With the lawn season just about in full swing, so will be the questions on the environmental impact of having a nice lawn.
Every year the same articles show up to scare the public into thinking they are polluting the world by fertilizing their lawn and spraying for weeds. Don’t get me wrong – with anything there are some risks but to help you understand, here at GrowinGreen Lawn Care we are all parents, pet owners, and advocates for the environment and we love our lawns too! So, if you have followed the news over the last few years about Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point’s water issues and the algae issues in Jordan Lake, you will appreciate how important this study is for all of us and what it means for maintaining good water quality for years to come.
The EPA has just finished a report concerning the water quality around the Chesapeake Bay area.
You can read another article about this report at Landscape Management and you can read the full EPA report here. The EPA gathered a panel of experts to look at lawn care and the impact of lawn care practices on water quality.
They concluded that a “dense vegetative cover of turf grass” on a lawn reduces pollution and runoff. If your lawn is thin and sickly then, pollution and runoff from the lawn increases dramatically. Directly from the report…
Maintain a dense vegetative cover of turf grass to reduce runoff, prevent erosion and retain nutrients. The research demonstrates that dense vegetative cover helps to reduce surface runoff, which can be responsible for significant nutrient export from the lawn, regardless of whether it is fertilized or not. Dense cover has been shown to reduce surface runoff volumes in a wide range of geographic settings and soil conditions.
If a lawn does not have a dense cover, it has an elevated risk for nutrient export, especially if soils are compacted or slopes are steep. In these situations, the primary nutrient management practice is to identify the factors responsible for the poor turf cover, and implement practices to improve it (e.g., tilling, soil amendments, fertilization or conservation landscaping).
This furthers the message that GrowinGreen Lawn Care is out to spread and that turf professionals and university specialists have been saying for years, a thick healthy lawn is the best environmental filter there is! If you live in the Greensboro, Winston-Salem or High Point area of North Carolina and want to “Love Your Lawn” you can be green with GrowinGreen!
