Should your mower mulch your grass clippings? For a healthy lawn, mulch your grass clippings and allow them to become a natural fertilizer. Also, chemicals are not the best choice for lawn maintenance.
When asked if your mower should mulch your grass clippings, Merrideth Jiles, who is the garden center manager at The Great Outdoors Nursery and Landscaping Center in Austin, Texas, says, "You definitely should not bag your clippings. Most lawnmowers nowadays have a mulching feature. Old saw lawnmowers just threw all the grass out the side and then lot of people would come back and rake up the clippings or they had a bagger that bagged it up for you. Nowadays mowers usually have three options: 1) throw it out the side, 2) bag it, or 3) mulch it. On newer mowers, the grass that is cut doesn't go out the side but kind of stays in the cutting area. A mulching blade will actually cut a blade of grass several times. It cuts it up from the plant and then that blade has a flywheel with these other blades around and it just chops it up into very small pieces. What that is doing is recycling that organic material back into your lawn and making them decompose back into the ground, putting those nutrients back "
As an example of how beneficial this can be, Jiles says, "I have three large pecan trees in my yard and they produce a tremendous amount of leaves. Instead of getting out there and raking the leaves, I just put the mulching blade on my mower, and go over the leaves and it chops them up into very small little pieces and they fall down between the blades of grass, reintroducing this organic material back into the soil - pretty much the way nature would. In nature, those leaves would sit there on the grass and that material would go back into the soil. Mulching speeds the process up because instead of a whole leaf, it is chopped into 100 little pieces, so it decomposes faster." Mulching these leaves also alleviates the issue of them smothering the grass underneath, which can sometimes happen if there is a bulk of them that are heavy and wet.
Jiles also says, "Cutting your grass too short - scalping your grass - that can be very bad, and that's another problem I see a lot of. Grass is designed to be cut regularly, where most plants really are not. But grass still needs to get its blades to a certain size to be able to do photosynthesis and collect light. Also, when you cut your grass too short, you are exposing the base of the plant and its soil to more sunshine and therefore more environmental stress. A lawn can be cut, at let's say, an inch-and-a-half or two inches and look very nice, but a lawn that gets cut to an inch, gets close to where you are basically, almost completely, cutting the entire plant away from its roots."
He goes on to say, "Another mistake, in my opinion, is using any kind of broad spectrum inorganic poison or fungicide or anything like that. There are so many products that they make now that you (can) just throw one bag on your lawn and it is supposed to do everything. It's going to feed your grass, it's going to kill all your weeds and it's going to kill all your bugs. To me that's like a lawn hypochondriac. You should definitely treat problems as they come up, but not every lawn has insect problems, not every lawn has weed problems and not every lawn has fungus problems. But some people just think, 'Well I will just put it on there and it will take care of everything.' That is just dumping more chemicals in our environment and into our lakes and streams, affecting yourself, your pets, and every living thing."
