You already know about the types of chemicals in your home, but what about just outside your door? Many homeowners take great pride in their lush lawns. Yet acres of thick, bright-green grass cost far more than a few bags of fertilizer and some weed-killer:
Pesticides and fertilizer get into homes and run off into lakes, rivers, and drinking water supplies like wells. Some of these chemicals are harmful to humans and animals.
Watering lawns uses a huge amount of precious water: up to 60% of all the water people use in arid climates.
Yard waste (such as grass clippings and tree branches) accounts for nearly 20% of the solid wastes in landfills.
Gas-powered lawn mowers, weed trimmers, and leaf blowers emit more greenhouse gases per hour of use than most cars.
You don't want to harm the great outdoors while you're enjoying it. Read on to find out what's bad about chemical lawn treatments and learn natural alternatives you can try.
Pesticide, insecticide, herbicide, fungicide: The suffix -cide comes from cida, the Latin word for "killer." The chemicals that kill lawn pests like insects and weeds can also be toxic to people and pets. That's why you see those little plastic flags warning you to stay off recently treated grass.
Every year, people in the U.S. dump more than 100 million pounds of pesticides on their lawns and gardens. Suburban lawns and gardens actually get more pesticides per acre than most agricultural areas. And those pesticides can get tracked into your house or blow in through open windows as you enjoy the breeze on a nice day.
Pesticides get into your body in one of three ways:
Through the skin. You might want to think twice before you walk barefoot through the grass or lie down on a shady lawn. And pesticides can get into your house on shoes or clothing. Then, when you walk barefoot through the house or pick up clothes to toss into the washing machine, they can get on your skin.
Through inhalation. You can breathe in pesticides in dust, fumes, or mist from a spray. Particles can travel in the wind, so your neighbor's pesticide use can affect your health. Larger particles tend to stick to your throat and nasal passages, but smaller particles can get into your lungs and from there into your bloodstream.
Through the mouth.Nobody in their right mind would munch on pesticides, but ingestion is a common way for pesticides to get into the body. Pets may eat grass or lick pesticide-coated fur. And if people have pesticide on their hands and don't wash it off, it can get on their food.
In a recent study of more than 9,000 people across the country, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found pesticides in everyone who had both blood and urine tested. And the average person had evidence of 13 pesticides out of the 23 the CDC tested for. Pesticides have been linked to a range of diseases, including cancer, birth defects, liver and kidney damage, neurological and hormonal problems, and infertility. And they're not just toxic to humans—pets and other mammals, birds, fish, and bees are also at risk. Common symptoms of pesticide poisoning include a burning sensation in the throat, coughing, rash, diarrhea, vomiting, dizziness, and headache. If you suspect you've been overexposed to harmful pesticides, see your doctor.
Note
Pesticides also kill the earthworms that aerate and mix the soil and help make humus (a rich form of dirt that's made up of decomposed organic material, like dead leaves and worm poop—not to be confused with hummus, the tasty Mediterranean dip), all of which is good for your lawn. But if you use chemical pesticides, you can kill up to 90% of the worms that naturally make your soil healthy and fertile.
The chemicals in pesticides also run off into rivers and lakes, contaminate groundwater, and leach into wells. From there, they can kill aquatic plants and animals and get into drinking water.
Note
The National Coalition for Pesticide-Free Lawns educates people about the dangers of pesticides and promotes safe, healthy, environmentally friendly lawn and landscape care. Learn more or get involved at www.beyondpesticides.org/pesticidefreelawns.
If you use pesticides, use them safely. Buy small quantities, store them in their original containers, and dispose of any leftovers according to package instructions and local ordinances. But fortunately, as you're about to learn, you don't need these dangerous chemicals to have a healthy lawn.
Whether you're discouraging weeds and other pests or encouraging your lawn to grow, you can do it without using harsh chemicals. This section describes how to care for your lawn the natural way.
The first thing to do when you're switching to natural lawn care is to take a good look at what you're growing. Is your lawn the best kind of grass for your area? In warm, dry climates, for example, you want a grass that can tolerate drought conditions and recover quickly after an extended dry spell. Temperature range, shadiness, rainfall, humidity, wear—all these factors affect which variety of grass grows best in your region. And knowing which one works best can save you water and cut back on the time you spend caring for your lawn.
Tip
For recommendations about the kind of grass best suited to your climate and conditions, visit www.american-lawns.com/lawns/best_lawns.html.
When choosing a grass, keep in mind that fine-bladed varieties and the older types of Kentucky bluegrass (like Kenblue and Park) need less water and fertilizer than perennial ryegrass or many of the newer varieties of Kentucky bluegrass. Or go with a "no-mow" lawn. That's a bit of a misnomer—you'll have to mow, oh, once a month or so, starting in June. No-mow lawns are made up of low-maintenance grasses, mainly fescue. Prairie Nursery (www.prairienursery.com) and NoMowGrass.com (http://nomowgrass.com) sell low-maintenance grass seed blends.
Another option is to rethink the whole concept of lawns. Many homeowners are replacing grass with gardens of native plants, like wildflowers and ornamental grasses. Native plants already thrive where you live, so they require less care than grass and other plants that don't grow there naturally. You can replace your whole lawn with such a garden, use native plants for decorative borders, or design a more complex landscape.
Tip
The U.S. EPA has a website devoted to landscaping with native plants: www.epa.gov/greenacres. The site has all kinds of helpful stuff like suggestions for getting started, landscaping and maintenance tips, and how-to videos.
If you decide to stick with grass rather than native plants, it's important to set yourself up for success. Whether you're planting a brand-new lawn or caring for an existing one, there are a few simple ways to keep it green and lush.
If you're starting from scratch and planting grass seed, it's a good idea to:
Check the topsoil. A lawn needs at least four inches of topsoil to thrive. Eight inches—or more—is even better. If you can only dig an inch or so into your yard before hitting rock or solid clay, buy topsoil to give your grass something to take root in. To make rich soil your new lawn will love, mix the top four inches of dirt with an equal amount of compost before you sow the seeds.
Test the soil. To test your soil's pH—that's its level of acidity—buy a do-it-yourself tester kit or hire someone to test it. Ideally, the soil should be slightly acidic to neutral, with a pH of 6–7. If the pH is lower than 6, add lime to make it less acidic; if it's above 7, add gardener's sulfur to make it more acidic (you can buy both at any nursery). Sulfur is also a good natural fungicide.
Tip
If you have a pro test the soil, ask him to check for the major nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. That'll help you choose the best fertilizer for your lawn. And if you know your soil already has enough of those nutrients, you can avoid overfeeding your lawn: When you give it nutrients it doesn't need, the extra nutrients run off into lakes and streams and make algae go nuts.
Once your grass seedlings are fully grown (they grow up so fast, don't they?), here's how to keep them happy and healthy:
Enrich the soil. Make sure your dirt is full of the nutrients that will make the grass thrive. If you enrich the soil with compost, you only need to spread the compost once a year—if that often. (The Joy of Composting explains what compost is and how to get started composting.) Aim for up to 1 cubic yard of compost for every 1,000 square feet of grass (that works out to a layer that's about a third of an inch thick after you've spread it). Use a shovel to spread compost, and use a broom to sweep the compost off the grass and into the soil. Then water the lawn to help wash the compost's microbes into the soil.
Dethatch. As grass grows, a layer of woody stems builds up under the blades and above the soil. This layer is called thatch. When it gets too thick, air, water, and nutrients have trouble reaching the grass's roots, so it's a good idea to get rid of thatch when it gets more than about half an inch thick. Get a rake with strong, stiff tines (garden stores sell dethatching rakes), and sink the rake into the thatch. Strike hard enough to get the thatch up but not hard enough to pull up grass blades. If your thatch is particularly thick and hard to get up, consider using your lawn mower's thatching blade (if it has one) or renting a power dethatcher. Toss the thatch you dislodge onto your compost pile (see The Joy of Composting).
Aerate.Another way to help air and water reach your grass's roots is to use an aerator that removes plugs of turf, loosening up dense or compacted soil. You can buy a manual aerator, but these can be tricky to use, especially if you have a big lawn. Other options include renting a power aerator, hiring a lawn service, or buying earthworms to aerate your soil for you.
Fertilizers promote plant growth, making your lawn lush and green. But what's in that stuff you're feeding your lawn? Both natural and artificial fertilizers contain elements that help plants grow—like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—but they get those nutrients from different sources:
Tip
Look for low- or no-phosphate fertilizers. As mentioned on page xx1, phosphorus is a plant nutrient, but there's probably already enough of it in your soil to feed your grass. (Have your soil tested if you're not sure.) The phosphorus in fertilizers can run off into rivers and lakes and make algae go nuts, which can choke off healthy bodies of water. Some areas with at-risk lakes have banned fertilizers with phosphates.
Natural fertilizers use organic materials to enrich the soil and provide nutrients for your lawn. (Here, organic means that the fertilizer came from a living thing, whether plant or animal.) Grass needs a lot of nitrogen, so these fertilizers contain protein, which can come from stuff like ground corn, soybeans, bone meal, or seaweed. The protein gets eaten by friendly microbes in the soil that then expel nitrogen, which your grass absorbs through its roots. It takes about three weeks of letting the microbes to do their thing before you start to see a difference in your lawn, so be patient. The Joy of Composting tells you more about natural fertilizers.
Inorganic fertilizers—also called chemical, mineral, or artificial fertilizers—don't come from living sources. They may be mineral in origin, such as limestone and mined phosphates, or synthesized, like ammonia-based nitrogen fertilizers. A significant problem with these fertilizers is that they can suppress the bacteria in the soil that produce nitrogen, making you increasingly dependent on inorganic fertilizer to enrich the soil with nitrogen. This kind of fertilizer can also wash off and get into surface water, making plants grow like crazy and harming water quality. Finally, current methods of producing these fertilizers aren't sustainable: Potassium and phosphate fertilizers use up already limited resources for those minerals, and the process for making nitrogen fertilizer uses fossil fuels or natural gas—resources we can't afford to use thoughtlessly.
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Producing ammonia, the main ingredient in artificial nitrogen fertilizer, currently accounts for 5% of the world's natural gas use.
Spring and fall are the best times to fertilize. If you're using a commercial organic fertilizer, apply between 10 and 20 pounds of fertilizer per 1,000 square feet of lawn.
If weeds seem to like your natural lawn-care program as much as the grass does, you don't need to poison the weeds to get rid of 'em. Instead, try these approaches:
Deep watering. As Give Your Lawn a Drink explains, when you water your grass deeply, you encourage the grass to grow long roots. This means the grass will be more deeply rooted than the weed seedlings that want to take up residence. When the top inch or two of dirt dries out, the weeds dry out and die. But the grass, whose roots go deeper, can still reach damp soil and survives until the next watering.
Frequent mowing. Grass grows from the bottom up, adding new cells to the bottom of each blade. Most weeds, on the other hand, grow from the top, adding new leaves at the top of the plant. So if you mow frequently with the mower blades set high, you cut off the weeds where they grow and leave the grass unharmed.
Good, old-fashioned digging. One sure way to get weeds out of your lawn is to dig them out. At the start of your region's growing season, grab a hoe and dig up weeds while they're still small. Later in the season, use a trowel to dig out dandelions and other weeds at the roots. (It's easiest to dig up weeds when the soil is damp.)
Suppressing new weeds before they grow. Corn meal gluten is an organic fertilizer that also prevents seedlings from growing healthy roots (but doesn't harm the roots of full-grown plants), so it's a good, natural way to control weeds. After you dig out a dandelion, for example, sprinkle corn meal gluten around the spot where it was to keep any seeds that got away from turning into new dandelion plants.
Zapping weeds with vinegar. Vinegar tastes great on a salad, but growing plants don't like it. Although you can get high-concentration vinegar (10, 15, or even 20% acetic acid) from garden-supply stores, household vinegar (5% acetic acid) is both cheaper and safer. (If you go for high-concentration vinegar, protect your skin, eyes, and lungs from possible irritation.) Simply spray undiluted household vinegar on weeds, saturating their leaves; the leaves should wither within a couple of days. This works best on young plants (older weeds can regrow from their roots), and you may have to repeat the process every couple of weeks until the weeds are gone. Be aware that vinegar isn't picky—it kills grass, too—so this method works best when you have a patch of weeds you want to get rid of.
Many people water their lawn more often than they should, which wastes water and doesn't help the lawn. When you practice natural lawn care, you don't need to water as frequently because the well-aerated soil soaks up water and holds it like a sponge.
Tip
The best time to water is in the morning. Watering in the evening can make your lawn vulnerable to fungus.
Here are the two most important things to know about watering:
Water infrequently. Watering too often encourages thatch (Get smart about fertilizers), while less frequent watering makes the grass push its roots deeper into the soil. How do you know when to water? Watch your grass. It lets you know when it's getting thirsty by curling its blades. Water when the blades start to curl (but before they turn brown). Another way to check is to walk across the grass; if you turn around and see your footprints, the grass is getting dry and it's time to water. Or grab a trowel and dig about three inches into the soil. If the dirt is damp at that level (even if it's dry on the surface), you don't need to water.
Water deeply. When your grass gets thirsty, give it a long, satisfying drink. Place a cup in the area you're watering; when there's an inch of water in the cup, turn the water off. This may seem like a lot of water, but when you water deeply, you don't have to water as often.
Tip
Oddly enough, a good time to water is after it rains. If a rainstorm drops half an inch of rain on your lawn, for example, you can give your grass the deep watering it needs while using less water—another half an inch, and you've done the job. And you don't have to wait for a rainy day to give your lawn a drink of rainwater—Outdoors explains how to collect rain and store it for later.
It's probably no surprise to learn that gas-powered lawn mowers create lots of pollution. For small lawns, consider an old-fashioned push mower (also called a reel mower)—you'll get a workout and a great-looking lawn. Electric mowers are another option; there are cordless models if you're worried about mowing over the cord.
Set your mower blades as high as they'll go. Like other green plants, grass converts light into food through its leaves, so if you cut the grass too short, you're basically starving it because it can't absorb as much sunlight. To help your grass grow upright, don't always start mowing in the same spot and go the same direction. For example, if you mow from east to west one week, try going from north to south the next time.
There's no need to collect the clippings after you mow (unless it's been so long since you last mowed that they cover the grass in big clumps). Let them decompose and enrich the soil—they add nitrogen and other nutrients, which means you won't need as much fertilizer. A mulching mower can help with this process. If you need to remove clippings from your lawn—either because it's been ages since you last mowed or the grass was wet so it clumped—don't bag the clippings. Toss them on your compost pile (The Joy of Composting) instead.
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