The old saying about "early birds getting the worms" seems a bit off for this issue but the fanatics among us are out there in force even though mowing grass is a very long way from other forms of pleasure that I can think of. It seems even more absurd to cut grass that is not even growing yet. What is even more surprising is that since getting a lush growth is the objective of the gardening and lawn maker they go to considerable lengths to increase their work load. The picture below shows a lawn that Ted has just gone over with a special attachment on his mower to scratch the roots. Ted explained to me that he also catches and bags all of the clippings.
We place great value in the manicured lawn for a variety of reasons, perhaps it would do us all some good at the beginning of the season to reevaluate what we are doing and what is the real goal we have. Some interesting statistics indicate that urban lawn growers routinely over fertilise and over apply insecticides. The compulsion to produce the perfect lawn involves the creation of a vast amount of pollution from lawn mowers which do not meet any emission standards and one of the wildest scientific claims is that freshly cut grass emits significant harmful pollution from the damaged grass leaves themselves. Then when you consider the pressure on land fill sites of bagged grass clippings that would do better left on the lawn itself or in a compost pile in the back yard, one has to wonder a bit about the direction of common sense in all this.
