By Reporter Joseph Toth
Washington Micro Bank BBS
Submitted 11-01-08
Are you part of a annual tradition of yard work that involves raking and bagging the leaves on your lawn. If you are, … you are doing a lot more work than you have to be doing, and you may be wasting your local resources for disposing of yard waste such as leaves. It costs your municipality money to put collection trucks out on leaf routes every year. The fact is annual yard waste also wastes a lot of space at landfills too.
It is possible to get away from this routine, which will reduce the burden on your local municipal resources and give you free lawn fertilizer without the use of bagged lawn chemical fertilizers.
First of all to do this you need a mulching mower with a sharp blade. A mower with a discharge is not a option. This means no side or rear discharge of the clippings at all. The mower deck has to be sealed all the way around (a true mulching mower).
The only time you will need a rake is before you do the lawn. Use the rake to get all the leaves from your sidewalks and other area’s, to the lawn area. Now, use the mulching mower to start mowing the lawn as you mow over the leaves. Start on the outer perimeter working your way toward the center of the lawn using a circular pattern around your yard as the circles get smaller with each pass.
What the mulching mower will do is shred the leaves into tiny pieces that will fall between the blades of grass and lay on the ground to rot away on the earth of your lawn giving you a natural fertilizer.
You may ask “will the leaves be visible after doing this?”. The answer is yes. It will take time for the leaf fragments to fall into the lawn bed, usually a day or two. Doing this the last few times of the year that you use your mower will really help your lawn’s health.
Once you’re done dealing with the leaves, and the snow season starts, … this is where mother nature really works it’s magic. During the coarse of the winter, you’re lawn is under a blanket of snow that keeps changing the surface of the lawn under the snow. Snow melts and refreezes numerous times on your lawn each winter. This process helps the decomposition of your shredded leaves so by the time spring comes around, you shouldn’t see anything left of them.
During the summer you want to use a mulching mower for your routine lawn mowings too. On 80 or 90 degree days or nights do you really want to wrestle with lawn bags and disposing of your lawn clippings when you could be doing something else? Of coarse not. Your lawn clippings in the summer, do the same things the leaves did in the fall. It feeds your lawn naturally.
Ideally, you don’t want to cut your lawn to short, or ‘scalp it’ as they say. Don’t set the wheels of your mower to low because this is the leading reason for having a dried out lawn bed (the lawn bed is the earth under your lawn). The length of your lawn should be at least as tall as your barefoot ankles. Doing this will help protect your lawn bed from drying out by the sun. The earth under your lawn will stay cooler and moist which helps the health of the lawn and your lawn will hang onto moisture a lot longer after each watering. Lawns cut to short are more likely to develop brown spots in summer weather because the wind and sunlight don‘t have to work as hard to dry out the lawn bed. This is another benefit of a mulching mower. Clippings laying on the lawn bed help block the soil from sunlight and wind. It also helps keep moisture at the soil level of your lawn as it also serves as the natural plant food your lawn needs.
