I have been looking around for organic lawn care advice, and stumbled across Organic Lawn Care For the Cheap and Lazy. Being both cheap and lazy the advice presented here is pretty much perfect for me. I want to try to keep an organic lawn for a couple of reasons.

  1. Chemicals are expensive;
  2. Chemicals are difficult to apply (although chemical burns look like mini crop circles);
  3. My lawn top soil is pretty health; and
  4. most importantly because I am not terribly fond of poisoning myself.

The website sets out a couple of lazy rules to an organic lawn.

    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? If you have less than four inches of soil, you must add topsoil.

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So far I seem to be doing pretty well with the “in a nutshell rules”.

I have no problem setting my lawn mower to its highest setting; unfortunately I don’t have a working lawn mower yet. My Father-In-Law has donated a beautiful TORO that can be set to mow at 4-inches, unfortunately it hasn’t run in the last four years. This weekend I used the weed-whacker left over from the last tenants to keep the front lawn under control. Hopefully we will get the lawnmower to the small engine repair shop in Vienna soon (three hours of tinkering with it didn’t do much good).

So far we have had so much rain that it hasn’t been necessary to water the grass seedlings much less the whole lawn, but again I have no problem watering the lawn less often, and spending more time between going outside and repositioning the sprinkler.