One of these days, turf scientists will perfect the “dwarf” varieties of grasses that will not need mowing (or watering). The grass will get to a specific height and remain there. We'll have all the advantages of lawns – the oxygen they produce, the cooling effect, the wonderful playing fields and soft ground cover, the dust and erosion control, the sound buffering etc... without the noise, pollution, energy use and labor of mowing. Its only a matter of time before this occurs. There are already some types suitable for home use that need less mowing than others.
For now, the very least you must do for a home lawn is mow it. Poor mowing is absolutely the first problem that needs to be fixed if you want to give your lawn a chance to be healthy. If your are mowing incorrectly, shifting to proper mowing technique will actually give you a better looking lawn in a matter of weeks.
Unfortunately, I can't summarize proper mowing in a few sentences. You do need an understanding of what is going on with the lawn first. Then everything gets easy.
In the last section, 3 Things You Need To Know About Grass, we discussed how grass plants make their own food in the leaf blades. (Please read that section if you haven't already.) The importance of that piece of information can not be overstated because every time you mow your lawn you are cutting off some of the food factory of the grass. Food is vital for both above and below ground growth and all the normal functions of a healthy plant. When the food factory in the leaf blades is devastated by improper mowing, all plant energy goes towards rebuilding the food factory. Nothing else happens until it is fixed.
A Question of Balance
If the lawn gets plenty of sun and is not cut too short, it has the potential to become a very healthy lawn. The leaf blades can produce a lot of food in this state. It will be able to easily build new shoots and will have the energy to spread out. The roots will be deep and full. Deeper, fuller roots are capable of finding more and deeper water and nutrients in the soil and can store more food as well. It has been shown over and over again that the higher you mow your lawn, the deeper the roots will be.
Here is an illustration from my book Building A Healthy Lawn: A Safe and Natural Approach that shows the relation ship of leaf blade height to root growth. 
(The book is out of print after a 20 year run, but we have a few copies left.)
If your were to scalp the lawn even lower than the height on the left, there would be little to no root growth at all.
Most plants have somewhat of a balance between above ground growth (shoots) and below ground growth (roots). It may not be entirely equal, one way or the other, but it the important point is that the roots and shoots are mutually supportive. The roots send water and raw material to the shoots and the shoots send food and necessary building blocks to help roots expand and do their job.
When the blades are cut short and too much of the food factory is removed, the stored food in the roots will be called up to help stimulate new blade growth. Making new leaf blades is the highest priority at this point. Root growth slows down or stops completely till the shoots recover. If this continues too long, all the stored food in the roots will be used up and the roots, no longer being supported by food from above, will wither. You have created an unhealthy lawn with a high potential for insect, disease and weed invasion. With continued scalping the grass has no chance of surviving.
Here are two lawns with the same grass type, but the one on the right is cut too short. Without enough leaf blade area, the lawn is weak, shallow-rooted and tends toward disease and insect problems. The homeowner has created this problem because he had the mistaken idea that short is better.
A proper balance between shoot growth and root growth is one of the fundamentals necessary for the health of your lawn (as well as most of your landscape plants). When things go out of balance for too long, your lawn is going to suffer.
Stuart Franklin is President of Nature’s Lawn & Garden, Inc. (http://www.natureslawn.com) which sell online products, and Green Buffalo Lawn Care (www.greenbuffalolawncare.com) a lawn fertilizing company serving the Buffalo, NY area He is also the author of Building A Healthy Lawn: A Safe and Natural Approach (Storey Publications 1988), available through our office. [email protected] 716-681-7796.
Comments