About Organic Lawn Improvements

Composting

• Gardeners who try to organically maintain their lawns rely heavily on composting because the compost material releases nutrients slowly into the soil and also helps gardeners develop stronger soil structure. The humus produced by composting can hold water better than sandy soil and improves drainage in clay soils. Also, composting reduces the amount of fertilizer that the lawn needs, which takes strain off of the diminishing supplies of phosphorus. Compost will help lower the soil pH if the soil becomes too alkaline. Gardeners can also use the liquid left behind from the compost as compost tea, which they can spray on the yard. Also, composting helps reintroduce more beneficial microorganisms into the soil, which help with tasks such as fixing nitrogen.

Testing

• When using organic methods to care for yards, homeowners must use pH tests more often and should send soil samples to laboratories at university extensions or municipalities, since organic gardening methods have unpredictable results if homeowners never know for sure how many nutrients will break down and enter into the soil. Plants could end up with too many or too few nutrients. Homeowners should perform their soil tests annually.

Pest Control

• Some pests, such as white grubs, attack lawns. Instead of using pesticides that can increase the toxicity of the lawn, organic pest control relies on other insects to fight these pests, such as parasitic nematodes and milky spore disease. These organisms will attack the pests and will reproduce on their own, so homeowners will not have to reapply the natural pesticides unless the grubs come back, though pests are not killed instantaneously.

Weeds

• To fight weeds, lawn owners can use tilling to kill the weeds off. Tilling is entirely organic, though physically removing the weeds from the lawn is more labor intensive. Boiling water serves as another organic way to eliminate weeds, though you can accidentally kill your grass with this method. But the boiling water leaves behind no residual effects.

Earthworms

• Some homeowners try to introduce earthworms into their lawns to improve the lawn aeration, which is the ability of the lawn to let air pass through the soil, helping plants take up nutrients.. Earthworms can also increase the nutrient availability in the soil by consuming, digesting and excreting various nutrients found in the soil. Gardeners also use earthworms to speed along the composting process both by improving aeration and digesting the composting material.