Cut Down on Runaround: Leave the Clippings

Back in the old days--when the Earth was young and fresh and there were infinite numbers of places to site new landfills when the old ones filled up--grass clippings got bagged up and set out with the garbage. The garbage collector would scoop them up and tip them into the landfill, where they are probably still perfectly preserved.

Then along came NIMBY-ism, environmental awareness and the garbage barge. Landfill fees became prohibitively expensive once no one would allow new landfills to be built. Municipalities found it less expensive to collect people’s grass clippings separately from regular garbage, compost them and then use the compost or sell it around town. And that’s what many places do these days. It’s called municipal composting.

Municipal composting is an improvement over treating grass clippings as garbage. But it isn’t exactly resource-efficient.

Think about it for a moment: You bag it all up and haul it out to the curb. Brawny workers employed by the city drive expensive, gas-guzzling, air-polluting trucks to carry your grass clippings to a large field on the edge of town where other brawny workers rake and toss and screen them for a few weeks. Then the brawny workers bag them, drive them back around town to various garden centers. Meanwhile, other city employees, not necessarily brawny, rack their brains trying to think up ways to entice you to buy the bags of your composted grass clippings, drive them home in your car, haul them back into the yard and spread them on your garden.

Some conscientious people compost clippings at home in a compost bin, which saves city employees, brawny and otherwise, all that trouble. But home composting is not for everyone.

*

Could there be a better way? Yes, say lawn care professionals, energy experts, and city managers. They offer you this valuable tip for dealing with grass clippings:

Leave ‘em on the lawn.

Yes, it is rather shocking. You see, it turns out that grass clippings are good for your lawn. They do not contribute to thatch, as once thought. In fact, grass clippings, it seems, are nature’s lawn fertilizer.

Here is what experts recommend:

Mow your lawn when it is dry, and set your mower blades so that they cut no more than one-third of the grass blade. If the resulting grass clippings are more than one inch long, mow over them again. Or, if you have a power mower, buy a mulching blade for it. This will chop the clippings up finely the first time.

When you cut the lawn, cross-cut it. That is, mow back and forth north to south, then go over it again east to west. This will chop the grass finely and disperse it more or less evenly.

These fine clippings--85% water themselves--do two good things for your lawn. They keep it moist, which means you need to water less often.

And they fertilize the lawn, which means you need to fertilize less frequently. The clippings won’t burn the grass, the way many chemical fertilizers can, and they won’t run off and contribute to water pollution, either.

This is an environmentally sensitive recommendation that is not uncomfortable, laborious or expensive. It is easy and free.