Basic Steps for a Safe and Healthy Lawn: A Natural Lawn Care Primer
by Rachel Rosenberg
Is it possible to have a lawn that looks good without using harmful herbicides and insecticides that can harm your family’s health and the environment? The answer, happily, is yes. Unlike conventional lawn care, which relies on chemical fertilizers and pesticides to artificially green your lawn, Natural Lawn Care focuses on restoring balance to the soil system—the microbes, organic matter, soil structure and nutrients that make a lawn healthy. Over time, your lawn will become naturally healthy, green and beautiful, with the added bonus that it will require less watering, fertilizing and mowing, saving you time and money.
It’s not complicated, but natural lawn care is a different way of thinking about how we take care of our lawns. Natural Lawn Care is not ‘no care’. Rather, it is an easy to follow system of taking care of your lawn without the chemicals and inorganic fertilizers that are heavily marketed each growing season.
There are a few basic practices at the center of a natural lawn care system. If you are making the switch from conventional lawn care, keep in mind that it will take at least two growing seasons to transition your soil back to health. Providing your soil with good food and nutrition will help make this transition easier.
Five practices for a healthy lawn:
1)Mow High: Keep your mower blades sharp and cut to 3 inches. Tell your lawn care provider to keep their lawnmower deck high. Don’t mow your lawn if it doesn’t need it!
2)Water deeply but infrequently: Water long and deep early in the morning or at dusk. Watering at night promotes disease. Make sure your lawn gets at least one inch of water per week. Conserve by not overwatering your lawn.
3)Fertilize correctly with organic fertilizers: Inorganic chemical fertilizers run off easily into our watershed and end up polluting our rivers and lakes. Organic fertilizers are stored in the soil and use only when needed.
4)Use hand tools to reduce your weed populations: Stop spreading herbicides all over your lawn! It’s so much easier to reduce your weed population by pulling by hand, spot spraying if absolutely necessary or using specialized tools.
5)Reseed at least twice a year: Fall and spring are the best times for reseeding.

Remember that lawn care chemicals don’t just stay put on the lawns. Kids and pets track them into our homes and they wash into our waterways where they can impact our health and our environment.
At Safer Pest Control Project we have dozens of resources for the homeowner interested in learning more about natural lawn care. Please go to www.spcpweb.org to check them out.
Have a great spring!

DON’T put down a pre-emergent (preventative) weed control in April.
DON’T use inorganic fertilizers.
DON’T have your lawn mowed and ‘cleaned up’ when it’s not needed.

DO put down an organic fertilizer according to label directions in mid-April.
DO seed and fill in thin or bare areas in your yard. Getting a thick turf is your key to a healthy turf. Choose seeds that will be naturally drought resistance and sturdy for our climate.
DO wait until the grass is thick and almost tipping over before the first mowing of the season. This will promote really strong early root growth.
For more tips on the rest of the year, check out the NLC Calendar Fact Sheet on SPCP’s website, spcpweb.org/yards

Rachel Rosenberg is a resident of Skokie and Executive Director of Safer Pest Control Project (spcpweb.org), a non profit organization dedicated to reducing pesticide use in Illinois. Safer Pest Control Project will be at the upcoming Spring Greening Event in Skokie on April 10th and Rachel will be speaking at 2:00 p.m. on Natural Lawn Care. In addition, she will be speaking on Natural Lawn Care at the Skokie Public Library on Saturday, April 30th at 2 p.m.