If you are after some good organic care for your lawn in a cheap and lazy way, be sure to visit richsoil.com, it has a pretty good tutorial on this method. In summary:
Must do:
* Set your mower as high as it will go (3 to 4 inches).
* Water only when your grass shows signs of drought stress and then water deeply (put a cup in your sprinkler zone and make sure it gets at least an inch of water).Optional:
* Fertilize with an organic fertilizer in the fall and spring. I recommend the Ringer brand.
* Have the pH of your soil professionally tested. Add lime if it is below 6.0 and gardener’s sulfur if it is above 7.0.
* How much top soil do you have? See how deep a shovel will go into the soil. How deep can you dig a hole in one minute? If you have less than four inches of soil, you must add topsoil.
Organic Lawn Care For the Cheap and Lazy – [Richsoil.com]
This is great stuff – I wonder how the lawn will look in a packed neighborhood though. I live in suburbia, and most of my neighbords scalp their yards.
I’ll run this by my fiance and see what she thinks.
How about just not having lawns. Lawns require water at some point, offer no shelter for birds and other local animals, and are nearly always exotic weeds. They’re also a big part of Suburban Neatness Syndrome: one of the world’s great evils.
This setup, combined with doing the mowing itself with a mulching mower or reel mower actually results in a very nice looking lawn. If you’ve ever seen the rough on a golf course on TV, that’s what you’ll have. It’s thick, fewer weeds, etc. It also tends to stay greener longer with less water than your neighbors’ yards.
As far as providing sanctuary, I have tons of birds in my yard, provided sanctuary by all of the trees towering over my lawn. My yard contains lots of trees, raspberry bushes, tall hedges, bushes, etc. The rest of the animals that would be harbored by some other sort of longer vegetation at the ground level are ALL overpopulated in my state and in my country: white tailed deer, rabbits, raccoons, etc. For every single one of them, there are now more of them today here than there were in 1900. Urbanization is actually responsible for removing the predators, which caused the huge population explosion. However, growing native prairie grasses on my 0.25 acres isn’t going to bring the wolves back.
Additionally, it is possible to both have a lawn and still be responsible with the little postage stamp portion of land that’s yours. The posted article is one way: organic fertilizer, mowing less with the hugely polluting lawn mower, etc. By growing it longer, it requires less water, grows fewer of the exotic weeds, etc.
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