Lush Lawn vs. Lethal Lawn

As an American icon, the lawn ranks right up there with Mom, baseball, and apple pie. It’s the quintessential playground, where we watch our children take their first steps, romp with our dogs, and host neighborhood barbecues, among other things. And each year, it’s the recipient of millions of tons of highly toxic manmade fertilizers. But here’s the good news: You can pitch those poisons and still keep that beloved turf green, thick, and weed-free, for less money than you’d spend on a “conventional” lawn-care regimen.

There are plenty of organic lawn fertilizers on the market that will enable you to maintain a great-looking lawn without putting your health at risk. But you can accomplish the same feat in either of these simple (and cheaper) ways:

1. Use my Super-Safe Lawn Fertilizer. This easier-than-pie recipe will provide all the nutrients your turf needs, with none of the dangers of synthetic food:

Mix 2 parts alfalfa meal, 1 part bonemeal, and 1 part wood ashes together, and apply the mixture at a rate of 25 pounds per 1,000 square feet of lawn area first thing in the spring, and again last thing in the fall.

2. Spread a layer of top-quality compost across the turf twice a year, in the spring, and again in the fall. If you want to try this approach, you’ll need a minimum of 50 pounds of compost for each 1,000 square feet of lawn area. As for the maximum, well, the sky’s the limit — there’s no such thing as an overdose of black gold!

Bring on the Thunder for the Greenest Garden in Town!

Have you ever noticed how your lawn and garden seem to suddenly green up after a storm? That’s because the electricity in the air joins oxygen with nitrogen to make nitric oxide (the chemical compound that delivers nitrogen to your plants). But you don’t have to just sit around praying for storm clouds to appear — you can create the same atmosphere yourself, as farmers and gardeners have been doing for centuries. They call it electroculture, and it can actually improve the health of your plants and increase the size of your harvest. Try it yourself, using these three techniques:

• Grow cucumbers, indeterminate tomatoes, and other vine crops on metal trellises or fences.
• Use only metal poles for staking.
• Tie up your plants with strips cut from nylon garments, like slips or old panty hose. (If you don’t know how that could attract electricity, just ask any woman about “static cling”!)

Oh, yes, there is one more thing to remember. Once you’ve made your garden an electrical magnet, make sure you get out of it the minute you hear thunder!