Organic Lawn Care Products
If you care about the health of your family and the health of the planet, then organic lawn care products are the best way to go.
How to Find and Use Organic Lawn Care Products
Finding organic lawn care supplies has gotten much easier. Most large home improvement centers now carry both traditional and organic gardening supplies.
Following are some organic lawn care products and resources that you may want to consider. All of these will eliminate chemicals and pesticides while still working to keep your yard in tip-top shape.
- Commercial natural fertilizers: These are fertilizers made from organic matter. Depending on the brand, organic fertilizer may be made with seaweed, fish, plants, and other matter that can be composted into rich growing material. One brand you might consider is AGGRAND's Liquid Organic Fertilizers.
- Extremely Green offers an amazing Organic Fertilizer and Soil Amendment Guide. This is one of the best guides and shopping areas around - listing both problems and solutions in an easy to scan chart.
- Use organic gardening mulch.
- Chicken manure sounds icky but actually it's considered a perfect fertilizer for yards and gardens because of its stellar nitrogen composition. You can buy your own chickens, although what's more practical is buying chicken manure from your local garden supply center.
- You can make your own compost fertilizer.
- For ridding your garden of mites, aphids, and other annoying critters you can use companion planting or mix up your own chemical-free insect and disease control solutions. You'll need a good guide book like The Organic Gardener's Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control: A Complete Problem-Solving Guide to Keeping Your Garden and Yard Healthy Without Chemicals - long title; but a great book.
- Lastly, try to attend your local home and gardening events and shows. Most of the time extremely useful and free information about organic gardening in your area can be gained simply from attending.
The Positives of Organic Lawn Care
The Environmental Protection Agency recommends working with nature to create the best lawn you can. Working with nature to build a healthy lawn, according to the EPA, means, in part, keeping your use of lawn care products with pesticides to a minimum, if you use any.
Organic lawn care products have many positives over traditional lawn care products, the number one benefit being a lack of harmful pesticides. Sadly, the majority of people do use pesticides as part of their lawn care regimen. The EPA estimates that lawns and home gardens combined use around fifty million pounds of pesticides a year in the United States.
There are over 600 registered pesticides and less than 25 percent have been tested for short- and long-term health hazards. Because most pesticides have not been tested, anytime you use a pesticide in your yard, you're taking a chance at harming yourself or your family. Pesticides aren't only an issue if you want your children to be able to run barefoot through the grass.
Lawn care pesticides run off into groundwater and pollute the environment as pesticide particles are picked up by the wind. These airborne pesticides can end up anywhere: the rivers, forests, oceans, and in your own house. Pets and other animals can be seriously harmed by eating grass treated with chemicals. They also run through yards, carrying pesticides everywhere. If you grow your own food with unnatural chemicals and pesticides, then your healthy veggies are not so healthy anymore. The EPA has noted that most pesticides are possibly and or probably cancer causing.
Your lawn is only one lawn, so going organic may not seem like a big deal. However, when you add up all the lawns in the world we're talking a lot of lawns covering a lot of space. It's important that everyone works together to create a healthier planet - you can't think in terms of, "Well, it's just my one little yard" because your actions do make an impact.
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