Spring on the Front Range

To bag or not to bag

That is the question. Every year, we get more questions – and more arguments – about what’s best to do. Here’s a little information to help you make the decision…

Lawn clippings can be used for many things from garden fertilizer to mulch for landscape plants. The clippings are a good source of necessary nutrients for plants in the garden and the landscape.

But think about this a minute…if clippings are a good source of nutrients for your garden and landscape plants, wouldn’t they also be a good source of nutrients for your lawn?

Let’s look at what’s in those clippings. In one year, your lawn will yield about 200 pounds of clippings per 1000 square feet. Of that 200 pounds, 150 pounds are water, and the remaining part is largely nutrients, like nitrogen (which helps your lawn stay green), phosphorous (which promotes growth of a healthy root system) and potassium (which helps your lawn withstand stress from drought and heat). If you remove the clippings, you’re just throwing away the same nutrients that you paid perfectly good money to put on your lawn in the form of fertilizer just a few months ago.

Your lawn will also benefit from the addition of organic matter. In a typical Berthoud lawn, much of the soil is clay based and needs to have organic matter added to help break it up and produce a better soil condition for grass to grow in. Returning the clippings to your lawn is one of the easiest, most cost effective ways to get this done.

Some folks don’t like the look of clippings left on the lawn. The best way to solve this is by keeping up with the mowing – that is, never let the blades of your grass get so tall that you have to cut off more than a third of the height. If you do this, the clippings will tend to filter through the top of the turf and will lie on the ground, where they can break down and release all of the valuable nutrients back into your lawn. Even better recycling of nutrients can be achieved by regular aeration, which allows the nutrients a better opportunity to get into your lawn.

Of course, there are all kinds of fancy mulching equipment available, but even if you don’t have this equipment, you can work with your lawn to gain the benefit of leaving the clippings, again by using a mowing schedule that ensures you’ll never have to cut more than one third of the blade height. But what if you get behind in your mowing schedule? No worries – just set your mower blade to a higher setting, mow off about a third of the blade height, then the next day or so, mow again at your regular height. Voila! More clippings, and you’re back on schedule!

So, we stand firmly in the “not to bag” camp. You can save money by cutting down on the number of fertilizer applications, and you can save lots of effort by not having to
carry around a bunch of heavy bags of mowed grass. Don’t you already have enough to do without bagging up all those clippings?