AS WE MOVE into the summer season, relaxing outside in our yard, sipping a drink or swinging in the hammock becomes a pastime.
We Americans just love being in our yard looking out over the lawn.
The perfect American lawn is an unattainable myth we pursue due to the societal mindset of our particular culture. And the very nature of this unrealistic pursuit, a low, just cut, trimmed and neat lawn actually causes the grass to look and grow poorly!
Last week, I concluded (demanded) that if you are to have any chance at achieving a nice yard, then you must first mow at a proper height, which is 2¾ inches high.
When grass is not stressed by being repetitively butchered down, then as a plant it is a rather aggressive creature.
Turf grass will grow very lush and thick, reproducing quickly by asexual means. Because mowing eliminates all the flower and seed heads, germination is not an option of reproduction for your lawn.
But with all that nutrient available and no flower heads to develop, reproductive energy and food is switched over to new root and shoot production.
A massive balanced web above and below the ground develops a healthy lawn. Provided however, that said nutrient is abundant, consistent and available.
Therein lies the rub.
We Americans, as a whole, really adore our chemical lawn fertilizers — God bless Weed-n-Feed. Here on the Olympic Peninsula, lawns must have abundant, readily available nutrient nearly year-round.
Without it, you cannot succeed. Our weather is perfectly mild, ideal for grass — never too cold to force dormancy, never too hot to stress it out — so it just grows and grows and grows.
When you mow properly, it is a method of pruning, stimulating new blade development.
Plus, being cut higher and allowing the grass to grow an inch or so before cutting it again, a now ever-healthier lawn is producing even more new roots and shoots. All this growth activity needs nutrients — lots of nutrients.
Typically lawn fertilizers have been developed to instantly, upon first watering, release massive amounts of nutrients, especially nitrates and phosphates, into the environment.
This fertilizer is just so highly soluble that it leaches down into the aquifers (if you have a well, it goes into your tap water)!
It will also be running off into the ditch, over to the creek and into the Strait and Sound, where all sorts of algae just love your smorgasbord and suck up all the oxygen during the feast.
But let’s say you aren’t that concerned about potable water sources or trivial matters like parts per million of dissolved oxygen in our local bodies of water.
Let’s say you are only concerned about the fertility of your soil.
You ought to be concerned for soil fertility since it is an important cornerstone to a healthy lawn.
Natural, healthy, fertile soil totally depends on a living soil structure.
Your soil, in order to be a complete platform for plant growth, needs a plethora of organisms from worms and grubs all the way down through to bacterium, mold and fungi.
When Weed-n-Feed or perfect-builder urea are applied, they, in reality, kill off a large population of life in the soil due to quick release nutrient dumps or chemical herbicides and pesticides.
The remaining soil, now just dirt, is sterile, totally dependent on its next fix of turf builder — your yard is now a crank addict.
Microbes, all of those fungi and bacteria, are needed as a catalyst for nutrient availability. It is their interactions of feeding, breeding, dying and excrement that breaks down and forms the slurry of nutrients that the plants hair roots take up as foods.
If your fertilizers amount of release destroys this web of life, then your fertility is ruined.
Organic fertilizers have many advantages for you to consider.
They release slowly and uniformly in amounts beneficial to complex soil, as well as healthy and long-term plant growth.
They persist longer in the soil, unlike highly-soluble fertilizers that release very quickly and leech or run off rapidly.
Organic fertilizers sustain and promote soil, which dramatically increases its ability to stave off or manage pestilence without the use of destructive chemical compounds.
Organic fertilizers do not pollute in the extremely detrimental ways that commercial, urea salt-based lawn fertilizers do.
Next week, we will discuss non-chemical, biological, organic Weed-n-Feed options as we continue on our journey to a healthy lawn.
Be mentally prepared to even further question and challenge some of your long-held beliefs about your yard and the grass.
But please, do stay well all!
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Andrew May is a freelance writer and ornamental horticulturist who dreams of having Clallam and Jefferson counties nationally recognized as “Flower Peninsula USA.” Send him questions c/o Peninsula Daily News, P.O. Box 1330, Port Angeles, WA 98362, or email news@peninsuladailynews.com (subject line: Andrew May).
