Archive for the ‘Lawns’ Category

Grass for LEED Certification

The Secret of a “No Mow”  Lawn BTW: This is our 100th blog post! Anyone interested in sustainability and landscaping has read about “no mow” lawns and wondered if this is the creation of some flim-flam man or a real option. One must wonder, for if indeed there were such a thing as a “no [...]

When to Lime Your Lawn (& not)

Lime and What it’s For When I first started going to gatherings of local landscapers at association meetings back in the middle ages, I would listen to those older and more knowledgeable than myself in awe of their experience and knowledge. Pretty much every fall they would expound on how lawns had to be limed [...]

Right Grass in the Right Place

Grass Seed Not all grass seeds are created equal. They may look the same, be packaged the same, and spread the same, but the varieties of grass and the quality of the seed are varied. Selecting the right seed makes a tremendous difference in the success of your lawn, and of course the selection of [...]

Soil Compaction in Lawns

Soil Compaction, Over Seeding and Aeration After a summer of kids and dogs pounding on the lawn and with temperatures dropping, fall is really the time to aerate and over seed the lawn. Aeration is a process where holes are punched into the grass and ground allowing better gas exchange, loosening the soil and helping [...]

Weedy Lawns

Coming Back to Weeds It has been one of the coolest, wettest summers on record and the weeds are loving it! By the end of July, we all had clover and dandelions all over our lawns. This month, crabgrass is making a comeback along with sedge and plantains. Before chemical weed control and fertilization, clover [...]

Think About Your Lawn This Fall

Fall Is  A Great time For Over Seeding If your lawn took a little bit of a beating this summer, as did mine, this is a great time to over seed it. Generally we all think of spring as seed time, but when it comes to lawns, fall is pretty ideal as well. First, weed [...]

Cut Out The Gas When Cutting Grass

Save Money & The Planet With Electric MowersIt is a little known fact that 5-10% of air pollution in the United States comes from lawnmowers. Though the EPA is moving to regulate the power equipment industry and mandate pollution control devices, it will take years for change in this area to take root. The surefire [...]

Real Costs of Lawn care

Our company, Greener by Design, has had an upsurge in local calls for pricing on organic lawn care. Consequently, we have a price sheet similar to what chemical lawn care companies have pricing various programs in thousands of square feet per year. We are not unique in this, there is a national organic franchise offering [...]

Converting To Organics From Chemicals:

      I converted my lawn from chemicals to organics by making it go “cold turkey”. I stopped applying pesticides and fertilizers  and  kept my fingers crossed. Anyone who has tried this knows exactly what happened, the lawn deteriorated steadily over a year and by the following spring I had a terrific lawn of crab and [...]

Greener Landcare Through Onsite Leaf Mulching

In an article on line in grounds magazine, Zac Reicher and Glenn Hardebeck Reviewed studies done at several well known universities on this topic. In reviewing these studies, leaves were mulched directly into the  turf. Formal mulching devices like the flowtron mulcher were not needed, instead, leaves  were mulched with a mulching mower on top [...]