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.
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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