7 Steps To Follow For Organic Lawn Care

Author: Saiqa Najeeb
Last Updated On: July 25, 2023

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Many individuals believe that they must cover their grass with herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides in order to have a beautiful lawn. That is a fallacy, of course. Growing a beautiful lawn organically is feasible and even simple.

However, implementing an organic lawn-care program demands a change in mindset. The key is to imagine your lawn as a combination garden of grass and other tolerant, low-growing plants. Your ability to succeed in this type of gardening depends on how well you build the groundwork by preparing the soil, picking the correct grass types, and providing the plants with what they require.

This guide covers a step-by-step process of how to do organic lawn care the right way!

Mowing

The lawnmower is the most crucial piece of turf maintenance equipment in organic lawn care. When done correctly, mowing not only reduces the size of the grass but also encourages thicker growth. Additionally, it can feed the lawn while reducing the weed population. The optimal height varies depending on the type of grass.

Mow when the grass is no more than 50% higher than its ideal height for the greatest results. For instance, if the height of your grass should reach 3 inches, cut it when it reaches 41 and a half inches. In general, cut the grass when it is actively growing at the bottom end of the range and when it is stressed or growing slowly at the top end of the range.

Here’s how to use your mower to obtain the greatest cut possible:

Ensure that the blade is sharp (do this at least twice each season).
To prevent soil compaction, switch up the direction you mow once every month.
When the grass is moist, avoid mowing.
With each pass, overlap by roughly one-third of the mower deck’s width.
After each cutting, clean the mower off the grass.

Watering

People put a lot of time, energy, and money into organic lawn care. That endeavor is ineffective in many areas of the nation since the lawn can survive the summer without any additional water.

Many varieties of turfgrass go dormant to survive dry spells. They go brown and stop developing. However, the grass comes to life again when the rains come again. Raising an organic lawn occasionally involves enduring an unpleasant lawn for a period rather than wasting valuable water resources. If you decide to irrigate your grass, be sure to do it gently and deeply.

the following advice:

Water for long enough to make the soil 6 to 12 inches deep with moisture. The type of soil under the lawn and the sprinkler both affect how long it takes to accomplish this goal. It causes more harm than good to stand with a hose in hand on the front lawn in the evening.
Apply water gradually enough to prevent puddles and runoff from your lawn. If your soil is clay, look for a sprinkler with a modest flow rate of less than 14 inches of water per hour. You might need to cycle your watering on such heavy soil by turning the water on for 15 minutes, turning it off for 15, and then turning it back on.

In general, the most consistent coverage and area are provided by high-quality oscillating and impulse sprinklers. Early in the morning, when temperatures are cooler, is the ideal time to water your lawn. Compared to midday, you’ll lose less water to evaporation, and the grass blades will dry out quickly, reducing disease issues.

Feeding the lawn

Since grass grows practically continually, it needs a constant supply of nitrogen, which it requires in greater amounts than any other nutrient for good growth. Grass clippings naturally contain some natural fertilizer, but you may also feed your lawn with a variety of different organic elements. Nitrogen, a component of natural fertilizers, requires a little assistance from soil microbes in order for it to become available to plants because it doesn’t break down easily in water.

That’s great. Because the nitrogen is released gradually, the lawn develops gradually and steadily. On the other hand, synthetic chemical lawn fertilizers have a tendency to release large amounts of nitrogen all at once, which causes the grass to grow quickly at first and increases your mowing duties. Chemical lawn fertilizers are one of the main suppliers of water as well.

Figuring out how much fertilizer you need

The amount of nitrogen your grass requires may be lower than you believe. The steps listed below can be used to calculate how much nitrogen to apply:

Determine the precise nitrogen requirements for the variety of grass in your lawn.

One to three pounds of nitrogen per 1,000 square feet per year are required by cool-season fescue.
Bent grasses like 2 to 6 pounds, while perennial ryegrass and Kentucky bluegrass require 2 to 3 pounds each.
The nitrogen requirements of warm-season grasses like buffalo and blue grama are only one-half to one pound, one to three pounds for Bermuda and carpet grasses, two to three pounds for Bahia, centipede, and zoysia grasses, and three to six pounds for St. Augustine grass.
Dig up a sample of your lawn’s grass and take it to your neighborhood extension office or a full-service nursery for identification if you are unsure of the sort of grass that predominates there. Alternately, start with a safe maintenance dose of 1 pound of real nitrogen per 1,000 square feet applied twice a year.

Calculate the fertilizer’s real nitrogen content in percentages.
Enter those figures into the formula below to find the precise quantity of fertilizer your grass needs: 325 Pounds of nitrogen that grass requires per year ÷ percentage of nitrogen in the fertilizer = pounds of fertilizer required per year per 1,000 square feet.

Subtract the number of applications you intend to make from the pounds of fertilizer needed annually. To determine the amount needed for each application, divide the response from Step 3 by 2, for instance, if you intend to fertilize your lawn twice. You already add the equivalent of a pound to the environment just by letting the grass clippings decompose on the lawn.

When calculating your fertilizer needs, take this into account. Instead of valuing their property in square feet, many homeowners do it in terms of acres. 10,000 square feet about equates to a 1/4-acre lot. To get the general area of your lawn, deduct the square footage of nonlawn areas

Loosening the soil

Grass puts a lot of stress on the earth beneath it. You frequently run a large mower over it, step on it, walk and run over it, and occasionally even drive over it. The compaction that follows hinders the growth of the grass. Aeration is a specialized method to treat grass compaction and revitalize the soil because you cannot turn and condition the soil for a lawn every year.

Simply put, aeration is the process of making holes in the turf. When done properly, it eliminates cores of compacted soil, allowing for the penetration of air, water, and nutrients. You may aerate by hand on tiny lawns. A hand aerator that removes dirt cores with the power of your foot can be purchased for less than $20.

You can rent a power aerator from the nearby tool rental business for huge lawns. Its tines dig into the turf, removing dirt cores as it moves across the lawn like a lawnmower. The next step is to break up the cores with either tool and let them disintegrate on the surface of the lawn, or if you find the trash too unsightly, rake it up and add it to the compost pile. Aerate your lawn once a year if it gets a lot of use, just like they do at the baseball pitch.

Top-dressing

Most lawn owners overlook top-dressing, which is just putting a thin layer of organic materials over the lawn and is a crucial organic lawn-care procedure. No, it isn’t fertilizing in the traditional sense, but depending on the material used, it can enhance the soil and add nutrients.

Top-dressing is essential because you can only amend the soil from the top down—you can’t dig up the grass every year. Top dressing is an easy procedure. Spread a very thin layer of organic materials (approximately 14 inch deep) over the grass in the autumn. Use topsoil, compost that has been chopped up, or any other organic material. With the aid of earthworms and other creatures, the substance penetrates the sod and changes the soil’s texture.

Weeding

Growing a strong, dense sod is the most effective technique to combat weeds in organic lawn care. It is harder for weeds to establish themselves when the grass is adequately fertilized, watered, and mowed. In fact, proper mowing by itself can aid in weed control for some species. According to university research, mowing a bluegrass lawn at a height of 2 inches dramatically reduces the number of crabgrass in a lawn. By giving your lawn a higher cut, you can encourage the grass to outgrow creeping charlie and other low-growing weeds.

You can also employ good old-fashioned labor. Pull or cut out weeds that you locate in your grass. Pulling dandelions, plantains and other lawn weeds is surprisingly quick and simple when using long-handled specialty weeding equipment for the lawn like the Hound Dog Weeder and the Speedy Weeder.

Recent developments in natural herbicides provide organic lawn owners with a nice break. An extremely powerful natural lawn herbicide is maize gluten meal. It effectively kills dandelion, creeping bentgrass, sprouting plantains, and many other weed seeds as a pre-emergent. Before weeds start to emerge in the spring, spread 25 pounds per 1,250 square feet. However, don’t use it on freshly sown lawns.

Managing pests

Although a long list of insects may chow down on the grass, only a few pests really do serious damage to turfgrass, and organic treatments exist for all of them. The most notorious and damaging turf pest is the grub, which is an immature beetle that lives in the soil. Grubs, especially the larvae of Japanese beetles, can do a number on turf. They feast on grassroots and kill the plants in the process. Pull up a patch of sod, and if you see a dozen grubs per square foot, it’s time to take action.

Here are two biological controls for grubs:

Milky spore disease: Grubs are infected and killed by a bacteria called milky spore disease. When the grubs are active, apply at a rate of 4 ounces per 1,000 square feet. It functions best in regions where the soil temperature is consistently over 70°F for several months out of the year.
Beneficial nematodes: Spray these microscopic worms onto the soil, and they begin killing grubs within 48 hours and continue their grub-killing duty for months. In the process, they also eliminate cutworms and armyworms.

Numerous novel grass varieties have been produced as a result of intensive turfgrass breeding that genuinely resists harm by armyworms, cutworms, billbugs, green bugs, and sob webworms. Look for the perennial varieties Premier, All-Star, Cowboy, Prelude, Sunrise, Pennant, Citation II, and Repell as well as the tall-fescue variety Apache.

There you go!

Organic lawn care is the path to a healthier, more sustainable environment. By eliminating chemicals and embracing natural alternatives, we can create vibrant, thriving lawns that benefit us and the planet.

All the steps outlined in the blog can come in handy for you to take care of your organic lawn. So, let’s contribute to sustainability by following organic practices for lawn care.