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Saturday, October 6, 2012

First Saturday Green 101: Preparing your lawn for winter

By motomynd

As impossible as it seems, there is a series of commercials these days that may be even more irritating than the barrage of election ads. And they may be even more over-hyped and deceptive than the false claims that Barack Obama cut Medicare funding or that Mitt Romney plans to starve to death the 47% of Americans who he says will never vote for him.

    What can be worse than all the election hoopla?
    It is “Scott the Scot” for Scotts, the fertilizer and seed company. Scott was allegedly discovered in Glasgow but his accent sounds more like fake Irish as he urges us to rush out and apply fertilizer to our lawns before it is too late. “Scott” beseeches us to feed our lawns right now because our grass is starving and won’t make it through winter.
    If we don’t, we are apparently supposed to assume that come spring our lawn will look like the Sahara Desert. Tsk, tsk, whatever will the neighbors think? And what laws might we break? We surely don’t want to end up like 70-year-old Orem, Utah resident Betty Perry, who was arrested in an incident spawned by her brown lawn—which she said she couldn’t afford to water. Brown is not the kind of grass we usually think of people being arrested over.
    Thanks to the efforts of Scotts and similar companies, lawn care in America is a more than $40 billion/year industry. For reference, that is about what the U.S. spends annually on foreign aid.
    From one perspective an immaculate green lawn is a charming, quaint tradition that found firm footing in the 1950s and has endured even stronger than pork rinds, the Moon Pie, Dr. Pepper and Krispy Kreme. From another angle it is an obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) that wastes time, money, and water and helps destroy the environment.


According to EPA statistics, Americans spill more than 17 million gallons of gas each year when filling their mowers. According to the Exxon Valdez report, that disaster only spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound. And it only did it one time, while careless filling of lawn mowers does it every year.
    As bad as that may be, the real damage wrought by lawn care is of course much worse than spilled gas. There is the matter of all the gas burned and hydrocarbons created in mowing, which the EPA says is 5% of the nation’s air pollution. The average gas-powered mower produces 11 times as much pollution per hour as the typical car. In addition, there is the issue of all the chemicals poured and sprayed on lawns. And all the water that is used to keep grass alive, which depletes that resource and washes all those chemicals down streets and storm drains and into creeks and rivers. And into the bays and estuaries that used to serve as nurseries for fish and birds.
    Have you heard about the many issues afflicting Chesapeake Bay, to cite an example? Well, thank your lawn for helping cause those problems.


So what is the truth about preparing your lawn for winter? Is all the effort really necessary? And is there a more environmentally friendly way to take care of your lawn than applying bags of chemicals and wasting hundreds of gallons of water?
    If you want to take drastic steps, get rid of your turf grass—which is an alien species anyway—and let nature take over. Native clover was once the lawn cover of choice; now most people consider it a weed. Such is the state of progress.
    If your OCD or Andy of Mayberry-era lawn ordinance codes won’t allow you to go native—we don’t want you to be arrested like the woman in Utah—then experts agree a lawn may need feeding in fall.
    This can be done with chemical-laden fertilizers, but if you want to help the environment, use an organic product. If you want to help the environment even more, take care of your grass so it needs no feeding at all.
    How do you do that? For starters, set your mower higher, three inches or more. It seems counterintuitive, but when you mow shorter the grass actually grows faster. Mow higher and you mow less often. Another advantage of letting grass grow taller is it blocks the sun from other plants—which others may call wildflowers, but your unenlightened neighbors may see as weeds – so it will naturally get rid of problem areas you otherwise have to treat with yet more chemicals. Even today most herbicides feature an ingredient that is a main component in Agent Orange, so as much as you may not initially like the idea of taller grass, you may ultimately decide you like it more than cancer.
    After letting the grass grow taller and cutting it back no shorter than three inches, leave the clippings instead of bagging or raking them. They are natural food and will take the place of the fertilizer you normally have to add.
    Another environmentally friendly trick: water only when it is really needed. Frequent watering discourages deep root growth, so the more you water, the more you have to water. Taper off the watering, let the grass send its roots deeper, and you probably won’t have to water at all, or at least only in the worst of droughts.
    If you want to make mowing a plus for you and the environment, get rid of the riding mower, and the gas self-propelled one, and buy an old-time “reel” mower. That is a mower without a high-horsepower gas motor—it has just one person power: you. Yes, the weird spiral blades make the contraption look like something Thomas Jefferson could have pushed, but the mower works great! And think of all the miles you won’t have to put on the treadmill at the gym, because you are getting your exercise outside, in the fresh air. And you are actually doing something real in the process.
    What a concept.
_______________
Editor’s note: motomynd is not a lawn care expert and doesn’t even play one on TV. In his spare time he does, however, maintain a six-acre wildlife refuge that just manages to meet city ordinances, and he does it without irrigation or chemicals, using only hand tools, a manual push mower, a battery-powered string trimmer, an electric chainsaw, and a little logic.
Copyright © 2012 by motomynd

24 comments:

  1. Link, please. I want to read in an EPA report that Americans spill 17 million gallons of gas every year while filling their lawn movers.

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  2. Phil, out of curiosity, are you thinking that 17 million gallons of spilled gasoline sounds like too large a number or too small? It seemed such a small number to me, considering the total amount of fuel used in lawn mowing, I didn't even bother to question it. Especially since it has been quoted and accepted in so many other places.

    A Yale University study estimated that Americans use 580 million gallons of gasoline a year in their lawn mowing (from 'Redesigning the American Lawn' by F. Herbert Bormann, Diana Balmori, Gordon T. Geballe, Yale University Press, 1993). Assuming that figure is correct, then spilling only 17 out of 580 million gallons seems nearly miraculous efficiency.

    You have shown such expansive and informed thinking in your other posts I am sincerely curious as to why you seized on the relatively minor issue of spilled fuel. The much more important question is can we justify the overall massive amount of ecological damage people cause in maintaining the artificial landscape that is the great American lawn?

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  3. I have been enjoying Moristotle and after reading this have decided to get a push mower. Thanks for the lawn article.

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    1. Jim, if you are thinking of a manual or "reel" push mower this is one place where Scotts does offer a great product, with higher cut height settings than most brands. I have used one of their mowers for four years, without having to sharpen the blades. The secret is to avoid twigs and rocks.

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  4. I greatly appreciate motomynd's legitimate concern about lawn care and its larger effect on the environment. Just a couple of notes:

    I live by a creek that feeds directly into University Lake and ultimately into Jordan Lake. I can't speak for my neighbors, but for that reason I use no fertilizer on my lawn and never water. The normal runoff from the streets does quite enough to pollute our water supply, Thank you.

    One thing not mentioned was pesticides. One reason to cut your lawn short is that it doesn't give fleas and ticks a place to hide. That is certainly better in the scheme of things than using Sevin dust (or worse) to attempt to dispose of these household pests. That's one of the problems of allowing your lawn to be entirely au natural.

    Lawn mower gas is spilled by accident (I could care less about the amount. Any toxic chemical spill into the environment is lose-lose.) From what I've observed changing the oil in a lawnmower, a mandatory procedure, is often accompanied by taking the old oil and putting it surreptitiously into an unused corner of the lawn rather than recycling it (which is difficult and inconvenient.) Again, that puts poisons into the aquifer which could be avoided.

    Then, I live in Carrboro and we don't need no steenkin' covenants with respect to lawn care.

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    1. Byron, you are absolutely correct to point out the danger of pesticides, sorry I did not spell that out more clearly in my original post Along with herbicides, gas spillage and the secret disposal of oil you mention, they pose a disaster for water quality.

      You also raise an interesting point about taller grass giving a better hiding place to fleas and ticks. I have never had a flea or tick problem on my property and I have had a natural lawn for decades. I wonder if flea and tick numbers are affected by grass height or by warm-blooded food sources such as mice, moles, voles, etc? Over the years I have turned my entire yard into a nature sanctuary so I have many wild predators - from hawks and owls to a couple of wild cats - and minimal small, furry creatures to donate blood to fleas and ticks.

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  5. Phil, here is the link:

    http://www.epa.gov/greenacres/toolkit/chap2.html

    See the section titled, "Reduced air pollution".

    motomynd, thank you for this thoughtful article.

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  6. Xavier, I thank you for your efforts. I hope you realize that your link is not to an EFA report. Like Mr. Mynd's post, it's a mention of an EPA report. That's how the Internet works: someone posts nonsense and it propagates like a bacterium. Consider the language of your source. "The few ounces spilled" it says. If this is the spillage, say under 1% of what's in the container, the total gas purchased for mowers would have to be nearly 2 billion gallons annually, not the half-a-billion figure in Mr. Mynd's comment. He can't have it both ways. (Nor can he compare spilled gasoline to spilled crude oil—the Exxon Valdez reference—and deny an attempt at sensationalism.)

    I fully agree with the spirit of the post. I'm repelled by the careless way we pollute the environment. And I'm repelled by the careless way we pollute the web. There's so much flotsam in cyberspace that I've developed a knee jerk when I read something that screams "Bogus!"

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    1. While I await a reply from EPA with updated numbers I will leave you with this quote from Henry David Thoreau: "Our life is frittered away by detail...simplify, simplify."

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  7. Enlightening article, thanks for posting it. This article has caused me to rethink how short I cut the yard. I cut it pretty short.

    Thanks for the information.

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  8. Phil- I agree completely that sources should always be cited and that if a valid trail of sources to the original cannot be found and/or the original source is not credible, then the statement should not be included.

    It appears the estimates mentioned in Mr. Mynd's post were from the equations in the EPA Nonroad Engine and Vehicle Emission Study of 1991, the variables of which were updated for the 2004 NONROAD study, and perhaps in later studies.

    I'll leave it to you and Mr. Mynd (who is responsible for the statement) to look into those documents and spend the time tracing the chain of sources and taking a hard look at the data, assumptions, and equations.

    Using the Yale study estimate of 580 million gallons of gas, the spillage estimates from the EPA study, 17,000,000, would be 3%, which is not unreasonable.

    Perhaps as grave as Mr. Mynd's failing to cite the source of the original estimate, is discussing estimates from the early 90's, which are likely now to be on the low side, perhaps even by an order of magnitude. I'll leave that to you all to figure out as it is pure speculation on my part.



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  9. Thank you Motomynd for a very informative article !
    This is something that should concern everyone who lives and breathes on our planet. We've discussed this quite a few times in our 25 years plus of having a large yard to mow.Seeing and hearing people hung up on having the perfect lawn free of weeds etc. has always irritated us.We have always loved our clover,dandelions,etc. and never felt they were intruders but added to our yard.As far as gas or any poison being spilled that too is a major concern and any amount spilled should be important to all who care (and everyone should care ! ) We didn't water during our drought except our plants and trees and came through despite it. Our town's main ordinance is keep lawns mowed to a decent level and not resemble a field ready for haymaking. My husband has considered a reel mower and who knows we may get one yet. Believe me we hate the fumes and pollution associated with mowing.
    Thanks again for the good article !
    Have a great Sunday !
    Dawn

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  10. Thanks for the article motomynd. I typically raise the mower blade up instead of the buzz cut method my neighbor uses. I also try to use a spot weed control strategy. I hate dumping all that weed and feed down on my yard, not just for the potential environmental impact, but also it just seems like a waste of resources. I also refuse to water. Again, it just seems like a waste of resources.

    So if we have a good rainy season, I have a great green lawn. If we have a dry season like this past summer, then I go all natural. The Home Owner's Association can come on by if they want to chat.

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    1. Joe, congratulations on your minimalist lawn techniques and for living in an area with enlightened governance. I maintain a six-acre preserve within city limits, surrounded by manicured lawns, in an area that leans heavily toward "Andy of Mayberry-era" ordinances, so people frequently like to chat. The main problem confronting homeowners wanting to maintain environmentally friendly lawns is usually antiquated codes, not a lack of interest.

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  11. Thank you for the info on lawn's and other helpful info. It is a lot to think about, that's for sure.

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  12. This article makes me feel even better about the fact that I rarely mow my backyard and do very little landscaping back there save for a paper and herb garden every other year. What little I do to my front yard is so I don't get a ticket from the city and so the neighbors don't completely hate me. I'm a more "natural" kind of gal-I like messy yards with weeds and overgrowth. It's prettier to me than

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  13. That was supposed to say "pepper and herb garden" and FB cut off my post. So it continues: it's prettier to me than manicured lawns.

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    1. Sara, thanks for your comment! But how was Facebook involved in your act of posting to Moristotle? I've never heard of that before.

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  14. Thanks for your thoughtful post. As one who's just setting up my first lawn at the first home I own, it's interesting to think about. I bought an electric mower so I don't have to deal with gas powered mowers. Gas is a pain in the neck to deal with mowers not starting anyway; when you have a small lawn like mine, electric is the way to go! Best, JD Payne

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  15. JD, great comment on electric mowers. I didn't mention them because I've always used the manual "reel" mowers. After you use it some, please let us know what kind of electric mower you have and how it is working for you.

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  16. For years I pondered the insanity of raising a crop of bluegrass in the Great American Desert. My solution, aided by a tolerant wife and neighbors:
    1) Plant lots and lots of trees and bushes.
    2) Spread weed mat on top of the lawn, and cover with a 4" layer of mulch (usually free from the county yards or your friendly tree trimmer.)
    3) Weed the mulch with a hoe a few times per summer.
    4) I keep one patch of grass for a clean walkway, another for the dog to poop on. Mow these patches rarely with the junk electric mower that came with the house.
    5) Let Colorado's Chinook winds blow the leaves to Nebraska a few times per winter. Use an electric blower and a push broom for incidental tidying.

    Advantages: I use about 1/4 the average water for a house like mine. Maintenance is about two hours a month, plus a little extra industry every spring and fall. Cost is a few hundred a year to my tree trimmer. (I grow a LOT of wood.)

    Disadvantages: Mulch is somewhat dirty stuff. You tend to track it in the house. It also grows weeds readily, so the hoe has to stay ahead of it. It's hard to find dog tootsie rolls in mulch; that's why the patch of grass.

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    1. Chuck, I've alerted motomynd that you left him a comment on his first "Green 101" article, so I expect he'll comment soon. You seem to be a man after motomynd's own heart.
          "Dog tootsie rolls," though? Come on, a dog turd is a dog turd <smile>.

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  17. Jeez, I'm a "certified master gardener," and I learned some things from this. We should all be so thoughtful about having a carpet of green in the great American desert.

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