A giant downside is that the traditional St. Augustine grass or artificial turf offers very little use along with very few nutrients.

This is a great contrast with an environmentally friendly lawn whereas a giant benefit is that your eco-friendly lawn has more nutrients invested in the soil.

This is because of a lot of practices involved such as:

• when you mow your grass less with a gas-powered lawn mower, you are polluting your soil much less.
• you can use lawn alternatives such as clovers to create a ground cover that is habitat for bees or sweet smelling.
• you can use terraces to descend rainwater into lower levels, using gravity to water your lawn.

Having an eco-friendly lawn means that you can have higher-quality soil for your lawn. If having fresher soil is important to you, then you will enjoy having an eco-friendly lawn.

A More Colorful Lawn

Another reason why you should consider having an eco-friendly lawn is that you will have a much more colorful lawn if possible.

While you can have a colorfully bright green lawn, your lawn doesn’t offer much aesthetic for your lawn.

With an eco-friendly lawn, you can still have a lawn that uses fewer unnecessary unnatural resources, pollutes the environment much less, and still has a colorful lawn.

You can have a colorful lawn by:

• using ground covers such as clovers, Corsican Mint, and barberry cotoneasters to create a sweet-smelling habitat for a variety of flowers.
• adding natural plants and flowers such as asters into your landscaping plan to bring bursts of color throughout your lawn.
• create a hardscaped landscape with a mixture of stones in your yard to achieve a quaint appearance.

There is no need to sacrifice appearances with your eco-friendly lawn when it is just as possible to use eco-friendly principles to grow your lawn.

Becoming an Expert in Eco-Friendly Lawns

The greatest benefit to growing your eco-friendly lawn is that you become an expert.

While at first, you start by researching information about eco-friendly lawns, then you are growing and maintaining your grass.

As you become more experienced in growing your lawn, you learn a few things about maintaining an effective, beautiful eco-friendly lawn, such as:

• which groundcover species to avoid planting in your eco-friendly lawn because of their high invasiveness.
• whether to go “No-Mow” or strategically mow your grass for the best-desired results.
• how to set up a deep root system for your lawn and the use of organic fertilizers.

Much like Rome was not built in a day, neither will your environmentally friendly lawn.

However, with enough practice and time, you can start today to become a well-practiced expert sooner.

How Do I Get and Keep an Eco-Friendly Lawn

By now, you should understand why you want to start and keep an eco-friendly lawn.

However, the more important question now is, “How do I get started with my eco-friendly lawn?”.

Fortunately, we cover five methods that you can do to get started with your eco-friendly lawn.

If you are interested in having an eco-friendly lawn, then you will appreciate the following steps to help you get started and maintain a healthy, nutrient-dense lawn.

Test Your Soil

The first thing that you must do before anything else is to test the soil of your lawn. There are several reasons for this, such as:

• you could either be overwatering or underwatering your lawn while being unaware of it.
• using “mystery soil” causes more harm to the environment because rainwater causes fertilizer to run off into nearby streams.
• your efforts are in vain because you are doing the wrong things for your particular lawn, further delaying any progress.

Therefore, if you are interested in caring for your lawn in the best way possible, then you must perform a soil test on your lawn.

Through the soil test, you should learn:

• the structure
• the composition
• and its fertility

Armed with a soil test, you can then use the best available methods when it comes to improving the overall quality of your soil and your lawn.

Mow Your Grass High

If you are interested in keeping your lawn healthy and full of nutrients, then you want to mow your grass high.

An important reason why you want to mow your grass at a high height (one-third of grass, each time) is that grass retains water.

The added compounding benefit is that you can leave grass clippings in your grass.

Grass clippings retain approximately 85% of water. This is effectively compounded when grass clippings release nitrogen which feeds into the soil of your lawn.

There are other movements such as the “No Mow” movement where you let your grass grow without mowing the grass.

If you feel that the “No Mow” movement is more beneficial to help you grow a more bountiful lawn, then you can consider “No Mow” for your lawn.

However, if you consider the appearance of your lawn to be very important to you, then continue to mow your lawn at one-third of the height of the grass and use the grass clippings to retain more water to produce a much healthier lawn for you.

Use Lawn Alternatives

Earlier, we mentioned that you can use grass alternatives compared to the traditional grass lawn that takes space but offers little return in turn of nutrients.

Fortunately, there are alternatives that you can use for your lawn such as:

• clover.
• thyme.
• barberry cotoneaster

Clover offers a habitat for bees to flourish while providing cover for your soil to retain water. Thyme is another lawn alternative that is soft to the touch and is also edible.

Using lawn alternatives allows you to host a more colorful, varied lawn while getting the most out of your lawn.

Reduce or Remove Chemicals from Your Lawn

A great way to have the eco-friendly lawn that you want is to greatly reduce or completely remove harmful chemicals from your lawn.

It is imperative to bear in mind that just because the chemical is organic does not mean that the chemical is safe: it only means that the chemical (compound) occurs in organic settings.

With that said, by removing harmful and unnatural chemicals, you are

• strengthening the quality of your soil to be more fertile and retain more water.
• producing a healthy biodiverse environment where bugs can fend off against actual enemies of your yard. (For example, one ladybug eats around 1,200 arachnids.

Therefore, if you are interested in maintaining a beautiful, healthy eco-friendly lawn, then you will want to:

• mow your lawn less frequently and try to use an electric mower to reduce gas and emissions.
• avoid using alternative turf as a replacement for your lawn that is NOT naturally biodiverse to the actual environment.
• use a non-phosphorus fertilizer.

Following these tips will help you maintain and grow a healthy eco-friendly lawn.

Water Your Lawn More Strategically

If you are looking to reduce your water bill for your lawn, then you can create strategic methods to water your lawn at a lesser cost.

Here are several solutions that you can use to better your lawn:

• have a rainwater barrel to collect and store rainwater to water your lawn on sunny or cloudy days.
• create terraces so you can use gravity to water your lawn.
• create a ground cover (with mulch and grass clippings) for your lawn to retain more water.
• create a deep-root system for your lawn to retain more water by watering infrequently and early in the morning.

With the above four methods, you can start watering your lawn more while using fewer resources.

Also, you can use the most out of your lawn to get and keep the most out of your soil, especially if you want fertile land where you can grow plants and food for your lawn.

By following these tips, you can water your lawn without overusing water that you do not need.

What Do I Need to Remember about Maintaining an Eco-Friendly Lawn?

Starting, growing, and maintaining an eco-friendly lawn can be a daunting task.

Here are a few takeaways from the article to help you start, grow, and maintain your eco-friendly lawn:

• always test your soil before doing anything else so you know how to care for your lawn
• use rainwater and gravity to water your eco-friendly lawn.
• use groundcovers such as clover or thyme to add a colorful appeal to your yard while promoting overall healthy soil.
• use high grass, mulch, and grass clippings to retain water and release nitrogen to produce more fertile soil.
• and reduce the unnecessary synthetic chemicals that you use so that you can use more natural methods to protect your yards from insects and weeds.

As long as you remember some of the methods to get the eco-friendly lawn that you want, then you will have the eco-friendly lawn that you want.