Think of all the times you’ve gone to your hardware store and spent anywhere from $20 to $150 on mulch. It is important, after all – it keeps the weeds down, helps your watering, and keeps pests away from digging into your plants. What you didn’t think about is that you can get as much mulch as you want – for free. Everyone likes free things.
Some of you mow your lawns weekly, like I do. You want it to look nice, so you bag it right away and either store it for compost (yes, you should turn your grass into compost) or get rid of it. An easy method of mulching is just to leave the grass where it lies. Don’t bag it every single time. You will be amazed at how much better your lawn will grow. Less weeds, less water evaporation – that means greener grass.
Now, you’ve gone a few weeks without bagging. That is usually how I do it, about 3 weeks without the bag, 3 with, so on and so forth. You look over to your garden and see it is being invaded with weeds. Time to go to work. You take your trusty, not so expensive garden shears and cut a big square of what I am sure is called “landscape fabric” and sow it thinly on the ground. You could use string as a visual aid in your endeavor, but fabric is so thick that the roots of your future lawn will actually find it and grow through it. Not a bad thing!
Now that you’ve purchased the landscape fabric, decided what you wanted to mark out in your lawn, and made a square of it, you are ready to start laying your grass seed. Remember, you must not allow grass to grow behind your set-out boxes. those little bits of grass come up very quick and can cause a stroll-in-the-moss feeling, so keep them confined to the walkway. You want your grass to grow and fill those spaces quickly, so spacing your grass seed out gives it a head start. It will grow unevenly as it mixes with the existing sod, but barerequotes weed growth.
Before you start laying down the turf, mix up the soil a bit with the rob until you have a crumbly, sandy, easily worked soil. Then take the soil and spread it evenly on top of the soil/compost. Use a shovel or a tiller to mix it up a bit.
Scatter the seeds with a rake, and make sure you get them covering a minimum of 4-5 inches. Thin them out as you get closer to the edge of the walkway, and continue thinning as you near the center of the walkway. The seeds will find the soil hot and continue to germinate when the weather is warm, so you won’t have to water them as often. If you do, you could easily pull them up by hand.
As your lawn grows, you may want to edge it with edging bricks if you have a border. This gives your walkway a finished look and keeps bare dirt from showing through. A brick edging is slightly different than a regular border, as the bricks and concrete will cooler the soil by 10 degrees on top of it.
For edging on the lawn itself, there are good plastic edging shears available. Use scissors to cut the plastic to a desired length, and trim around the edges for a neater look. There are also shiny plastic edging that looks good, but the price of it probably will be more than the price of the cement and brick combination.
There is one other method of doing a lawn edging, as well as a less expensive alternative. It will take a little more time, and you will use a ladder to reach the top of the mound.
MulchLawn edging is an optional alternative, and if your lawn is already established, it will be a low maintenance alternative. However, if you are going to use electric lawn mowers for the mowing part of your yard, or if you want that uniform lawn, this is the method of choice.
Permethighy is a substance that is scraped from rocks that is used as a substitute for grass. It composes most of the turfs used for lawns. Permethrowway is made by composting materials and finding the best place to layer them in your yard.
There are good uses for many of the grass clippings. Adding them to compost piles saves money and time and gives back to the soil what has been taken out. Turning the lawn in Rotary motion in the fall and mowing with the sprinkler on a regular basis will soon have the grass competing with the weeds and crabgrass.
