Organic Landscaping: How to Grow a Lush Lawn the Natural Way

A lush green lawn dramatically transforms your home. Besides serving as an ideal space for outdoor entertainment and recreation, lawns generate oxygen while absorbing carbon dioxide and keeps the temperature cooler in hot summers. However, maintaining conventional lawns is a costly affair. Synthetic lawn fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides are indeed more expensive than their natural alternatives. These chemicals also adversely affect the environment and pose serious hazards to wildlife, pets, and children. Considering this, why not switch to organic landscaping and lawn care?

An organic lawn – cultivated and maintained with organic materials and natural processes – can not only make you feel good but also is low-maintenance. And if you’re thinking this switch is going to be tough, well…it’s not!

Here we’ll offer you a guide on how to grow a natural lawn that’s green, safe, and healthy. But before that, let’s have a look at the key benefits that the organic lawn care can offer you, in the infographic beside.

We’ve described these benefits in detail in one of our previous posts, which you can read here.

Organic Landscaping Tips to Grow a Natural Lawn

1. Conduct a Soil Test

The first step to attaining an organic lawn is strengthening weakened soil, which requires a soil test. Testing the soil can help you find the nutrients that are lacking and think about the amendments necessary.
For example, calcium-deficient soil can be given a gypsum top-dressing, and magnesium-deficient soil might need the mineral langbeinite.
To conduct a soil test, you need to obtain soil samples from several areas of your lawn and send them to a lab for analysis. You can contact university extension offices and local nurseries to ask if they do soil tests.

2. Do Composting

Irrespective of the soil test results, add essential organic matter to your soil by spreading half-inch of compost over your lawn. Compost treatment is the basis of organic lawn care. Compost improves the structure of soil, especially in sand-heavy or clay soil. It’s rich in beneficial organisms like nematodes, fungi, algae, and bacteria that promote healthy soil.

Go for compost made from decomposed organic plant material, like what you find on the forest floor. Such compost is often available at nurseries, or you can collect waste from your own yard in a backyard bin and create your own compost.

3. Apply Organic Fertilizers

Give an occasional boost to your lawn in the growing season by applying organic fertilizers, which you can find at most garden centers. Organic fertilizers consist of natural ingredients like feather meal that offers nitrogen, bone meal that provides phosphorus, and seaweed that contains potassium to the soil.

Contrary to conventional fertilizers that give an instant, heavy dosage of synthetic nitrogen along with potassium and phosphorus, which your lawn can binge on, organic fertilizers offer a diet of nutrients, which are released slowly and are more beneficial.

Your lawn can crowd out weeds more easily when the grass is thicker. After treating your soil with fertilizer, overseed your lawn with suitable turfgrass. For homeowners at or around Bettendorf in Quad Cities, the turf experts and landscape designers at All American Turf Beauty can offer you recommendations about grass types for your Bettendorf lawns.

You need to select a seed mix that’s suitable for your climate, moisture needs, and sun/shade conditions. And ensure that it’s well-blended with the existing lawn.

Water your lawn daily until you find new grass growth.

4. Choose ‘Greener’ Grass

Overseeding your lawn, or completely replacing the grass, with organic or native grass seed can make your lawn more sustainable.

Organic lawn seeds are grown without the use of synthetic herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers. Native turf grass seeds – another green option – are the ones compatible with the average rainfall and soil conditions of their region. These grass seeds have a higher resistance to diseases and need less water compared to non-natives (like St. Augustine grass from Africa and Kentucky bluegrass from Europe).

5. Go for Organic Lawn Weed Control

Well, it should be kept in mind that making the shift to natural lawn care might not lead to overnight disappearance of weeds. You might have to deal with some weeds for one or two years at least as the grass and soil become strong enough to control weeds naturally.

An effective weed prevention method is spreading corn gluten meal during spring on your lawn. It’s an organic weed preventive. However, avoid spreading it at the time of overseeding as it prevents all seeds from germinating, including grass. Although corn gluten meal is about 65% as effective as chemical herbicides, weed infestations can still be significantly reduced with it.

The presence of weeds in lawns indicate specific soil problems. For example, crabgrass can indicate soil compaction as it usually grows in high traffic areas like along walkways or driveways. To address the root of the problem, aerate the region where it grows rather than using pesticides.

Some weeds are even helpful for your lawn. For example, clover – a common broadleaf weed – acts as a natural fertilizer factory, which converts nitrogen in the air into a form digestible by your soil.

Enjoy the Rewards of a Natural Lawn with Organic Lawn Care Service!

The organic approach can help you get a lawn that’s lush, healthy, and beautiful, as well as good to the environment! Natural lawns are more cost-effective and require less water than their chemically treated alternatives, and all you need is some patience to be successful on the path of organic landscaping. They are completely safe for your kids and pets.

All American Turf Beauty can help you get that beautiful lawn you’ve always wanted, in the organic way! Based in Iowa, our lawn care & organic landscaping company offers quality pet-friendly lawn care and natural lawn care at Bettendorf in Quad Cities and nearby areas. Being one of the top-notch organic weed control companies and natural lawn care companies in Bettendorf, we can significantly improve your lawn’s health and beauty with our modern organics landscaping strategies!