Create a Stronger, Healthier Lawn With Grass Clippings

If you’ve been taking your lawn mower clippings to the green waste section of your local dump, you have been throwing away a valuable resource you can use for improving your grass. Use these tips from All Year Round Turf for the best ways to use lawn clippings to feed your grass.   

The Problem with Lawn Fertilizers

Organic fertilisers can help build healthy, lush green grass, but many won’t supply all the nutrients your lawn needs. Nitrogen is essential for growth, but fertilisers often don’t have enough.

When you recycle your lawn clippings and use a good-quality fertiliser, you create the perfect recipe for delivering all the nutrients your grass needs to thrive.

How to Add Lawn Clippings to Your Lawn

You may think that leaving the catcher off is a great way to recycle lawn clippings back onto your lawn. However, you may be faced with unsightly grass clumps across your property that take a while to break down.

Mulching lawn mowers feed the grass clippings back through the blades a second time, so they are smaller and will drop through to soil level rather than sit on top of the lawn. These mowers can save you a lot of work, but you need to be more regular with your lawn mowing because they are less efficient with long grass.

Why You Need to Remove Long Grass Clippings

If you leave grass clippings across your lawn after mowing, you are creating a few problems for yourself. Grass sitting on top of the yard will take a long time to break down, and while it’s doing so, the grass underneath is blocked from sunlight and moisture.

Even when it does break down, it can sink to the thatch layer of the lawn and prevent water from soaking into the soil. You will lose a lot of moisture to evaporation and will need to water more often to keep your grass green.

Fast Growing Lawn Tips

You probably don’t want to spend every weekend mulch mowing if you have a fast growing grass variety. In this case, you can alternate grass catching with mulching for every third or fourth mow. You don’t have to waste the nutrients when catching grass because you can always throw your grass clippings into the compost for later use in the garden.

A bonus tip from All Year Round Turf for a perfect lawn is to not mulch your grass clippings for at least three or four mows after adding pesticides or herbicides. Doing this could cause the chemicals to build up to unhealthy levels and create more problems than they solve. It’s also a good idea to bin the clippings rather than put them in the compost.