Eco-lawn can be left unmowed for about a month, and indeed some advocates suggest not mowing it at all.
How our Eco-lawn looks when it's cut regularly
So why not leave it to grow taller and more meadow-like? Our city friends often wonder why we country folks cut so much grass.
We experimented with this about five years ago when we let a big part of the west field Eco-lawn go without mowing for most of the summer. The grass went to seed, and it looked quite nice, but in the end, we decided to start cutting it again.
The reason: mowing keeps weeds down
Country weeds are just so much more aggressive and plentiful, and fresh weed seeds just keep blowin’ in the wind. If you don’t want three-foot tall dock, sow thistle and Canada thistle all over your Eco-lawn, (especially with broadleaf weed killers now banned in Ontario), one of your best defenses is to mow regularly.
The idea is to cut down the flower stalks of the weeds before their seeds mature. I mow frequently during spring dandelion season to chop off the flowers before they turn into puffballs. (Mowing also stops woody plants you don’t want – in our case, walnut trees and buckthorn.)
During the summer and fall, we mow most of our lawn every week and a half to two weeks, and more often if it rains a lot.
The west field with less mowing - we decided to cut this portion of the Eco-lawn only every 4 to 5 weeks this season. Here, it's overdue for a haircut
Best mowing height – high
This year, in mid-summer and fall, we decided to leave parts of the Eco-lawn uncut for 4 to 5 weeks, and then we cut it as high as our mower deck goes: 5 1/2 inches. (Fortunately, changing the height on my ride-on machine is dead easy – I just pull a lever while pushing a pedal with my foot, move a pin, and it’s done.)
Eco-lawn cut at 4 inches (left), unmowed for 5 weeks (right)
I find that the Eco-lawn looks healthier and greener when you cut it at about 4 inches, especially if your lawn doesn’t get watered during dry spells.
In the moister areas of our property, it does well when cut to 3 1/2 inches. But we have found that cutting it shorter – at 3 inches – makes it look yellowish. During a wet summer, such as 2008 and this year, I’ve had to cut once a week or week and a half. In dryer years, I can get away with mowing less frequently – perhaps every two to three weeks.
The bottom line with Eco-lawn, or any low maintenance lawn is this: Low maintenance doesn’t mean no maintenance. Eco-lawn still needs care, but less care than a traditional lawn. No planting or garden (even a naturalized one) is completely carefree.
Abandon any country garden or stop cutting your lawn, and, guaranteed, it will revert to weeds and wilderness in no time. That’s what our property was like when we bought it, and it was not pretty.
Read Part 1: Eco-Lawn: the ultimate low maintenance turf?
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Hi Yvonne,
It’s great you’ve been carefully tracking the best ways an unmowed or rarely mowed Eco-Lawn works for you. Here at Wildflower Farm we’ve been doing the same thing. We have a number of shaded pathways and moist part shade expanses that we tend to mow just twice a year; once in late spring and once in the fall. It does keep the weeds down considerably. We do get the occasional weed. They’re easy to dig out and then throw more seed into the empty spot. Minimum maintenance!
Hi Miriam: With all the rain we had this season, our Eco-lawn grew so luxuriantly that we had to mow more frequently than that. But it is such a dense turf that weed control is quite easy. Cheers/Y
I think I must be OCD Yvonne…if my lawn needs mowing…like it does right now, due to too much rain and laziness…I don’t even want to walk on it. I think I might trip!
Great post!
I think I would like to try filling some areas with moss. That seems like the way to go in the woodsy south.
Hi Eve: You are so right – go for what is regionally appropriate for you.
What’s the scientific name, and cultivar name, for eco-lawn? And how does it do in shade or part shade?
Thanks,
Mary
Hi Mary: Eco-lawn is made up of a mixture of fescue grasses (Festuca is the botanical name) including Sheeps Fescue, Lifine Slender Fescue, Navigator Creeping Red Fescue, Jasper II Creeping Red Fescue, Longfellow II Chewings Fescue, Heron Hard Fescue and Chariot Hard Fescue. Fescues are excellent in shade. Most traditional shade grass seed mixtures contain fescues.
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