A thought provoking US article relevant to anyone who generates lawn cutting waste.
Mulching ? are we fooling ourselves and clients ?
Strange how we may be going full circle..
What's your view ?
" About 30 years ago local authorities began forbidding the dumping of landscape waste, including grass clippings, in their landfills. This created a huge problem for the lawn care industry. What could lawn contractors do with the tons of clippings and other green waste they generated each season?
Few contractors have the property or expertise to haul the waste back to their shops and compost it. Besides, gathering, hauling and disposing of grass clippings, whether at the rare landfills still accepting them or at a composting site, is expensive when you figure in the time and labor involved.
Shortly after landfills became off limits to green waste, the former Professional Lawn Care Association of America (PLCAA, later to become part of PLANET and now NALP) kicked off its “Grasscycling” program. It promoted leaving grass clippings just where they lay after being mowed. A similar program called “Don’t Bag It” urged the same of landscape pros and homeowners in Texas.
These programs, along with claims that clippings returned a small amount of nitrogen back to lawns, helped popularize the development of mulching mowers, which remain a popular choice of many landscapers and homeowners to this day.
Todd Graus, CEO of Yellowstone Compact & Commodities, disputes claims that lawn clippings left on lawns make an observable difference in their appearance or health. He says it’s “a myth” that clippings return 1 pound of nitrogen to lawns each season. The reason? Clippings end up on top of the lawn and do not make their way into the soil to benefit turfgrass.
“As a lawn fertilization professional for 35 years, I have never seen a visual difference between lawns mulched and lawns bagged,” says Graus. He adds that mulching can promote thatch buildup and also increase the possibility of lawn diseases because disease spores on clippings can re-infect emerging grass blades.
Moreover, he says, landscape pros are left with the same huge problem they faced about 30 years ago — the same labor- and time-wasting chore of gathering grass clippings and disposing of them in some way. That this activity takes place during contractors’ busiest times of the year — spring and early fall — only magnifies the expense. "
Original article by Ron Hall @ Turf
Views: 357
Replies
To call that out, its mostly Bollocks.
What happens to the nutrients of mulched grass? Do they disapear, NO they enter the upper soil horizon and are made soluble during the microbial breakdown, then washed in and available to roots.
A simple comparison would be a hay meadow - If you "top" it with a mower, and leave the grass in situ, the recovery and rate of growth is fast, and lush.
If you collect the cuttings and bale them, you have removed the growth just as with lawn mowing, and the resultant regrowth is measurably less.
The clippings obviously do not enter the soil physically, they break down on the surface and the nutrients are washed in, or in small quantitys taken in by soil microbial life.
Sounds to me like someone is singing their own ttune, a quick google of Yellowstone shows he is trying to sell a machine that Bales grass clippings, if you dont collect them, he has no market!
Basically hes lying because he wants to sell his machine!
good point, also maybe the regrowth on the hay meadow is quick because the grass underneath is looking for the light so puts on a lot of growth to regrow through the cut material