Organic Lawn Care

The perfect lawn is a thing of simple beauty. Smooth, regular and weedfree, lush and green and just begging to be sat on, walked on or played on. And yet lawn care is now big business simply because trying to obtain that perfect lawn can be such a challenge. A huge range of different tools, chemicals and techniques are employed by lawn care professionals – many of which are both time-consuming and bad for the environment.

Fortunately organic lawn care is not only better for the environment but aims to work with nature to not only keep your lawn looking it’s best ever but also to keep your garden as environmentally-friendly as possible. So ditch the sprinklers and the weed killers and let’s examine some successful organic lawn care tips that’ll help to give you the lawn you’ve always dreamed of without the guilt of unsustainable lawn care techniques.

Aerating Your Organic Lawn

By their very nature we walk on our lawns and doing so compacts the soil making it harder for your lawn to grow. Aerating your lawn helps to open up the soil making it easier for the roots of your grass to penetrate it, putting essential oxygen into the soil and as a result enabling your lawn to grow more strongly.

Not only does a densely-growing, healthy lawn look for more attractive than a patchy, struggling one but furthermore weeds find it far more difficult to get a foothold because your grass is already such a dominant element of the environment.

Aerating your lawn can be done at any time of the year though is arguably most beneficial in the winter when fallen leaves and heavy rainfall can lead to waterlogging in more clay-rich soils.

There are two main ways to aerate your organic lawn. The first is to go round with a standard garden fork, digging it into your lawn and then gently “wiggling” the fork to open up the holes. However with a decent-sized lawn this will likely take quite some time and can become back-breaking work.

Therefore many gardeners opt to use a special lawn aerator as available from many garden centres.

Top Dressing Your Organic Lawn

Anoher useful strategy for organic lawn care is the concept of drop dressing where you add things onto the top of your lawn which will help it to grow healthily. There are four popular forms of lawn dressing though other less popular applications do exist.

Organic Lawn Seed

Densely growing lawns look amazing and provide essential ground cover which not only helps to retain moisture in your lawn but also makes it harder for weeds to get a foothold. Therefore adding more organic lawn seed to an already-established lawn can be a very practical way to not only make your lawn look very attractive but to also cut down on the routine maintenance you need to do.

Organic Fertilizers

Sprinkling organic lawn fertilizer will help to add essential nutrients to the soil and will help lawns to remain vigorous throughout the growing season. Just be aware that some gardeners have found that adding organic lawn fertlizers can be so successful they need to mow their lawns far more often than normal after a few weeks.

Lawn Sand

After aerating your lawn a useful technique can be adding some fine organic lawn sand and then using a soft brush to distribute this evenly across the surface of your lawn. This sand will slowly work it’s ways into the holes you have created during the aeration process helping the soil under your lawn to drain more freely and thus remain healthier.

Corn Gluten Granules

Corn gluten granules can be bought from some specialist retailers and have a unique property in that they stop seeds germinating. This means corn gluten granules should only ever ben used on an established lawn rather than one which has been recently seeded but the benefit for an established organic lawn is that the granules help to prevent weeds from germinating.

Particularly in the summer months your lawn will be under constant attack from the seeds of nearby weeds that get into your lawn either as a result of birds or having blown there in the wind. While a healthy, vigorous lawn will certainly reduce the problems associated with weeds, dressing your lawn with corn gluten granules can play a major role in preventing these seeds from even getting started in the first place.

Organic Weed Removal

An essential aspect of organic lawn care is the avoidance of any unecessary chemicals. Weed killers are a primary example of these and while the advice given elswhere in this article will geartly reduce the chances of weeds getting established in your lawn there are likely to always be a few stubborn weeds that manage to grow.

Fortunately resorting to toxic weedkillers isn’t essential and there are a range of far more environmentally-friendly ways to remove weeds from your lawn.

Digging Out Weeds

Specially-designed trowels with very narrow heads are available for digging out weeds from your lawn so that you not only remove the main body of the weed but also it’s roots too thus ensuring it won’t grow back again. The narrow head to these tools ensures that while you remove the weed in it’s entirety you also remove as little of your lawn in the process as possible.

After using one of these tools to remove a weed it’s likely you’ll be left with a small hole in your lawn so aim to fill this back in with soil and reseed the bald area if necessary with a handful or organic lawn seed.

Raking Out Weeds

Lawns which are in particularly moist or shady areas can often suffer from moss growing in them. While this can feel pleasant on a summers day under bare feet it won’t give you that “perfect lawn” look and so removing it will give your lawn the chance to recover and take on it’s full potential.

Fortunately whilst it can be laborious removing moss organically from your lawn is both easy and effective. Either use a good old-fashioned garden rake to rake across the surface of your lawn or use a specially-design scarifier which will do the same job but far more efficiently (and with less chance of a bad back afterwards!).

Mowing Your Organic Lawn

Unlike most plants which grow from their top, grass in unusual in that it grows from the bottom. By cutting off the tops of the grass plants you encourage more shoots to grow from the base which is why the fields on many farms that are grazed by sheep can look so healthy. Quite simply all those sets of teeth munching on the moist tips of the grass encourages the grass to grow up even denser.

Therefore a regular routine of mowing your lawn is an essential key to your organic lawn care regime. However rather than cutting your lawn as short as it will go like many people do, consider setting the blades of your lawnmower so that it leaves your lawn that little bit longer. Doing so will mean more ground cover so that moisture is trapped within your lawn meaning less watering will be necessary during the warmer months of the year.

I recently had the pleasure of connecting with Laureen Rama online who has written a wonderful book entitled “Eco-Yards“. The concept of the book is all about creating a garden which is not only in tune with nature but that also provides a useful habitat for wildlife. In essence Laureen’s book is about enjoying your garden while seeing it as a small part of a much larger puzzle – the environment around you as a whole.

In the book she talks about the principles of growing plants organically and it was the specific chapter on organic lawn care that I personally felt I learned the most from, hence the topic of this article.

I personally really enjoyed the book and so if organic gardening is of interest to you then you could do a lot worse than taking a closer look at Eco Yards to see what you can learn. Eco Yards is available on Amazon here.

Eco Friendly Living Advice