Why do people bag grass these days?

[David Weaver]

This is just a side comment of mine, coming from a long line of farmers I guess -

Why do people bag grass? Unless you don't have a mulching mower, I can't imagine a good reason to do it unless your grass is so tall that the mower can't make it through on a mulching cut.

My neighbor bags his grass and has been doing it for years. His yard looks like it's starving for nutrients, and on the opposite side down the street I have neighbors who bag their grass and then resort to fertilizing their yards to make up for it.

It's more work, it takes longer, why bother?

[Brian Elfert]

My father catches the grass almost all the time. My mother has a large garden that he dumps the grass on to use as mulch. He won't put the grass on the garden if he has recently applied weed killer. My mother will compost some of the grass if the garden is well covered in grass. I mulch when I mow. I am currently looking at a used riding mower that has a mulching deck and no option not to mulch.

[Mark Patoka]

From observing the neighbors on my block that bag grass, they don't want any of the clippings to distract from their perfectly manicured lawn. They are the same ones that also blow the grass clippings from the yard and driveway into the street or their neighbors lawn (so it becomes someone else's problem) and then spray or dump more chemical on the lawn, all in the sake of having the perfect green lawn. I know they are the fastidious type as they also wash and wax their cars at least once a week, apparently having much more time on their hands then I do.

My wife gardens organically so we don't use chemical weed killers. I will either mulch the clippings back into the lawn or bag them and mix them with sawdust in my compost tumbler or compost pile.

[Andrew Pitonyak]

I was lead to believe (I did not verify) that if you "mulch" in too much too quickly, you can get some sort of build-up (or even thatch), which can then inhibit growth. I am of the opinion that done properly, thatch will not be a problem from mulching.

I think that you have trouble if you let the grass grow too long then your mower cannot mulch it properly (make it small enough) and you may just have too much of it even if you can.

I am one of the few in my neighborhood that does not bother to bag unless I have a particular use for the clippings. When I want clippings, however, I usually just get them from my neighbors who do bag.

[Mike Ontko]

I'll bag on some weeks during the summer, just to keep down on the amount of clippings I'm leaving behind. If they don't break down properly they can contribute to thatch buildup. Or if the grass was too long to mulch thoroughly, the unmulched clippings that are left to sit on top of the lawn (often in clumps) can burn the grass as they breakdown. When I do bag though, I either add the clippings to my own compost bin or put them in my green yard & food waste recycling container.

Ditto what Mark mentioned about adding sawdust (depends on the wood type) into the compost mix.

[David Weaver]

We no longer use weed killers, either, with the exception of that I will use a small amount of 2-4D and triclopyr because I haven't found any other way to control ground ivy, but only once a year and only sprayed directly on the ground ivy.

When I first moved into the neighborhood, I treated the yard three times a year and then I realized that it just made my weekly mowing take longer. Couple that with the fact that a single plant type of uniform lawn with no bugs in it or under it and no weeds being a "healthy lawn" is a farce, and having kids that are in the yard often, and it smites me a little bit to even use 2-4D and triclopyr on the ground ivy.

I understand why people like their yard to look artificially healthy, I'm just out of that as being an all appearance and no substance kind of thing. (even then, I didn't bag the grass).

I don't know what the value of grass clippings is for gardening, but there's plenty else available (leaves, etc) to compost in my yard, so it never crossed my mind.

Most of the people in the neighborhood who bag put it out for the trash.

The other thing we used to do semi-religiously when I was a kid was roll the lawn with a drum filled with sand.

[David Weaver]

I was lead to believe (I did not verify) that if you "mulch" in too much too quickly, you can get some sort of build-up (or even thatch), which can then inhibit growth. I am of the opinion that done properly, thatch will not be a problem from mulching.

I think that you have trouble if you let the grass grow too long then your mower cannot mulch it properly (make it small enough) and you may just have too much of it even if you can.

I am one of the few in my neighborhood that does not bother to bag unless I have a particular use for the clippings. When I want clippings, however, I usually just get them from my neighbors who do bag.

Yeah, from experience as a kid in a heavy wet yard with a non-mulching mower, thatch was an issue. But it was sort of one of those things that was an issue if you were standing right over the grass where it was thatched. If you were viewing across the grass, you couldn't see it. I guess if it got thick enough, it could be a bigger problem. The grass that comes out of the honda mulcher is bits no longer than about 3/4" and no matter how heavy, I've never had a buildup of it - the mulching feature is a good one, even though it's power hungry.

[Mark Bolton]

We use to bag a lot for the mulch factor. True the leaves and other sources are there but your already mowing so it's easy to bag and pile them. Some of our best garden beds were mulched heavily with grass and fall leaves mowed from the yard. That said when I didn't have time to garden the mower went into mulching mode and done.

I have never seen the logic in a manicured lawn. Seems like an utter waste of time and resources to me not to mention the devastating effects of the runoff. If it's green and I can walk on it with bare feet im fine.

[Steve Rozmiarek]

I'm a farmer, and I'm ashamed to admit that I use a bagger mower. The chickens get some of the clippings so it doesn't all go to waste, but I still know better. I do it because I'm too cheap to buy the different deck that it would take to make the mower mulch properly.

[Ole Anderson]

I bag primarily because I get a lot of litter from my trees which are mostly cottonwoods and maples. I wish I didn't have to bag, but I value the look of my lawn. Most of the neighbors don't have my problem though, and they have a lawn service which rarely bag, nor do they "mulch", they just blow it out over the previously cut strip using big zero turn mowers. My pet peeve question would be "why do people insist on driving in the left lane?", but I will save that for another time.

[James Tibbetts]

I bag simply because it keeps it from all coming back in the house on the dog.

[David Weaver]

I'm a farmer, and I'm ashamed to admit that I use a bagger mower. The chickens get some of the clippings so it doesn't all go to waste, but I still know better. I do it because I'm too cheap to buy the different deck that it would take to make the mower mulch properly.

well, if you remove too much organic material from the yard, you can put some chicken poop on it and the grass will grow like a rocket. I knew a guy (before I lived in the burbs - he was a chicken farmer) who put chicken poop on his lawn sparsely because he didn't want to pay for nitrogen. He only did that once - the grass grew way too fast for him once it was feeding on the chicken poop.

[Bruce Page]

I tried mulching several years ago without much success. Our climate is so dry that the clippings just build up. After a few weeks I had no choice but to bag it. (pun intended)

[Ryan Mooney]

We no longer use weed killers, either, with the exception of that I will use a small amount of 2-4D and triclopyr because I haven't found any other way to control ground ivy, but only once a year and only sprayed directly on the ground ivy.

Just plant some walnuts :D A buddy has a big old walnut tree in his yard and you can clearly see where the drip line on it is because that's where the ivy stops and the grass starts (there are some grasses that do quite well under walnuts - although not all are "lawn" quality).

On the chicken side - I helped the same friend put together a chicken tractor and we ran it around one of the more barren stretches of his yard for a few months (meat chickens). This was really BAD soil where only a few spindly unnattracitve weeds had ever grown since he'd had the place. For a good 3+ years after that there were lush strips of grass popping up where ever the tractor had gone through. I think it was also that the chickens had dug up and eaten all of the weed seeds as well (although where the grass came from I have no idea - it wasn't seeded by humans anyway).

[David Weaver]

Chicken tractors!!

I'd like to have a new fireside chat...we'll make sure there's a chicken tractor in every yard!

[Phil Thien]

I use a bag only during fall, to get the leaves. My Lawn-Boy mower does a pretty good job chopping the leaves so I only have to empty the bag maybe 8-10 times. I don't have a large lawn, but this still goes quite a bit faster than trying to rake leaves.

Grass clipper are mostly water, they seem to break-down pretty quickly. I have my mowers wheels adjusted to leave the grass pretty long, this seems to help quite a bit with weeds.

I also avoid chemicals on the lawn. I think my environmentalism is lost cause, though. Almost all my neighbors put stuff on the lawn, the runoff goes into the river and then the lake, and I drink the treated lake water. I hate this.

One thing is for sure, the people around me are crazy about their lawns.

[Larry Frank]

When the grass gets so long because I have not been able to mow due to weather issues, I will rake the grass to keep from having a bunch of brown grass on top. Also, if there is too much grass the dogs track it in and make a mess.

I like my blue grass yard (along with fescue and rye grasses) and want it to look nice

To bag or not to bag....that is the question....

[Steve Rozmiarek]

Chicken tractors, get a chuckle out of that name everytime I hear it. My brother told me he made one, I had no idea what he was talking about, but was admiring the clever movable chicken pen/hutch/gadget when it dawned on me. Chicken poop is powerful stuff. I farm a piece of ground that had it applied many years ago, and its elemental trace still shows up when I look at soil samples there.

[Jim Rimmer]

I always chuckle in the spring time when nearly all the people in Houston pay yard crews to clean all the leaves and grass clippings and other natural organic materials from their flower beds and then go buy mulch to put in the beds. :D

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Like Bruce, in our dry climate, thatch doesn't break down well, so I bag it. I have tried many organic, eco-friendly methods of dealing with thatch haven't found any that work well for me yet. Our grass clippings (we can't use bags except during late fall and winter months so we use cans) are picked up weekly and used at a local compost company as are out tree trimmings, wood scraps etc.

As far as weed killers and pesticides, I use them both. We have a lot of noxious weeds in our area. We have 2 water systems. One water system is treated for domestic indoor use. The other system is irrigation that comes from reservoirs in the nearby mountains to a lake on the edge of town by way of open canals. From the lake it is pumped via it's own pipe system. This system is unfiltered or treated and we get a lot of noxious weed seeds from weeds present in the farming areas along the canals. Thus, if you didn't do something, your yard would literally be all weeds. We have nearby neighbors that don't do anything and their yards are horrible. One neighbor spent some serious money trying to filter the weeds seeds from his sprinkler system. The result was that his filters required constant care. He has since quit using the filters. It's easier to spray.

For the first time in a couple years, I am about to go outside and use a pesticide on the lawn and our 30 arborvitaes in the back yard. Red spider mites have set in on the trees and are doing damage.

[Mel Fulks]

Real thatch is a mat of shallow roots often caused by too shallow and frequent waterings. Grass clippings are not thatch.
Only really matters when you are diagnosing and treating lawn problems. The clippings are good for the grass according to
plant PhDs . Some just don't like to see clippings,just make sure you and lawn service are understanding each other.

[David Weaver]

I don't have any serious environmental opposition to lawn pesticides. I think pesticides and herbicides used on residential lawns are mid single digits of total pesticides and herbicides used (and probably fertilizer, or even more than that as far as fertilizer goes). I don't use them on my yards because they've got some statistical association to dogs having bladder cancer, etc, and I don't want them in my yard when i've got a garden right in the middle of it.

I also feel a lot less annoyed when the inevitable three dry week period occurs in the middle of july and my yard burns off.

The strongest 2-4D smell I have ever encountered was on a high dollar golf course. And it was being applied in the middle of the day - it was so pungent because there was so much of it that it was incredible. They didn't want any single broadleaf to be able to grow anywhere. I'd hate to be the guy who was applying it all day.

[Ted Calver]

I bag if the lawn has gotten too long to mulch, usually the first cutting in the spring or if we've been on vacation. The recycling facility just a mile away takes grass clippings, leaves and other herbaceous green stuff, composts it and sells it back to us for $14 a yard. It's actually pretty good stuff but I have always wondered about the chemical residue.

[Kevin Bourque]

well, if you remove too much organic material from the yard, you can put some chicken poop on it and the grass will grow like a rocket. I knew a guy (before I lived in the burbs - he was a chicken farmer) who put chicken poop on his lawn sparsely because he didn't want to pay for nitrogen. He only did that once - the grass grew way too fast for him once it was feeding on the chicken poop.

We used chicken poop on our hay fields last year. Smelled so bad I almost had to move out of the house!!


As far as mowing is concerned...I usually cut the grass on the farm when its pretty high. I use a tractor with a side discharge mower and the clippings get pretty thick. However, each time I cut the grass I change the direction of my cutting path so I'm not throwing new clippings onto the old ones. It also prevents tire ruts from forming. Everything looks great.

[Tom M King]

I bag simply because it keeps it from all coming back in the house on the dog.

We bag our dog yards too, but those are the only ones that use the bagger mower.

[Rick Potter]

In my area, most people have a lawn service, and I have never seen one that didn't bag the clippings. They go in the big green barrel the city provides to each house for lawn and garden trimmings. Green barrel for this, blue barrel for recycling, black barrel for garbage.

[Larry Edgerton]

Oh, you're talking about lawn clipping.........

Larry

[David Weaver]

In my area, most people have a lawn service, and I have never seen one that didn't bag the clippings. They go in the big green barrel the city provides to each house for lawn and garden trimmings. Green barrel for this, blue barrel for recycling, black barrel for garbage.

Some people here use the services, some bag and some don't. When I have been in resort areas/towns, I've noticed all of the places bag the grass, too (I mention resort areas, because those are the places where you're likely to see a lawn service working from one end of a street all the way to another hitting every single property - stone harbor and avalon come to mind. They have tiny amounts of lawn though and everyone gets their grass fertilized as well as bagged.

[Paul McGaha]

We moved into our house when it was built in 1995. On the advice of a lawn care service working for one of our neighbors we started bagging our grass. He said it was better for the yard.

Around here the grass needs a lot of TLC to look good. Thatch removal, aeration every year. Fertilizing and seeding also.

I'd say most of the people in our neighborhood bag their grass.

PHM

[David Weaver]

We used chicken poop on our hay fields last year. Smelled so bad I almost had to move out of the house!!



Yeah, what's in it...a lot of ammonia or something? It's pretty nasty, and double nasty when it bakes in the sun. A few decades ago, someone put a chicken farm in next to my grandparents' farm. I don't know how many chickens, probably about a million (it's an egg operation now), but when they had no takers for their manure, they put it on fields adjacent to their buildings. Eventually, you could smell it in the well water at my grandparents' farm (hand dug well for the house, separate well elsewhere for the livestock originally. Not sure how deep the hand dug well was, but shallow enough that it was affected). And then after that, you could see a reddish tint in the water, which was due to who knows what. The chicken farm paid to have a filter system put in their house, but you could still smell it in the water. My grandparents died not long after (unrelated, they were old), so I don't know what the final resolution ever was. But chicken poop is nasty stuff!!

[Brian Elfert]

Some people here use the services, some bag and some don't. When I have been in resort areas/towns, I've noticed all of the places bag the grass, too (I mention resort areas, because those are the places where you're likely to see a lawn service working from one end of a street all the way to another hitting every single property - stone harbor and avalon come to mind. They have tiny amounts of lawn though and everyone gets their grass fertilized as well as bagged.

I suspect those areas have an HOA that maintains the grass so the HOA contracts with one company for everyone's lawns. Otherwise, I don't see how everyone would use the same landscape company. Over time you would think some of the homeowners would have jumped ship for another landscape company that offered a lower price.

[David Weaver]

When the lawns are as small as they are in a place like avalon, and the workers look like illegals, it's probably tough to beat the company who is just marching down the street from lawn to lawn in terms of price. They can also pitch to the homeowners that there will never be a day that their yard is not cut and their neighbor's is, because they do them all at once. There are lawns on some of those properties that I'll bet aren't more than 100 square feet - they're just a little grass behind the sidewalk, and then it's gardens and a building.

[Curt Harms]

[QUOTE=David Weaver;2269562]Yeah, what's in it...a lot of ammonia or something? /QUOTE]

I think so. Ammonia is turned into nitrogen via natural processes. As I recall from many years ago so may be wrong, NH3 + H20 -> NH4 -> naturally occurring microbes ->NO3 which is a form used by plants. Nitrogen can REALLY make grass go nuts.

[David Weaver]

Yeah, I wasn't even thinking about that...we don't call the dry fert used in this side of the country by the same thing the midwest does anhydrous ammonia. My family / relatives have been out of farming for decades now, and corn didn't have the dominant position that it does now, and the rotation was more of a rotation. It may be that the anhydrous ammonia is more common here now, too. But you're right, I didn't even think of the nitrogen being delivered via anhydrous ammonia.

[Mel Fulks]

I've heard some of the lawn foods have reduced the nitrogen content to comply with standards for improving the Chesapeake bay. And the government message will increasingly be more rules and taxes on those products and ads saying
clippings should be left in place. I've noticed more people are using the powered leaf blowers to pile clippings, that way
they can pollute and make noise for hours at a time.

[David Weaver]

If you live in a neighborhood like mine (with quarter to half acre lots), there is pretty much no time on a weekend day that the weather is nice that you don't hear a whole bunch of lawnmowers or leaf blowers.

[Dave Sheldrake]

I got a pellet press to deal with all the grass cuttings, the local farmers take it away for me or it gets dried and used for kittylitter :)

cheers

Dave

[David Weaver]

I got a pellet press to deal with all the grass cuttings, the local farmers take it away for me or it gets dried and used for kittylitter :)

cheers

Dave

As in like one of the chinese pellet presses that makes feed shaped pellets, but requires the fodder to go through a hammermill first?

[Dave Sheldrake]

Noooo it's a complete unit that takes damp grass in, crushes and feeds pellets out. Hydraulic screw driven rather than just two round rollers A lot of my MDF waste goes the same way after going through a 15hp garden shredder / crusher.

cheers

Dave

[Steve Rozmiarek]

I think you are right on the process Curt. Meth heads have screwed up the NH3 option pretty much everywhere. Cost a stupid amount to protect all the tanks and infrastructure from them hurting themselves, so costs are way up. I have no idea what they do with it, but there isn't much brainpower involved.

[Dave Sheldrake]

It's a precursor chemical for cooking Meth Steve, same here with all precursor chemicals, while theft isn't a problem the paperwork all has to be in order for inspections.

cheers

Dave

[Myk Rian]

We cut the grass, let it rot, and never water it. No way am I going to run my well for grass.
If it dies in August, so be it. It'll come back first rain.

[Larry Klaaren]

I bag in the back yard where the pool is located. Otherwise kids tear around the yard, get grass on their feet, and it ends up in the pool. The front I mulch. I can not tell the difference by looking at them.

[Lee Schierer]

What I've noticed since I started sweeping our lawn to remove excess clippings is that the weed count has dropped significantly without the use of chemicals.