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Hey, everyone I am Eric Rochow and this is Real World Green. Today I want to talk about greening your lawn. Now, this is may sound like an oxymoron because the lawns are already green, right? But consider this, in United States there are 30 million acres of lawn out there. But on that 30 million acres of lawn, we dump three million pounds of fertilizer. Commercial, non-organic fertilizer, maybe not commercial is the right word. You know what I mean.
Regular old fertilizer. And 60% of the nitrogen from those fertilizers is washed off the yard into our ground water and into our streams. That is a bad thing. So when you hear about a lake that has a whole bunch of weeds and a whole bunch of plant matter that is choking out all the fish, it is because of the all nitrogen coming out the lawns and washing into the pond which is a bad thing.
Consider also the fuel used to create this fertilizer and also the fuel used to transport this fertilizer from the plant to your local store. It is a big impact. Believe it or not that piece of grass in your front yard, that puts quite an impact on resources and our earth. I mean three million pounds fertilizer that is amazing.
So here is a couple of ways to green your lawn, let it go brown. In the summer, grass naturally goes dormant because there is a lack of water and the height of summer, things are very dry, the grass goes brown. Why does this stay green, it is because we water it so much. So you do not really need to water it, it might not look perfect but it is a grass.
When you are going to mow the lawn, consider using a push reel mower. A mower with a gas engine pollutes and actually gas mowers pollute more than modern cars do today. It quite pollution intensive to mow your lawn with a gas powered lawn mower. That is a really long sentence there.
If you are going to use a lawn mower, keep the blade sharp. On garden fork, we talked about how to sharpen your blades, it is really easy to do. And use a mulching mower, do not bag your grass and then put it in the trash can. What you are doing is you are talking compostable material a lot of nitrogen also that can help your grass, you are bagging it up and you are putting it in the land fill. Yes, I do not have a number but I put under right here that is how much we put in the land fill every year, I am sure I find it somewhere.
And the other thing that I cannot think of so, I will look at my notes, you will like this. I think that is it. Smaller lawns, but the best way to green up your lawn is actually to have less lawn. Consider tearing up some of your lawn and putting in native plants. Native plants do not need nearly as much water as your monocultured grass there. It looks great and you do not have to work as hard, you just mow it a little bit there with your push reel mower of course, you are saving on gas, you are not polluting the earth, you are not putting a lot of nitrogen into the ground water and streams and stuff, it is just a big plus and you save more time for more important pursuits which could be watching a football game. I do not know.
Anyway, you know what I mean. Less lawn, less work, more green, right? There is great quote that I have read on this website called smaller American lawns today and the gentleman’s name escapes me so I will put it right here for you but he says, “There is nothing wrong with dandelions, there is something wrong with the people” and that really kind of sums it up. A lawn is not a monoculture, it is a bunch of different grasses, a bunch of different plants and we should celebrate that, it is kind of a neat thing. It does not have to be this picture perfect, when I see lawn like that basically to me that says it is a super chemical lawn. I do not want kids on it, I do not want dogs playing on it and think about the run off of the chemicals that are used on that lawn. It is going into the water that we drink.
All right. So there we go. Eric’s sermon on smaller greener lawns, come to the greenhouse and green-house.tv. Tell us what you think, give us some ideas, you h
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