Greening Your Lawn

Wide, green lawns are the ultimate badge of the suburban lifestyle. The manicured lawn has become the accepted front yard landscape, thanks to the urban exodus of the 1950’s and the proliferation of the suburban plot. Some clever marketing efforts at that time, by companies such as Scott’s, further solidified the turf grass lawn as the de facto American home landscape.

But the cost of upkeep for the prototypical manicured lawn is steep, both monetarily and environmentally. The emissions from power mowers, edgers and blowers, the cost of gas, fertilizers, pesticides, water consumption and your time all add to the cost of maintaining a lawn. Running a lawn mower for a half-an-hour emits roughly as many carbons as driving from Cranston to Boston 5 times. And a riding mower? Well, if you own one of those, you might as well just go outside and start clubbing every living thing, you walrus-hater.

We use an estimated 26 billion gallons of water per day, and approximately 30% of that (8 billion gallons/day) goes to water lawns and gardens. That adds up to 35,000 gallons per year per household. For suburban homes it’s about 10,000 gallons more than that.¹ Anyway, that’s a lot of water. Fertilizers and pesticides find their way into the Pawtuxet via runoff. The extra nitrogen makes the algae bloom and fish angry.

OK, so you’d like to reduce the environmental impact of maintaining your lawn, but you want to keep it looking, you know, tidy. The options range from a slight alteration in maintenance to a complete 180 about the concept of what the front yard should be. Here’s a list of maintenance habits that can make your lawn greener - in the save-the-earth sense. I’ve tried all of these things with some great success, and some spectacular failure, on different sides of the same yard.

Mow it taller and less often This will encourage better root growth, promote better drought tolerance, and keep less weeds from germinating. 2-3 inches is recommended. Taller if you want to encourage antelope.

Use a hand mower This is actually a relatively easy and cheap thing to do, and those newer reel mowers are actually easy to push. The negatives? At times there might be more raking. If you use a service, ask them if they have alternative mowers like electric or preferably reel mowers. And when they stop laughing at you, fire them.

Don’t use those silly blowers If a dumber power tool has been invented, I want to see it.

Stop watering OK, you just spit out your gum. Keeping your lawn off water is like setting it on fire. But the lawn will just go dormant during the hottest driest months, and bounce back in the Fall, like magic.

Can’t go cold turkey on the water? Water less Water less often - but water more deeply. Water in the morning to reduce water lost to evaporation.

Switch from chemical fertilizers and pesticides Chicken manure provides a great alternative to the usual lawn chemicals. Corn meal can be used as an effective natural weed-suppressor. Ask your lawn service if they’ll apply organic fertilizer. They might. If not, here are some that will:

Gro Pro
Laurel Garden Design
Thompson Organic Landscaping 401.861.3616
Gardens Are…
saferyardcare.com
NaturaLawn of America
Simply Safer

Find organic land care pros in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island using Organic Land Care’s guide

In future posts, re-thinking the front yard.

- with information from Pawtuxet Farmers’ Market/Friends of the Pawtuxet
1. lowimpactliving.com

-photo by Paul Frederickson

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