponds with a waterfall between them, even winter looks damn good.

But imagine instead of these patches of cold season lawn there were just mulch, or bare earth above herbaceous plants that are hiding for the winter?  Or compare it to the muddy expanse where turfgrass used to be in my own backyard, which is now SO NOT PRETTY I won’t even photograph it.  (It’s sealed off from public display by its status as Work in Progress, I tell myself.)

Now that I’ve cavalierly, possibly rashly banned lawn as a groundcover from my property, is it really so terrible?  These patches may even be maintained organically - I know the folks at Safe Lawns promise it can look this good without the gardener behaving badly.  Not a bad deal, I say.

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The other day I noticed what looked like streaks across my front lawn, the cute little oval I’ve written about before.  My first, nonsensical thought was: Could it be the light?  But you’ve probably already ID’d the problem - sloppy fertilizer application, specifically by hand, not spreader.  Why, when I’ve read dozens of times that we’re supposed to use spreaders - any spreader, even the hand-held kind - did I use the gloved-hand-in-bag technique that produced this result? Because I’m special; I can shrug off advice I consider overly fussy and mechanical. Real organic gardeners use their hands right?

See, after years of completely neglecting my lawn I discovered, while researching an article on organic lawn care, that lawns really DO need supplemental nitrogen; without it they get patchy, just like mine.  So like the dubie gardener I like to think I am, I applied a slow-release fertilizer in September and the results are in.  Turns out it really works - where it’s actually applied.  Human error strikes again.

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First, to vent.  I haven’t posted in a few days because my whole photographic world is in shambles.  I won’t burden you with the details but think New Editing Program, New Pixel-Packed Camera, the Burning and Copying of countless CDs and their subsequent Storage for ready Retrieval, and finally, Old Editing Program that suddenly won’t even talk to me, complaining of a "full scratch disk."  I’ve heard that one that before.  But because we Southerners know how to carry on in adversity, I’m choosing lawns as a good photoless topic and forging ahead.

Lawns are a huge topic these days, specifically how to reduce their size or even get rid of them altogether.  Then there’s the more moderate approach that I took in my recent column, "Earth-Friendly Lawn Care Throughout the Year,"  in which I lay out the consensus among environmentally responsible experts - to use only organic products, mow higher, tolerate some weeds, and so on.  I think I even slipped in a promo for clover, to no one’s surprise.

Next up is a column tackling a much more controversial subject: are turf grasses inherently bad, even if they’re cared for using these environmentally correct techniques? And what alternatives really work?  I’m hearing totally contradictory statements by seemingly unbiased, well-informed sources - so I’m loving it!!  I’ll let you know my take on the subject as soon as I have one.

FOR MY OWN LAWN I do have a position and a plan:  I’ve reduced the size considerably but will keep what’s left for utilitarian reasons - like walking, hauling a garden hose in every direction, and occasionally mowing.  And I’m keeping my lawn because - don’t let anybody fool you - most alternatives are more maintenance than the lawn itself!  Yes, as heretical as it sounds, ask people who’ve gone lawnless how much less maintenance they have now and they’ll laugh.  Seriously.  That’s because it’s really the traditional, perfect lawns that are so much work, not the profoundly imperfect kind of lawn I have.  And most borders, god love ‘em, are a lot of work.

And here’s the other part of my plan: to gradually transform the lawn I have left into a healthy patch of biodiversity, to include turf grass, clover, attractive weeds like violets, and anything else I can find that might work.  So what do you suggest?  Remember it can’t be so tall that a garden hose would catch on it, and it has to be drought-tolerant, walkable and mowable.  Perhaps a touch of thyme?

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The old-fashioned idiom to be "in clover" means living a carefree life of ease, comfort and prosperity."  Okay, count me in.  And everyone knows that clover of the four-leaf variety is good luck.

But we’re gardeners here, so what about planting the stuff in our lawns?  Here’s what Less Lawn has to say about it:

"Clover is often planted by gardeners as a soil conditioner. It grows quickly and easily, chokes out weeds and is easily ‘turned in’ to the beds when planting time draws near. The deep root system reduces soil compaction. Clover is also a nitrogen-fixing plant, which   enriches the soil with natural fertilizer.  Clover also works well, however, as a replacement for turf - consider the benefits: 
Low Maintenance  - Clover needs little to no watering or mowing.
No Fertilizers - Chemical fertilizers are not needed to grow clover.
Color - Clover stays green even in the driest part of summer.
Inexpensive  - It costs about $4 to cover 4000 sq. ft. of turf area.
Comfortable  - Easy to walk through or play on, although not as durable as grass."

Did you catch the bit about clover being a "nitrogen-fixing" plant?  Now I’m no botanist, as Readers here have surely noticed, so I looked it up for you and it goes like this.  Bacteria that live in nodules on the roots of clover convert nitrogen in the atmosphere into a form that’s usable by plants.  There, that’s as technical as you’ll ever get from me.  Cool stuff, though.

And if you care about biodiversity (and who doesn’t?), clover also supports more wildlife by providing nectar for those pollinating bees we all love and even attracts small, non-stinging but aphid-eating wasps.

So what’s not to love?  I’ll concede that the romance of running barefoot across fields of flowering clover is sometimes ruined by the screams and curses of the newly bee-stung.  But isn’t that why God created gardening clogs and TEVA sandels?

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