| By Mal Annells, President Australian Lawn Mowing contractors Association (ALMA)
Lawn contractors and others within this industry will continue to be affected by on-going drought and Australia’s diminishing water resources. Water restrictions threaten the livelihood not only of lawn contractors, but all involved in horticulture and its suppliers. To maintain our business we need to inform our clients that lawns provide tangible benefits to our environment. We need to reassure them of the benefits of owning and maintaining lawns. We must also encourage and educate them to irrigate sensibly. This will entail a shift in our role.
Previously many of us have seen ourselves as merely mowers of grassed surfaces. This change to become educators will become essential to stay in business. But it will require us educating ourselves first!
This issue is all the more pressing as the vast majority of the information disseminated by government agencies is so overtly negative when discussing the methods of conserving water.
The simple fact remains: Turfgrasses serve many functions in urban landscapes. The vast majority of these are clearly highly beneficial. Further, the impact of replacing turf surfaces with alternative materials and/or gladly permitting them to die through lack of moisture has a highly detrimental impact on our environment.
Turfgrass Functions
Primary roles of turfgrass are soil stabilisation, water conservation, and filtration of air and water borne pollutants. Actively growing turf is highly effective in control of environmental pollution, such as the suppression of dust, glare, and noise, and in heat dissipation. Healthy growing turfgrasses act as biological filters and remove atmospheric pollutants. Turfgrasses are extremely useful removers of “greenhouse” gasses and producers of vital oxygen. Studies have demonstrated that a mere nine square metres of grass mown at 5cm (2”) will supply all the oxygen requirements of a family of four persons! (The area required increases with reductions in cut height).
Replace Lawns with paving to save the environment?
Not a good idea.
Replacing lawns with brick paving does not appeal to me as being environmentally sustainable. It fulfills none of the environmentally-positive functions while adding to many of the negative issues. Paved areas fail to suppress dust, increase glare, magnify noise, and retain heat. They create serious run-off problems allowing pollutants to rapidly enter the stormwater systems and ultimately our waterways and seas.
Challenge
Maintaining lawns when water is scarce is a challenge that we as lawn care operators must learn to meet. Simple management practices such as raising mowing height will shade the soil more effectively and help to reduce water loss by evaporation. However this needs to be accompanied by more careful applications of water that must effectively penetrate the root zone. The simplest way to monitor this is to inspect the soil by removing a small plug with a garden trowel. Look to see that the soil is moist down to 10cm depth. Are the roots reasonably dense at this depth? Show your soil plug to your client, so they can appreciate how effectively their watering is. For generations we have all been over-generous in our watering habits and it will take time to re-learn how to water effectively.
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Waterwise
"Waterwise" has become a catchword with all sorts of water conservation tips being offered.
Some are valid, but many are half-truths that are not sustainable.
Be wary of advice such as: "Your lawn should be fertilised regularly to ensure it stays healthy. Once a year in March or April is the recommended time."
The recommendation is to fertilise regularly, which is sound horticultural practice. But fertilising once a year is a feast or famine syndrome, and cannot provide adequate nutrition for the entire year. Fertiliser applied at the proper rate will provide nutrients for around 8-10 weeks, when the available nutrients will be consumed by the plants. Doubling the dose could be toxic and scorch the grass, and not necessarily extend the fertilising interval.
Sustainable horticultural practices suggest little and often. Four or five fertiliser applications during the active growing season is the optimum. However, the autumn application remains the most important application, but is not the only one for healthy turf.
Extending the mowing interval is another practice that is detrimental to the health of turfgrass. Maintaining healthy turf relies on regular “defoliation” (that’s “mowing” to you and me) to keep the grass in a vegetative phase with individual grass plants continually replacing green, leafy tissue. With less frequent mowing, the turfgrass plant will convert to a reproductive phase and start forming flowering stems and seed heads. The plant will therefore expend most of its energy into producing seed for the next generation. Its leaf growth will decline and the lawn will become sparse and thin.
Regular mowing helps to suppress seed development and maintain a leafy green lawn.
Education
Lawn contractors and others within this industry will continue to be affected by on-going drought and Australia’s diminishing water resources. To maintain our businesses, we must reassure our customers that lawns are viable and don't need to be neglected in the interest of saving water. Sensible fertilising, watering and mowing will maintain a lawn in reasonable condition and we need to retrain our customers on how to achieve this.
However, it will require us within the Industry to educate ourselves first!
If we are unaware of the beneficial functions Turfgrasses serve in urban landscapes we will hardly be able to educate our customers of them.
This issue remains all the more pressing as the vast majority of the information disseminated by government agencies is so overtly negative when discussing the methods of conserving water.
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