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| Photo: Marcy Damon | Every single person who lives in your neighborhood has a profound impact on the health of the Chesapeake Bay. Help improve water quality in your backyard by making smart decisions in your home and by using Bay-friendly landscaping techniques. Smart landscaping choices can help reduce the Bay's biggest pollutants (sediments and nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus) and restore natural filters.
Bay-friendly landscaping increases native plant diversity; provides food, cover, and nesting areas for wildlife; and reduces the stormwater runoff (equally important in city and suburban gardens) that dumps sediment and pollutants in the Bay and its rivers and strams. You can also involve and educate your community by using Bay-friendly landscaping on community property near your home.
Here's how:
Get Started:
CBF's new lawncare brochure will walk you through eight key steps to ensure a healthy, beautiful yard that helps protect clean creeks, rivers, and streams.
- 1. Test your Soil
Find out what your lawn actually needs to thrive, and find organic, local materials to protect it.
- 2. Feed the Soil to Feed the Lawn: Fertilizers and Compost
Choose natural, organic fertilizers, or create your own organic compost to give your lawn the nutrients--and only those nutrients--it needs.
- 3. Mow High
Don't cut your grass too short. Taller grasses help prevent weeds, allow roots to reach deeper and reduce runoff, and stay green longer during drought.
- 4. Pick the Right Grass Seed
Do your research (or use CBF's guide) to select the best grass for your lawn.
- 5. Water Thoughtfully
Don't overwater your lawn. In fact, excess water can cause disease. During the hot summer, it is normal for the grass to go dormant, and the tops of grass blades to go brown.
- 6. Deal with Lawn Problems Safely
Weeds can be removed by hand, or with natural products like corn gluten or vinegar. Most insects and "nuisance" animals, like moles, aerate the soil and are actually good for your lawn!
- 7. Minimize Pollution from Lawn Equipment
A gas-powered push mover used for one hour produces as much air pollution as ten cars driven the same amount of time.
- 8. Reduce your Lawn
Great expanses of grass are not your only option. Consider enlarging flower beds, planting native shrubs under large trees, letting fallen leaves serve as compost, and creating a rain (or wetland) garden in wet areas.
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