

Deep, infrequent watering produces a deeper, more extensive root system, enabling turf to resist disease and stress. Lawns watered too frequently tend to develop shallow root systems, making them more susceptible to stress and disease. Warmer-season grasses need about 1-inch water a week in the growing season. Water After Cuttingĭifferent grasses have different water needs. Fungal infections will present as white tips on the end of the grass blade. The temperatures generated by the composting process will break any organisms down. Instead, use the clipping as part of your compost heap. Of course, an electric mulching mower will reduce air pollution.Ī point to note. If your lawn has fungal growth, do not leave the clipping on the lawn. Mulching mowers make grasscycling easy by cutting grass blades into small pieces and forcing them into the soil. Your local mower dealer can help you select a suitable one. The shorter your clippings, the less impact they have on your mowed surface. But generally, you should cut your grass before it reaches 4 inches long, maximally removing the top inch. If you’re creating a putting green in your backyard with some Bermuda Grass or Bent Grass, you want it low.

Generally, the best lawn length is between 2½ and 4 inches, depending on the grass cultivar. The correct guideline for lawn mowing is not to remove more than the top third of the leaf. The following are doable solutions that don’t require much effort. So they collect that nutrient-rich product and have it added to some unseen landfill – wasted. Gardeners want clippings removed because they believe drying clippings on a cut lawn breaks that sense of order. Newly cut grass feeds our general sense of well-being. The feel of freshly cut lawn under our bare feet is energizing. The smell of chlorophyll in the air is an active aid in creating and recalling happy times. The Appeal of Cut GrassĪ freshly mowed lawn appeals to our sense of order, beauty, and being alive. That could be good news for estuaries and other coastal areas where runoff of excess nitrogen from land surfaces is a major source of water pollution, leading to algae overgrowth and dead zones where aquatic life can’t survive. The carbon storage is still greater than it would be if we used the higher amounts of fertilizer but removed the clippings from the lawn.”

“The model suggests that if we recycle the clippings on the grass, we can almost halve the amount of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. That’s equivalent to about 37 billion pounds-the weight of about 147,000 blue whales. lawn area could store up to 16.7 teragrams of carbon each year. If people recycle the grass clippings, leaving them to decompose on the lawn, the U.S.
WHERE TO DUMP GRASS CLIPPINGS SERIES
The following quotes from a study done by the NASA Earth Observatory site add perspective.Īfter running a series of model simulations using different amounts of fertilizer, watering schedules, and leaving or removing the cut grass after mowing, Milesi says that a well-watered and fertilized lawn is a carbon sink. Grasscycling is the solution, reusing this valuable resource. When fully considered, grass clippings make up a surprisingly large portion of waste – approximately 300 to 400 pounds of grass clippings per 1000 square feet annually or, put differently, six-and-a-half tons per acre each year.
