Homeowners who demand the spiffy appearance of a raked lawn but still want a healthy lawn have several options. They may compost their grass clippings and then return the compost to the lawn. They may use a side-discharge mower and cut two days in succession. The first cut will leave rows of clippings to dry on the lawn; the second cut will disintegrate those clippings and pretty much make them disappear. Finally, there are "mulching" mowers with blades that chop green grass clippings into tiny pieces and drops them below the mower where they are unnoticeable.
Grass clippings, especially spring grass, are very high in nitrogen, similar to the best horse or cow manure. Anyone who has piled up fresh grass clippings has noticed how rapidly they heat up, how quickly the pile turns into a slimy, airless, foul-smelling anaerobic mess, and how much ammonia may be given off. Green grass should be thoroughly dispersed into a pile, with plenty of dry material. Reserve bags of leaves from the fall or have a bale of straw handy to mix in if needed. Clippings allowed to sun dry for a few days before raking or bagging behave much better in the compost heap.
Greensand. See Rock dust.
Hair contains ten times the nitrogen of most manures. It resists absorbing moisture and readily compresses, mats, and sheds water, so hair needs to be mixed with other wetter materials. If I had easy access to a barber shop, beauty salon, or poodle grooming business, I'd definitely use hair in my compost. Feathers, feather meal and feather dust (a bird's equivalent to hair) have similar qualities.
Hay. In temperate climates, pasture grasses go through an annual cycle that greatly changes their nutrient content. Lawn grasses are not very different. The first cuttings of spring grass are potent sources of nitrogen, high in protein and other vital mineral nutrients. In fact, spring grass may be as good an animal feed as alfalfa or other legume hay. Young ryegrass, for example, may exceed two percent nitrogen-equaling about 13 percent protein. That's why cattle and horses on fresh spring grass frisk around and why June butter is so dark yellow, vitamin-rich and good-flavored.
In late spring, grasses begin to form seed and their chemical composition changes. With the emergence of the seed stalk, nitrogen content drops markedly and the leaves become more fibrous, ligninous, and consequently, more reluctant to decompose. At pollination ryegrass has dropped to about l percent nitrogen and by the time mature seed has developed, to about 0.75 percent.
These realities have profound implications for hay-making, for using grasses as green manures, and for evaluating the C/N of hay you may be planning to use in a compost heap. In earlier times, making grass hay that would be nutritious enough to maintain the health of cattle required cutting the grass before, or just at, the first appearance of seed stalks. Not only did early harvesting greatly reduce the bulk yield, it usually meant that without concern for cost or hours of labor the grass had to be painstakingly dried at a time of year when there were more frequent rains and lower temperatures. In nineteenth-century England, drying grass was draped by hand over low hurdles, dotting each pasture with hundreds of small racks that shed water like thatched roofs and allowed air flow from below. It is obvious to me where the sport of running hurdles came from; I envision energetic young countryfolk, pepped up on that rich spring milk and the first garden greens of the year, exuberantly racing each other across the just-mowed fields during haying season.
