Category: Lawns

The first steps in growing an organic lawn means understanding four simple techniques. Luckily, these are easily described and easily accomplished.

Step one: make the lawn thick.

Every fall, you’re going to add two to 6 pounds of grass seed per thousand square feet of lawn.

• If your lawn is lush and green now, then 2 pounds is acceptable.
• If the lawn is sparse and weedy, then you can add four to as high as 6 pounds per thousand square feet.

This will increase the number of grass plants per square foot in your lawn. And because grass is an effective competitor, it will choke out the many weeds.
We call this overseeding and we’d do this. When the night temperatures cool down in September.

Step two makes the soil fertile

Fertile soil feeds your grass plants and make them healthy. The simplest way to do this is to add compost at the rate of 2 pounds per thousand square feet in the spring and 2 pounds per thousand square feet in the late fall.
Compost will activate all the microorganisms in the soil and these in turn work to increase the health of each individual grass plant.

This is a good point in this note to remind you that a lawn is composed of thousands of individual plants. I invite you to consider you’re not “growing a lawn” but instead you’re “growing thousands of plants” that make up a lawn.

Organic matter is the lifeblood of good soils. So we’re going to do two things, to ensure a high organic matter content in your lawn. The first is to add one bale of peat moss per thousand square feet in the early spring. The second is to set your lawnmower at its highest setting and allow the clippings to stay on the lawn after mowing.
For the average lawn, these simples how-to steps will improve fertility greatly.

Step three: controlling weeds organically.

There were two basic types of weeds we need to control.

The first are those annual weeds, whose seeds germinate first thing in the spring.

A good example of this is crabgrass. Crabgrass is an annual, and frankly, at the beginning stages, most gardeners can’t tell the difference between crabgrass and turf grass. Annual seeds are controlled by adding corn gluten at the rate of 20 pounds per thousand square feet of lawn.

Adding corn gluten every spring, will reduce or eliminate annual weeds within three years. Note this is why we spread our grass seed in the fall, because corn gluten will stop grass seed from germinating as well.

Perennial and established weeds will not be controlled by corn gluten. This will require a little work on the gardeners part.

I use a simple tool called a spud. It has a long handle and a forked metal blade that cuts perennial roots off. I repeat this several times in the spring and the vast majority of weeds are finished. The spud kills established weeds and the corn gluten stops them from reappearing.

Click here to check out my Organic Lawn Care ebook.

Step four: controlling insects.

A healthy organic lawn will be less bothered by insects, and any damage is quickly repaired by the lawn itself. After a few years of organic fertilization, you’re going to find that insects and pests are not a problem.

In the organic lawn, white grubs and other pests are easily controlled using predator nematodes and chinch bugs are controlled with insecticidal soap drenches.

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Lawn rolling must be hormonal. Every spring, just about this time, some mysterious hormone hits the male of the species and the urge to “do lawn work” strikes. Personally, I try to resist this urge whenever possible but from the looks of the lawns in the surrounding area, many of you are simply not able to resist the urge to get out there and do something, anything, to make your lawn look better.

I Have a Bridge I Want To Sell

Many local homeowners, no doubt hormonally unbalanced by the passing of winter, like to go out and drag a heavy weight around the lawn.

I recently read one newsletter that said the reason for lawn rolling was to make sure the grass roots were in contact with the soil. Right, and I’ve got a bridge I can sell you.

Grass roots, if properly grown, are quite deep and no amount of frost is going to throw them out of contact with the soil.

The only thing lawn rolling accomplishes is to compact the soil.

Compacting the soil squashes all the soil particles together.

This means that air spaces necessary for good root growth are eliminated. It also means that water can’t penetrate the soil because there are no holes for it to move into.

The bulk of the water runs off the lawn and never penetrates deep into the soil to the root zone level.

This run off water takes the dissolving plant food with it so the spring feeding is washed down the sewer. In one fell swoop, rolling a lawn eliminates the necessary aeration, prevents water from entering and assists in the removal of spring applied fertilizer.

I can’t think of an faster way to help put stress on a lawn than to roll the lawn first thing in the spring.

I once watched a contractor use a road leveling roller to roll a lawn about to be seeded. Occasionally I pass this street and take a look at the house and ask myself if the gardener inside ever wonders why they can’t grow grass on this concrete expanse. In this case, there was a sand bed and a shallow layer of top soil over it being graded (with heavy machinery) and then rolled for a smooth seedbed.

Water Penetration

Water would have a tough time penetrating the top layer because of the compaction and then, once into the soil, would not easily drain into the sand.

Golf Course Greens

You have to remember that for physical reasons, water does not easily move between layers of different soil types- the junction between sand beds and top soil layers would be one such hard-to-pass area.

What is created in this case is a parched top surface layer at the ground-air junction and a swamp layer at the top-soil to sand layer

With few airspaces for the roots to penetrate and this mish-mash of water, the testament is to the versatility and strength of grass that it grows at all in this compacted bed.

Golf Greens

Occasionally, those of you who golf will see the greens crews rolling the green

Rolling a green is not the same as lawn rolling your home lawn. To begin with, a green is not usually made of garden soil

Your lawn sits on a mixture of soil types and these are easily compacted; a green sits on special sand chosen for its ability not to compact

Turf being grown for putting greens is one of the most intensively managed grass surfaces in the world. It is fed, watered and treated for disease on a regular basis. (Which is why you should never pick up your golf ball and then wipe your hands on your face.)

Even with the special sand bases, if the putting greens are rolled several times a week, they will usually have to be regularly “cored” (cutting out hundreds of finger sized holes) to allow for expansion of the soil, and the introduction of water and air

The turf manager at a golf course is really trying to do several things at the same time. This person is trying to make the golf ball roll better by making the surface firmer. If the ball rolls better on firm soil, the grass itself can be left to grow a bit taller

Taller grass is healthier grass because it is producing nutrients and extra root growth. The turf manager at a golf course is treading a thin line between optimum grass health and optimum playing surface.

What is critical to understand is that the soils on the green and your lawn can’t be compared and so the lawn rolling practices will be different.

In any case, put the lawn roller into the neighborhood garage sale because unless you want to produce concrete, you don’t need it anymore.

Responses to Readers about Lawn Rolling

I thought I would make a few short points about the above notes on lawn rolling as I’ve heard a few comments about it from readers.
There seems to be two responses to the article (besides the one that says, “But, I’ve always done lawn rolling on my lawn.”)

The first is a question about the bumps on the lawn in the spring and if they are not rolled, how will they disappear

Trust me, they disappear in the normal lawn, they’ll sink and find their own level and as soon as the grass begins to grow, you’ll never notice them. If there are large bumps in the lawn, the soil needs to be added and graded, not squashed

How Do I Fix Compacted Lawns

The second question is a natural one and one I should have addressed in the first article. If I’ve rolled my lawn in the past, how do I correct the damage I’ve done

The answer to that is deceptively simple, grow your grass in a proper environmentally sound manner. Given half a chance, the root growth of grass plants will penetrate deeply into the soil and work to create a uniform aeration level. If we allow our grass plants to do the work they can do without “help” from us, our lawn will be the healthier for it.

Aeration

You can also rent an aerator machine from a rental store. This pulls small plugs out of the soil to allow the water and air to reach down into the roots. The first mowing will chew these plugs up and you won’t see them again. And nope, you won’t fall down the holes. They’re really small.

New Seedbeds

The other point to be made is that rolling a new seedbed with a light roller is an acceptable garden practice to ensure the seed is firmly in contact with the soil. This is not a mandatory step but can marginally increase the germination of grass seed.

Here’s a quick way to learn about how to grow organic lawns