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July 31, 2003
A green carpet welcome
Aamir Kabir offers advice on maintaining a healthy and lush lawn
A well kept lawn came be the best welcome one can have. Even the proverbial red carpet cannot be more inviting than the green carpet provided by a neat, clean and healthy lawn around your front doorstep.
It serves as a welcome mat for you, your family and your guests. It makes for a pleasant sight for passersby. It beautifies your grounds, adds to the appeal and to the value of your home.
Just as a trim haircut improves the appearance of a man, your well-kept lawn can make your home more pleasing to look at. And just as tousled, unkempt hair and a stubby, uneven beard will make a well dressed person look sloppy, similarly even the most luxurious homes lose some of their charm if the lawn is uneven and discolored, blemished by ugly weeds, tarnished by unsightly bare spots and otherwise untidy and neglected.
The secrets behind a beautiful lawn are simple and fundamental: use reasonably good soil, nourish it adequately with plant food, sow proper seed, water it in the right way and keep the grass well mowed.
Many people hesitate to spend too much money on the exterior of their home and prefer to decorate the interior. Perhaps they don’t remember that more folks see the outside than they do the inside.
Experts suggest that 10 to 30 per cent of the cost of a new home should be spent on gardening and landscaping. Good landscaping can cut down your fuel bill in the winter and makes your home cooler in the summer.
A properly located shade tree can reduce summer room temperatures by as much as 20 degrees. The trees not only eliminate the “attic furnace” but will cut your fuel bill by as much as 30 per cent by cutting as a windbreak. To heat an ordinary house it takes twice as much fuel at a temperature of 32 degrees and a wind of 12 miles per hour as it does for the same temperature and a wind of three miles per hour.
To grow a good lawn, meaning one with healthy and vigorous grass, you need reasonably good soil. Grass seed is not very hard to please. It will grow in almost any soil but will grow at its best in soil, which is neither too loose nor too tight. In most cases you can use the existing soil which is a lot cheaper than if you import costly topsoil.
In fact, tests show that the cost of building up the present soil is only one third that of building top soil. The only time you should buy extra soil is when you want to bring the lawn up to a proper grade or when the existing soil is nothing but pure gumbo, too poor to serve as a good seed bed for grass.
What you just need to do is spread 25 to 30 kilograms of balanced fertilizer evenly over each 1000 square feet of lawn, or if you use organic manure or compost spread it two to three cubic feet over each 1000 square feet area and mix it with the soil.
Balance fertilizer means it should contain all three of the chemical substances your lawn will need i.e., Nitrogen (which gives a lawn its rich dark green color and also promotes leaf and stem growth), Phosphorus (which stimulates root growth and helps plants make a fast start) and Potassium (which helps plants resist diseases and encourages a luxuriant condition).
These three chemical substances are contained in many kinds of organic as well as inorganic plant foods in varying quantities. Organic foods are those that are made up of — once live matter — such as rotting lawn clippings or leaf mold or rotting manure. Inorganic foods are those processed through a chemical process in a laboratory.
You can buy inorganic plant food at stores that sell seed. One such plant food is 5-10-5, which means it contains five per cent nitrogen, ten per cent phosphorous and five per cent potassium in a 100 pound bag.
Use 25 to 40 pounds. of this food per 1000 square feet of established lawns and 40 to 50 pounds. for new lawns for the same area.
Water the essence of life is as vital for a garden as it is for our life. Maybe this will surprise you, but few gardening topics are as controversial as how to water a lawn. And all the prevailing opinions on the subject, if you will forgive the pun, hold a lot of water.
The one thing on which there is a general agreement is that a newly planted lawn should be watered generously, and often from the time of seeding through the sprouting and growing of the new grass.
Frequent watering of the newly seeded grass will encourage fast growth. Watering the soil generously once a week after the seedlings are up will encourage them to grow deep roots which, in turn, will enable them to better withstand later droughts.
For well-established lawns watering lightly and often can keep them cool, lush, rich and sparkling with greenness. But remember to keep watering with unfailing regularity, usually daily, and never allow the soil to completely dry.
Clipping the grass, if done the right way, will strengthen it and help make your lawn handsome and healthy. In hot weather grass should never be cut shorter than 1.5 to 2.5 inches. Because during the warm season short grass allows the sun and wind to dry the soil quickly, which results in weakening of the roots.
On the other hand if you allow your grass to grow to a height where clippings measure more than our inches, its better to cut them. Otherwise clippings of that length might bunch together and cover the lawn like a mat causing plant diseases common in grass.
It is usually seen that grass clippings are considered a waste and thrown outside the lawn. It should be well noted that these grass clippings contain nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium; the same three substances mentioned earlier which are required for building up the soil, to make it an ideal host for a lawn.
If these clippings are raked and removed the soil must eventually be fed or fertilized to replace the loss of these vital substances. A more practical way is to leave the clippings in the garden as they fall. They will decompose and turn into a perfect soil conditioner re-supplying the soil with valuable chemicals.
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