Many of us now have near perfect designer gardens, with every pebble in its own place, and every garden bed dressed in almost fine linen with perfect black mulches, every plant meticulously chosen and placed in perfect sequences. Such gardens can be rather sterile, cold, lifeless. Gardens need to be alive, they need activity, they need the same things that nature needs in the wild, which is a constant source of its own organic materials constantly breaking down to feed the soil. Our gardens need earthworms, manures, and decomposing matter, and all that stuff our great grandparents knew all about, but many of us have forgotten, to our own detriment.
Lawn clippings are a wonderful resource for our gardens too, to feed our soils with their decomposing leaf matter, to add Nitrogen for fertiliser, to naturally protect soil from moisture loss in Summer, and to invite earthworms into our gardens to do their work too.
Thinly applied lawn clippings in garden beds can be raked or hoed directly into the garden soil.
Thicker layers of clippings can be applied to the garden and left to sit on top of the lawn, these will rot out in Winter when a lot of water is about, or they may dry out completely in Summer when there is much less water around and when the sun and heat are helping to dry them out simultaneously at a fast pace.
Rotting lawn clippings is always better than drying.
The Lazy Gardener In Summer
I’m a lazy gardener and I always reckon the simplest ways are often best too, managing our gardens a certain way to then let nature do all the hard work for us. So in the case of when I apply a thicker layer of lawn clippings to a garden in Summer, I will never dig them into the soil to start a decomposition. Instead I will just leave them, sure they’ll dry out somewhat and the effect won’t be the same as if they had rotted, but what I then do when I hand water the garden is to put the hose nozzle on jet mode, you know, when there is a single stream coming from the nozzle at high force… I use that, then I spray directly into the soil and through the clippings. This disturbs and aerates the soil, which is a good thing, and it mixes up both the soil and clippings together to a small degree each time its done.
Note: for those of us who suffer with hydrophobic soils, using jet mode on a hose can prevent any water from running off our garden beds at all. We let the force of the jet push water much deeper into the soil when watering, and this prevents water runoff if compared to if we had used a gentle shower or spray mode on the hose, whereby water would have run off the soil surface in quantity.
This action mixes the soil, water and clippings together, which all work together to decompose the lawn clippings into the soil at a much faster rate. The microbes from the soil in the clippings helps to break down the clippings faster. Eventually, over time, the lawn clippings will all disappear into the soil, and we’re ready to do it all over again.
When we get to the time when the clippings look like they’re becoming quite thin after decomposing for a while, we can then hoe the garden beds to mix the remainder of the clippings into the soil.
The Great Rotting Pile
If you have the garden space and the need for this idea, this is a great way to improve garden areas in many different ways. Remember, rotting is better than drying… well lets rot these lawn clippings on a much grander scale.
Remember, this idea is not for all of us, but it’s great when it is used.
In this case we dump all lawn clippings from the lawn mower catcher into one spot, and we don’t spread them out, we just leave a great big pile. And each time we mow our lawns we make another pile nearby the last pile, in the same garden bed, and we keep doing that.
Now, as long as these piles are kept moist, with either rain or with light watering from the hose, these piles of lawn clippings will rot away quite quickly, and as long as their is adequate moisture maintained in these piles of clippings, earthworms will get in there as well, chewing away at our rotting lawn leaves and leaving their precious castings behind.
I’ve seen this process in action many times, done by different people, and the rich feeding of the soil that occurs is incredible to see, and for anyone with poor quality garden soils, this process will work an absolute treat.
Personally, I was once faced with a little garden area that was sunken and which I wanted raised, so the soil level had to come up by about 15-20 cm. The soil was also extremely poor quality. What I did was pile on lawn clippings upon lawn clippings, almost a metre high in total, in the middle of Summer, and I kept them moist. The putrid stench as they broke down was wonderful for a few weeks, and the pile was hot to go near in the mornings, you could watch the decomposition happening… and I have to warn that the flies were bad for a few weeks, but that’s nature at work.
Within three months the entire pile had disintegrated, and I had mixed soil together with the decomposed matter, the soil level raised perfectly, and the quality of the soil was now rich and fertile, and I planted my new little garden. That was years ago, and even today this is still the best soil quality I have anywhere in my little yard, and the mandarin tree in the middle of it is a picture of perfect health.
This process of piling a lot of lawn clippings together to rot down can be upscaled as much as we want, and the improvements to the underlying soils would be amazing. I often thought that if I moved into one of these new houses in new areas where the garden soil is often so incredibly sandy and poor, that the first thing I would do would be to contact every lawn mowing business nearby, and invite them all to dump their clippings a metre high in every inch of my gardens !! The results in the following years would create a rich garden oasis.
But in reality, such would be an exaggeration for any suburban home, as the stink, the flies, and the unsightly appearance would be enough to warrant a tap on the door from our friendly council ranger, accompanied by a threat of some kind, and a timeline. Though for those of us with much larger blocks in the country perhaps, this could of course be done for our vegetable gardens and any other ornamental garden we want to improve.
For the rest of us in suburbia, we can keep adding lawn clippings to our garden beds over the years, albeit in smaller quantities, for wonderful rich improvements to our soils, plants and gardens for years and years to come, without the stink or the flies, and there’s no reason for us to ever stop that practice.
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