Going lawnless, or at least a little less lawn

Even with all the snow outside at the moment, I’m already thinking about Spring, and ways to make our garden a bit more earth-friendly and low-maintenance.  This article from today’s Denver Post is a great start.  I have neighbors whose lawns are already looking golf-course perfect, dark green and perfectly mowed – and it’s not even Easter!  They are the same ones who water for hours every day and always win the “best lawn” award given out by the HOA.  I hope that they are up early reading this today, too… 

If you want to have an environmentally responsible lawn, you are simply going to have to take it easy — on fertilizers, on herbicides, on water and on yourself.

Lawns are enormous consumers of garden energy: They are preened and pampered, weeded, watered, enthusiastically fertilized, mowed to a fare-thee-well and edged to perfection. Of course, a trim lawn is essential for a round of croquet or a lively game of whiffle ball, but most people grow more lawn than they need, and spend more time, money and energy taking care of it than it really requires. The Lawn Reform Coalition wants to change all that.

The coalition, a group of garden designers, environmentalists, conservationists, garden coaches and garden journalists, was founded last fall to help increase awareness of the impact of lawns on the environment. Their goal is to encourage responsible lawn care and to suggest alternatives that conserve resources without compromising your standing as a lawn-abiding citizen.

“People need practical ideas for managing their yards in eco-friendly ways,” says Susan Harris, a garden coach and one of the founders of the Lawn Reform Coalition. “You can have a good-looking lawn that doesn’t harm the environment.”

As a founder of the coalition, Harris put the group’s message into practice, completely eliminating the lawn around her home in Maryland and replacing it with low-maintenance sedum acre (also known as stonecrop) and white clover. “Now it requires nothing,” she says. “Not even weeding. No watering, mowing, feeding — nothing.”

Harris admits her alternative lawn is not sturdy enough for rough-and-tumble sports or high-traffic events, but it looks great, and “it’s good for pollinators,” she says. A lawn made up of a single species of grass really provides nothing for birds or bees, she says, and may even be toxic to them (and your pets) if you use herbicides and pesticides.

Spring is an excellent time to reform your own lawn-care practices, Harris says. “Spring lawn fertilizing does the greatest environmental harm of any gardening practice, period,” she says, yet applying fertilizer in spring is a lawn ranger’s almost instinctive reaction to the changing season. Cool-season grasses (such as bluegrass, rye and fescue) should be fertilized in fall, not spring, and warm-season grasses (such as bermuda, zoysia, and St. Augustine grass) shouldn’t be fertilized until the weather is warm. Applying fertilizer at the wrong time is not only a waste of money, it also contributes to a further waste of resources: Your grass will respond by growing faster, and you’ll find yourself mowing sooner, and more often, than neighbors who let their lawns green up naturally in spring.

Lawns that are dependent on chemical fertilizers may look green, but they are not healthy, Harris says. Over-fertilized lawns need frequent mowing, and short grass plants have correspondingly shallow roots, so the lawn will need frequent watering. Overirrigation wastes one of our most precious resources — water. Instead of making you look good in the neighborhood, such needy lawns are a sign of a homeowner who is not really paying attention.

If you leave finely chopped grass clippings on the lawn to decompose naturally when you mow, you may not need to fertilize at all, especially if your lawn contains a small amount of clover.

Paul Tukey, a coalition member and author of “The Organic Lawn Care Manual” (Storey, $20), says it wasn’t so long ago that white clover was actually one of the standard ingredients in lawn seed. Clover produces about half the nitrogen that grass needs. It outcompetes undesirable weeds, helps maintain healthy soil, and looks pretty, Tukey says. It fell from favor, however, because herbicides introduced in the mid-1950s killed clover along with dandelions, henbit and other common lawn weeds.

Tukey calls clover “the best weed money can buy,” and suggests broadcasting a little clover seed on your lawn.

The Lawn Reform Coalition has a website (lawnreform.com), a Facebook page with hundreds of friends, and an inspiring photo album on Flickr showing environmentally friendly lawns and alternatives to lawns. Members post tweets on Twitter, and the coalition has an impressive roster of supporters, including Green the Grounds, an organization founded to promote sustainable lawn and garden practices at official residences, including the White House.

First lady Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden on the South Lawn is a start. The Environmental Protection Agency’s lawns and gardens around its headquarters in Washington, D.C., also demonstrate some of the techniques and ideas.

The Lawn Reform Coalition and organizations like it have a fresh, new message just right for the season: Smart lawn-care practices reflect an awareness of the balance in nature, and save time, money and energy. Going green will give you a precious gift — more time to enjoy the garden.

Read more: http://www.denverpost.com/lifestyles/ci_14712783#ixzz0iig48MWx

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