Organic lawn management or organic turf management or organic land care or organic landscaping is the practice of establishing and caring for an athletic turf field or garden lawn and landscape using organic horticulture, without the use of manufactured inputs such as synthetic pesticides or artificial fertilizers. It is a component of organic land care and organic sustainable landscaping which adapt the principles and methods of sustainable gardening and organic farming to the care of lawns and gardens.
A primary element of organic lawn management is the use of compost and compost tea to reduce the need for fertilization and to encourage healthy soil that enables turf to resist pests. A second element is mowing tall (3" - 4") to suppress weeds and encourage deep grass roots, and leaving grass clippings and leaves on the lawn as fertilizer.
Additional techniques include fertilizing in the fall, not the spring. Organic lawns often benefit from over seeding, slice seeding and aeration more frequently due to the importance of a strong root system. Well-maintained organic lawns are often drought-tolerant. If a lawn does need watering it should be done infrequently but deeply.
Other organic techniques for caring for a lawn include irrigation only when the lawn shows signs of drought stress and then watering deeply - minimizing needless water consumption. Using low volume sprinklers provides more penetration without runoff. Lawnmowers with a mulching function can useful in reducing fertilizer use by allowing grass clippings and leaves that are cut so minutely that they can settle into the grass inconspicuously to decompose into the soil.
Grass seed mixes used to contain white clover, which provides natural fertilizer, but this practice fell out of favor with the rise of synthetic fertilizer and businesses profiting from the sale of this fertilizer. In recent years, homeowners have returned to the use of clover as a natural fertilization source for lawns. In 2022, the New York Times reported on the growing popularity of clover lawns.
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Organic horticulture is the science and art of growing fruits, vegetables, flowers, or ornamental plants by following the essential principles of organic agriculture in soil building and conservation, pest management, and heirloom variety preservation. The Latin words hortus (garden plant) and cultura (culture) together form horticulture, classically defined as the culture or growing of garden plants. Horticulture is also sometimes defined simply as "agriculture minus the plough".
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to organic gardening and farming: Organic farming – alternative agricultural system that relies on fertilizers of organic origin such as compost, manure, green manure, and bone meal and places emphasis on techniques such as crop rotation and companion planting. Biological pest control, mixed cropping and the fostering of insect predators are encouraged. Organic standards, in general, are intended to enable the use of naturally occurring compounds while restricting or strongly limiting the use of manufactured substances.
A lawn (lɔːn) is an area of soil-covered land planted with grasses and other durable plants such as clover which are maintained at a short height with a lawn mower (or sometimes grazing animals) and used for aesthetic and recreational purposes—it is also commonly referred to as part of a garden. Lawns are usually composed only of grass species, subject to weed and pest control, maintained in a green color (e.g., by watering), and are regularly mowed to ensure an acceptable length.
Sphagnum mosses mediate long-term carbon accumulation in peatlands. Given their functional role as keystone species, it is important to consider their responses to ecological gradients and environmental changes through the production of phenolics. We compa ...