Lawn Mower Rules

Welcome to LAWN RULES.

What Should You Do With Your Grass Clippings?

There are two schools of thought on the subject of this problem - none of which generally is definite. Some people say leave the cuttings on the lawn after you mow. This not just saves time and effort, but the clippings break down instantly and add crucial vitamins and minerals directly into the soil, something which can be avoided if proper lawn mower reviews and resources are looked into at the start.

In reality, recycling grass clippings has not too long ago adopted a routine of its own. Proponents refer to this practice “grass-cycling” and advocate that leaving those clippings wherever they rest saves time, landfill space and nourishes the soil. The Professional Lawn Care Association says that around 20% of all waste that goes into a landfill is landscape trash and about half of that is only grass clippings. With backyard waste prohibitions in place in many parts of the country, “grass-cycling” provides you with an alternative, and together improve the health and beauty of your lawn.

Grass clippings are 85% water, decompose quickly, and return nourishment to the land with no thatch build up. They also return 20 percent of their own nitrogen to the ground to feed the lawn's root system. And grass-cycling is often applied year-round with most mowers.

On the other side, others state that leaving clippings in your yard is not only unattractive, but it can easily cause damage to your lawn too. Leaving grass clippings on the lawn gets to be a dilemma only when they are far too thick. If you mow the lawn before it gets excessively high, the volume of the grass clippings aren't going to be enough to warrant raking. When cut grass lies in big clumps, it might be stopping the grass beneath it from finding the sunlight and fluids which it needs to grow. This may leave behind unattractive brown spots of dead grass.

A great way to obviate being required to rake grass cuttings is to mow by way of a mulching lawn mower. Once you have a mulching mower, the cuttings are accumulated in a container and may be used in rich compost heaps for fertilization. Working with mulching mowers can not just decrease your garden up keep, but it will also make your grass greener. If not, you may end up either raking or bagging the grass clippings, which in turn mean dumping those grass clippings or trying to recycle them, all of which means extra work.

The end result is if you are mowing regularly and you don’t leave behind clumps of cuttings, it will not cause any problems leaving those cuttings right where they are.