Lawn mowing sounds like a simple enough thing. You just gasoline up the mower, yank the cord, walk or ride around in rectangles for awhile, and the deed is done. Oh, but the lawn connoisseur understands there’s a lot more to it as compared to that. How you mow, when you mow and even what you use the clippings can make a massive difference in how your lawn performs.
Here are some tips on how to mow your lawn.
In fact, mowing the lawn is probably the most underrated and overlooked part of good lawn care.
It starts with lawn height
The biggest mowing miscue the normal homeowner makes is cutting grass too short. Some people downright scalp the lawn, while using putting-green look as the ideal model. That’s a bad idea culturally for several reasons:
It increases moisture as well as nutrition demands as the grass tries to fight back from close to total decapitation.
It reduces the amount of chlorophyll open to manufacture energy to gas the grass roots. (Lengthier blades mean more chlorophyll per grass plant and consequently a lot more vigorous grass.)
It allows the soil to dry faster, which increases the side effects of drought.
And, weeds germinate better and get off to a faster start when taller grass blades aren’t shade providing them out.
What truly makes a mown lawn look good will be the evenness of the cut — not the height. Most people are just as satisfied with a 3-inch-tall evenly cut garden as a 1-inch-tall evenly cut yard.
A bad cut can dehydrate your lawn and advertise weed growth
The theory that slicing short lengthens the time among cuts also doesn’t hold up. Grass actually grows quicker after it’s been cut quick as it tries to rebuild by itself to its genetic norm.
An excellent in-season height for most turfgrasses is 2½ to three inches — typically the highest environment on mowers. The different is toward the end of the growing season when it makes sense to cut a bit shorter so the grass cutting blades will dry faster more than winter. That can help head off early-spring fungus problems such as snow mould.
Don’t wait too long between grass cuts
A second crucial issue is when to get out the actual mower. A good rule of thumb is always to mow the lawn frequently enough so you’re never removing more than one-third of the blade length at a time.
Mowing is really pruning. And that’s a form of injury to the grass plants. Severe cutbacks are much more stressful on grass than lighter in weight cuts and require more energy to heal.
Whenever grass is growing fastest inside mid-spring, this may mean mowing twice a week or every 4 or 5 days. It’s much better to reduce that often than to wait other days and end up having to whack 3 inches from a 6-inch stand. That’s not just a shock to the grass however creates an unusually huge mass of clippings.
And also what about the grass clippings?
Big piles of cuttings are bad news because they cannot be left on the lawn. They are going to mat down the living grass blades and shut off the sun’s rays, which will yellow the turf and encourage diseases. Extras that can be seen even in small piles should be raked up and also preferably composted or used like a mulch over garden mattresses.
Clippings can provide one-third of your lawn’s Nitrogen wants
If you’re mowing regularly, extras won’t be a problem. They’ll be brief enough to disappear into the yard. It’s actually best to let the clippings drop into the lawn as opposed to bagging them. Why?
They return precious nutrients to the garden soil as they break down. Turfgrass experts at Penn State University estimation that letting the cuttings decay in place supply concerning one-third of the lawn’s total nitrogen needs for your season.
The decaying clippings add organic matter towards the soil.
Clippings are not an important cause of thatch in the lawn, out of the box often believed. Thatch is that layer of dead roots, caps and other decomposing matter that will impede rainfall and oxygen exchange when it’s too thicker (i.e. more than an inch). In a healthy lawn, microbes quickly break down small grass clippings.
Returning the clippings to the ground is recycling at its best and keeps organic “waste” out of the trash flow.
Mulching mowers do an excellent career of chopping the extras into small pieces. Even ordinary side-discharge mowers disperse cuttings well enough to let them lay when you mow at regular enough intervals.
If you go delinquent, at least try to work around the particular perimeter of the yard, firing the clips inward so you’ll end up having to house ” rake ” only one or two channels in the middle. In the event you go back and forth — shooting first off to the right and then to the left — you’ll get a channel of clippings each and every two passes.
Avoid reducing the grass when it’s wet. The clippings are more likely to pad together then, you won’t get an even cut (the mower wheels will flatten grass blades), and you may even compact the soil if it’s moist.
Also don’t attempt to mow when grass is going brownish and dormant in a drought – even if you’re mainly carrying it out because weeds are continuing to grow and are poking up. Grass crowns become breakable and fragile in drought conditions, and if you break them with your feet and lawnmower wheels, the plants will not recover when rains come back. Dead crowns equal deceased grass.
Of lawn mower blades and models…
Some people swear by their particular reel mowers — the ones with all the old-fashioned bladed drums that go around and snip off grass rotor blades like scissors. These work great, but so do rotary mowers when they’re kept in good shape.
No matter which style of mower you have, the most important thing you can do is keep the rotor blades sharp. Nice, sharp lawn mower blades make a clean minimize. Dull blades rip the actual heads off grass blades and cause ragged sides.
First, that’s a cosmetic problem because rough, ragged cuts make bigger openings which turn brown and be noticeable more than sharp cuts. Yet even worse, those bigger openings cause the grass to lose more moisture, which increases drought stress in hot weather. And greater openings leave grass cutting blades more vulnerable to disease spores.
Sharpening your lawn mower blades as soon as every few years is not sufficient. Two or three times during the growing season is a better game plan, and even sharpening once every 25 hours is not overkill. Some homeowners personal two different lawn mower cutting blades so they always have one for that mower while the other will be sharpened.
Habits and mowing and trimming patterns
Finally, there’s the issue of the course you take as you mow. Many homeowners take the exact same path every time because it makes sense to them for one reason or another (convenience, habit, avoiding the nosy next door neighbor, etc.) There’s no horticultural problem with that, but altering the road can make a cosmetic difference.
Look closely and you’ll notice that the color with the grass appears different depending on which way you passed over it with the mower. That’s because the force of the spinning mower blades blows the lawn blades as it cuts these. Light reflecting off the turf will make it look lighter in weight or darker, depending on which usually way the blades are laying.
It’s this routine of mowing that is the reason the designs commonly observed in athletic fields. Some actually avid home-
lawn fans carry out the same thing themselves, and there tend to be even special mower blades made for creating patterns.
Varying your own route can make a slight variation in the evenness of the cut by looking into making sure no particular places keep getting pushed straight down while others are always cut off.
Yard mowing might not be rocket science, but it isn’t exactly foolproof both. Just remember these few important rules, and you’ll be master of one’s mower: Mow high and often. Let those clips lay. And keep those lawn mower rotor blades sharp!
If you are interested in joining our mailing list, please submit your email below. 
