MAINTAINING AN ORGANIC LAWN
Whenever we do things organically, we look to Mother Nature for answers. Grass is a monoculture but even here I find a mixture of grasses does better than a single variety. I find Black Beauty Ultra a mix of the more disease resistant fescues mixed with Bluegrass varieties makes a superior lawn than just using one variety both in looks and sustainability. Nature teaches us the best time to seed is now for we have the warm temperatures to germinate our seed and the advantage of a cool nights and the cool weather of spring to grow a thick turf before we get into the heat of summer. Each application of an organic product in my program takes into consideration Nature.
Let me start off with a few general recommendations that make sense to anyone who is in tune with Nature. I am going to call them my 12 Steps to a beautiful Organic Lawn.
1. Grass should be watered 2 times a week applying a ½ inch of water each time. This encourages a deep root system by stimulating roots to go down deep in the ground to search for water. Frequent watering stimulates a shallow root system. Strong deep root systems are the key to sustainability.
2. Grass should be cut at the height of 3 ½ inches and the clippings left on the lawn. Higher settings on mowers allows the grass to grow to this height that shades out light thus reducing weed germination. Short cutting of grass favors weed populations. Keep up with your mowing and don’t let your grass get too long.
Clippings should be left on the lawn to reduce weed germination and to add nutrients to the soil. Everything that comes from the earth needs to go back into the earth.
3. A good lawn comes from the soil it is grown in. A heavy compact soil lacks good oxygen circulation and roots don’t penetrate it. This causes the development of a shallow root system. Most soils need to be conditioned to become good soils. Not only is structure important but so is the development of a good food web. There is a whole structure of life that takes place in our soils that we can’t see. It is filled with microbes, arthropods, gastropods, earthworms, roots and symbiotic relationships. What takes place in an organic soil is truly amazing and a full length feature film could be made showing the interaction of the different relationships taking place within that soil. It is difficult for us to understand this for when we look at soil this is not what the eye can see. Developing a strong and healthy food web is what will develop a healthy beautiful lawn. Life in the soil keeps the soil aerated and productive. Sustainability takes place when you have a good food web and you take care of it. Feed the soil and the soil feeds the plant. If you understand the workings of nature you can achieve a beautiful lawn.
4. Knowing the pH level of your soil is critical. A pH soil test will tell you if you need to add a high calcium lime. A ph test is inexpensive and easy to perform. I like to be at a pH of 7. Grass grows best at this level and most weeds grow best at a low ph. Adding Magical will raise your pH.
5. Water is essential to growing a good turf. Deep root systems are important to develop for than roots can go deeper to obtain water and they stand up better in drought situations. To develop a deep root system you need soil with a good structure to go down 12 inches or more. An inch of water per week is our recommendation with ½ inch application to be applied twice a week. Rain water can be measured by placing a cylinder container on your lawn. This container can also measure the time you need to keep your sprinkler on to achieve a ½ inch of water. Deep infrequent watering promotes deep roots. Daily frequent watering promotes a shallow root system
6. Harmful Insects can be devastating to a lawn. A well tended organic lawn is more resistant to insect problems. When the immune system of a plant is strong, it combats diseases and insect invasion. An organic control for grubs and sod webworm is to add beneficial nematodes to the soil. Nematodes are a very small worm barely seen by the human eye, it enters the body of the grubs and releases a bacterium that infects and kills the grub. Milky spore is a biological control for Japanese larvae. The bacterium is ingested by the grub and kills it. The bacterium reproduces in the grub, inoculating their area. After 3-4 years of application the area becomes self sustaining.
7. Most people consider weeds to be the biggest problem in an organic lawn. We don’t use toxic weed killers in an organic lawn. We approach the problem differently. The organic control for weeds is very simple to understand but more difficult to execute. We need to build such a thick turf that weeds cannot penetrate. This requires adding grass seed whenever you find a bare spot in your lawn and aerating and seeding your lawn every fall. Grass needs to become so dominate the weeds cannot penetrate it. You may have to follow our renovation program every fall for five years to accomplish this.
8. Select the right seed for the right location. Different seed types perform better in different locations. It is important to understand your light and soil situation. More light can often be added to a location by removing lower limbs on trees. Drainage problems can be corrected by the use of drainage pipes, dry wells or contour surface drainage
9. The application of organic products takes place 10 months out of the year. Each application of organic products has been put in my calendar and my book for a specific reason. For the first five years you should follow these guidelines explicitly. This will require a higher investment for the first five years but will probably require a lower investment in the subsequent years. Once you have developed a good food web and a deep root system you will have developed a self sustain system. You can cut back on your applications and spread them out over a three year period. In a high quality golf course type lawn you will need to continuously need to spray for the control of fungus, weeds and insect invasion. When we did my mother’s lawn chemically every year we had to fight fungus in June, chinch bug in July and grubs in August. Each of these problems could cause devastating dead grass and required immediate spraying for control. They say lawns are the most expensive part of your property to maintain and a chemically treated lawn will always be expensive for it will never be self sustaining. In my 5 year program for an organic lawn I fertilize 3 times a year and use a different product for each application. I apply humates to feed the microbes in your soil.
10. Compost top dressing and Compost tea: Top dressing with compost adds organic matter and microbes to the soil. Compost tea is loaded with microbes invigorating your food web with new life.
11. Fall leaf drop: Everything that comes from the earth needs to go back into the earth. When I was asked to be part of the recycling committee representing the green industry in Westchester County, new York;
municipalities were collecting leaves and burning them in incinerators in upstate New York. For an environmentalist like me this was a crime. Since then we have come a long way. Leaves are an excellent ingredient for any compost pile. You can recycle leaves back into your turf by crosscutting your lawn with several passes until the pieces are small enough to decompose. There are special mowers that many gardeners now own that efficiently do this.
12. Dormant seeding: One of the most important tasks in an organic lawn is to get grass to be so thick and so dominated by grass that no weeds can penetrate it. Dormant seeding sets up another time of the year that we can apply seed to our lawn with often great success. Timing is the most important judgment call that needs to be made in dormant seeding. Seed should be applied to an open lawn just before a large snowfall. The snow covers the seed and prevents birds from consuming it. The spring thaws condition the seed and when soil temperatures reach 50 degrees the seeds germinate. I always tell the story of a school groundskeeper who told me reseeding his athletic fields was a huge problem since they were always being used. I suggested dormant seeding to him. That winter the conditions were perfect and the grass came up thick and strong in the spring. The next year he sent a driver over to pick up grass seed so he could do the same thing again. The message was don’t get that regular grass seed get that dormant seed. We all laughed for dormant seeding was a procedure not a special seed and certainly not one that remained dormant.
Once you own a beautiful organic lawn you will never go back to a chemical lawn. Not only will your lawn be healthy for your children, your pets and yourself. Your lawn will also be organic and will reduce air pollution in contrast to a chemical lawn which will add carbon to the air. An organic lawn will not pollute your rivers, lakes, ponds or oceans. The choice should be clear. We all need to own an organic lawn.
