10 Tips to a Bay-Friendly Lawn | Professional Lawn Care Companies | Compost

Lawns

Green, manicured lawns are better at slowing runoff and reducing erosion than hard paved surfaces but they usually are achieved at a high environmental cost (mowing, watering, fed with lawn chemicals). Consider reducing or eliminating your lawn.

Here’s how:

1. Determine how much of your yard you actually use (for a play area, paths and walkways, access to the mailbox, utility areas).
2. Plant alternatives to lawn area, such as islands of trees and shrubs or a no-mow meadow.
3. Bring the edge of your property closer by densely planting a mixture of native trees and shrubs. The result in a short time is a wooded area that you don’t have to mow and provides many wildlife benefits.

A smaller lawn needs less:

• water
• maintenance (less mowing, watering, fertilizing, and MORE TIME for you!)
• toxic chemicals
• chemical fertilizer

If you must have a lawn:

• Get a soil test (see Resources below for test materials in your state). When you send the soil samples in, ask for organic fertilizer recommendations.
• If needed, fertilize only in the fall (avoid water-soluble chemical fertilizers, use natural fertilizers like compost instead)
• Leave the clippings on your lawn
• Mow high (3 inches)
• Let your lawn go dormant in the summer
• Dandelions are green too!

10 Tips to a Bay-Friendly Lawn

10 Tips to a Bay-Friendly Lawn
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Professional Lawn Care Companies

CBF neither endorses or nor recommends any professional lawn care companies. If you use a lawn service, ask them:

• About doing a soil test first to determine if fertilizer is needed and in what amounts.
• If they have an “organic” treatment for lawns (using slow release compost or other organic material).
• If they routinely apply pesticides and herbicides, and specifically what kinds of chemicals.

Use compost as fertilizer

The best alternative to water-soluble chemical fertilizers for your lawn and garden is compost. You can make your own from food waste, grass clippings, yard waste, and other natural ingredients or purchase it from garden centers. Nutrient and mineral-rich compost:

• improves the productivity and health of the soil
• increases rainfall and runoff absorption
• slowly releases nitrogen to your plants (and not the Bay) where it is needed the most.

A compost “bin” can be as simple as a pile of leaves left to decompose in a corner of your yard or it can be a purchased container made to speed up the decomposition process. The best compost is a mix of:

• Two (2) parts “green” material: vegetable peelings, coffee grounds, egg shells, and wilted flowers, grass clippings (do not use animal products such as meat or fats),
• One (1) part “brown” material: raked leaves, grass clippings, straw, hay, sawdust
• Add water if necessary to keep the pile from drying out but don’t let it get soggy

Turn it every now and then to circulate the material, add oxygen, and speed up decomposition.

Compost websites

Compost (natural fertilizers):
Maryland Department of the Environment website on composting www.mde.state.md.us/assets/document/factsheets/composting.pdf

Pennsylvania home composting:
www.dep.state.pa.us/dep/deputate/airwaste/wm/recycle/compost/home1.htm

Consider using alternatives to chemical herbicides for weed removal:

• Use a weed-popper or trowel to remove individual weeds
• Spray full strength vinegar on young leaves (works especially well on a hot day)
• Burn weeds with a propane torch
• Pour boiling water over weeds
• Feed lawn with compost or organic fertilizers, so grasses outcompete the weeds
• Learn to live with a dandelion or two

Lawn Resources

In Maryland, to order free publications on lawn care, lawn renovation, “Lawns and the Chesapeake Bay,” contact Maryland Cooperative Extension Service (Home and Garden Information Center), 800.342.2507, www.hgic.umd.edu

To order soil test kits

Maryland Cooperative Extension Service (Home and Garden Information Center) has a list of regional laboratories who will do soil tests at cost, 800.342.2507, www.agnr.umd.edu/SoilTesting/

Pennsylvania Cooperative Extension Services, contact your local county extension office or search the directory www.extension.psu.edu/extmap.html

Virginia Cooperative Extension Services, contact your local county extension office or search the directory www.ext.vt.edu/offices

The Lawn, A History of an American Obsession by Virginia Scott Jenkins, Smithsonian Institution Press (1994)

The Natural Lawn and Alternatives, Brooklyn Botanic Garden (1993, 1995)