Organic Lawn Maintenance – or the Devon Red and Green Woodpecker
Edwards Garden Services provides sustainable lawn maintenance programmes, across Bristol, BANES, North Somerset, South Gloucestershire.
The British lawn, just another crop monoculture, weed and pest free, a quality product targeting maximum yield from those all-important lawn grass species. For the organic gardener, to achieve these intensive results, what are the options without the unsustainable use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides? Or a convenient grazing animal and a hungry woodpecker.
If there was one thing the British could always be relied upon to claim the upper hand over their European neighbours, it was the superiority, above everything else, of the British lawn. Its lush, velvety splendour. The essential canvas made an art form though the English Landscape movement. Though gone are the days when after a few years you would simply replace your exhausted meadow with lush new turf, conveniently lifted from the South Downs or other reluctant wilderness. Now, the cosmetic surgery is brutal and intensive. The array of chemicals, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides that are routinely poured down upon UK lawns is shocking. Now being replaced by plastic and confused pets.
Even the keenest environmentally friendly gardener seems to lose all perspective when it comes to the lawn. The red mist (or selective herbicide) descends when the buttercup and dandelion remorselessly creep their way into the velvety carpet.
Thankfully, there is a change in the air as ecological gardening continues its advance as the acceptable norm. Like much of our gardening approach, it centres around treating garden features as habitat, a semi-enclosed ecosystem where nutrients are re-cycled within the system, and above (or below) everything is looking after a healthy soil.
Happy mowing!