Organic Lawn Care For the Cheap and Lazy

Lawn care in a nutshell: Must do: Set your mower as high as it will go (3 to 4 inches). Water only when your grass shows signs of drought stress and then water deeply (put a cup in your sprinkler zone and make sure it gets at least an inch of water). Optional: Fertilize with an organic fertilizer in the fall and spring. I recommend the Ringer brand. Have the pH of your soil professionally tested. Add lime if it is below 6.0 and gardener's sulfur if it is above 7.0. How much top soil do you have? See how deep a shovel will go into the soil. How deep can you dig a hole in one minute? Four inches of topsoil will make for an okay lawn. Eight or more inches of topsoil will make for a great lawn. Now for the verbose details on lawn care:

A little knowledge makes it so damn near anything can qualify for the "cheap and lazy" label. Including lawn care. Organic is just a bonus.

The key to the lawn care game is competition. You want to make things favorable for the grass and unfavorable for the weeds so the grass will choke out the weeds. Naturally.

MYTH: "If I mow short, it will be longer until I have to mow again." False! Wrong! (SLAP! SLAP! SLAP!) Your grass needs grass blades to do photosynthesis (convert sunshine into sugar) to feed the roots. When you whack the blades off, the grass has to RACE to make more blades to make sugar. It then grows amazingly fast. This fast growth uses up a lot of the grass's stored sugar, and weakens the plant. It is now vulnerable to disease and pests! Tall grass is healthier and can use the extra sugar to make rhizomes (more grass plants) thus thickening the turf. Have you ever noticed that short grass in the summer is always riddled with dead brown patches?

If you have a serious weed infestation, consider mowing twice as frequently as you normally do. The sensitive growing point for grass is near the soil. The sensitive growing point for most weeds is near the top of the plant. So when you mow, it's as if you are giving your grass a haircut and cutting the heads off of the weeds.

Finally, when mowing, be sure to leave the clippings on the lawn. It adds organic matter and nutrients back into the soil. If you don't leave the clippings, your soil will begin to look more like "dirt" than soil. Soon it will be a form of cement that nothing will grow in and you will have the world's most pitiful lawn. Some people are concerned about "clumping" - that only happens when you mow too short or when you don't mow often enough.

Mowing higher gives the following perks:

Check out this pic. Someone started to mow and then I convinced them, as an experiment, to set their mower higher. This pic was taken about six days later as summer is setting in. Can you see the difference?

My lawn care mower of choice? The "Scott's Classic" manual mower. When you mow high, it doesn't take much effort to mow. It is easier with a manual than a heavy, noisy, stinky gas mower. The Scott's Classic is the only manual mower that I know of that can mow three inches. The others top out at 2.5 inches or less. It's at amazon.com.

Update!

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Organic Lawn Care For the Cheap and Lazy