Make Your Lawn Extra Green

When it comes to landscaping your garden having a green lawn isn’t all about how lush and literally green the grass is. It is lovely to have a well maintained lawn, and walking without shoes on over your well groomed turf is something special. However, with the dwindling amount of fresh water available on the planet, and the rising levels of harsh chemicals that are finding their ways into the planet and waterways each year, having a large lawn can be incredibly un-green if you’re not careful.

Choose the Right Grass

According to lawn care experts, you might not be able to choose a native type of turf, but finding something that thrives in your climate is important. This will reduce the amount of special attention that your lawn needs, such as cutting and watering. For example, if you live in a particularly hot part of the world, choose grass that does not need a lot of moisture to stay healthy. Talk to someone who is an expert in turf, so that you won’t plant the wrong type of lawn and have to rip it up and start again.

How Much Water Does Your Lawn Use?

You would be appalled by how much water is used when people water their lawns from the main water supply. If you want to work out how much water your lawn is soaking up, fill up a bucket and count for 10 seconds before turning off the water. If you times the amount that you filled in the bucket by six, you now know how much water your garden hose uses per minute, otherwise known as the “flow rate.” The results might shock you. There are plenty of ways to reduce this and they don’t have to cost much.

Use People Power

You will probably hear that telltale hum and buzz of gas operated mowers and landscaping equipment on any given weekend. Apart from the incredibly annoying way they pollute the air waves with their obnoxious noise, gas lawn mowers release a lot of harmful emissions into the planet’s atmosphere. Compared to modern cars, landscaping machines are not capable of controlling greenhouse gas emissions nearly as well.

Your average lawn mower will unleash over 80 pounds of deadly carbon dioxide, as well as a bunch of other air pollutants, each year. That goes for the average household, anyway. The more you use your mower, the more damage you are doing to the environment. And this is without even considering all the harm that sourcing oil for fuel does to our planet in the first place.

Basically, by cutting out the use of a gas powered lawn mower, you will be adding to the percentage of green power that your home is using. For those who already have quite eco-friendly homes, figuring out a practical way to tend to landscaping maintenance without using fossil fuels is probably a welcome thing.

Push mowers have long been seen as semi-useful inventions that are only to be considered for people who couldn’t afford a “real” mower. While plenty of mediocre push mowers have been manufactured in the past, the new models are actually quite nice. You can find something that’s going to get the job done without too much physical strain. Also, you can just think of that extra work as a little exercise on behalf of the planet.