You wouldn’t cut your hair with your kitchen scissors, right? At least, we hope not! Instead, you would visit a hairdresser, where they have extra sharp, disinfected scissors capable of cutting your hair neatly, not to mention combs, brushes and sprays to make sure your finished look is as good as possible.
The same goes for your lawn.
No, you can’t take your lawn to a specialist to be cut. But you can understand what care your lawn needs, and use specific tools to make the job a lot easier for you. At Pod Landscapes we prefer to use a specialist lawn mower on our customers grass wherever possible, known as a mulching lawn mower. This unique type of mower has a range of benefits for you, for us, and for the environment, so we thought today we would explain why we use such a unique tool for a very basic task.
What Is A Mulching Lawn Mower?
When you think of ‘mulch’, you probably think of the stuff you put on your flowerbeds to encourage flowers to grow. That mix of shredded bark, pine straw, compost and plant food. But while that is mulch, it’s a specific product, while mulch as a whole is much broader. It’s essentially a material that covers the soil, provides it with nutrients, prevents weeds, regulates temperature and reduces evaporation and erosion.
Grass clippings are an ideal form of mulch, because they are free and they achieve all of the above without you having to really do much work thanks to tools like a mulching lawn mower. These specialised mowers cut your grass, but rather than vacuuming the clippings straight into a bag for disposal, they pass them through a series of blades that finely shred each blade of grass. You can then either have that mulch gathered into a bag for you to use elsewhere, or you can have the clippings blown directly back down onto your freshly cut grass – which is what we recommend.
The Benefits For Your Lawn
The big reason we love mulching lawn mowers is the benefits they bring to our customers lawns, thanks to a process called ‘grasscycling’. By pushing the mulched grass clippings back down to the soil, they act as a protective barrier for your grass and keep the soil at the perfect moisture level.
These fine bits of grass also decompose very quickly, releasing essential nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and other micronutrients back into the soil. This results in much healthier growth for your lawn and fewer fertiliser treatments. And because they decompose so quickly they don’t contribute to thatch build-up (layers of leaves, stems and roots between the grass and soil), and instead promote a healthy microbiome for your soil.
It also means you aren’t left with piles of grass clippings everywhere, which is always a bonus!
Better For The Environment
Another big perk of mulching lawn mowers is their benefits to the environment. Yes, your local council will collect garden waste from your home, or at a recycling facility, and that is still an overall positive. But all of those grass materials often still end up in landfills, which aren’t designed to decompose materials in them quickly. So your grass could sit in landfill for a while before it biodegrades. This adds a lot of pressure to local waste management facilities, many of whom are already struggling. Not to mention the carbon emissions and water involved in moving and processing the green waste!
Landfills are also designed to keep things out of the environment, wasting all of those valuable micronutrients. By putting your grass clippings back into your lawn they will decompose quicker, release those nutrients where they need to be and contribute to the overall health of your lawn and the insect and microbe life in your soil. And if that hasn’t got you convinced, remember the adage of ‘reduce, reuse recycle’? using a mulching lawn mower is quite literally reusing a ‘waste’ product to grow healthier grass.
Mulching lawn mowers are useful for lawns of all shapes and sizes. But for commercial properties with large plots of grass to manage, they can be an absolute godsend. By grasscycling, businesses can ensure their lawns look healthy, green and hydrated all year round, reduce their carbon footprint and reduce their waste management workload. If the team at Pod Landscapes are maintaining your lawn for you, then this is one of our biggest secrets! If you’d like to know more about mulching lawn mowers, our other unique tools or see the results our lawn care service can produce, just get in touch with the team today and book your free consultation.
