Friday, April 30, 2010

Grass Facts

Gardner Turfgrass is pleased to provide an open forum of which you can take advantage of 40 years of experience growing both warm and cool season grasses. Our team of experts include some of the most highly respected minds in the industry today located throughout the world. Ask any grass or sod question no problem is to large or to small.

I'll get us started with the most frequent question I am asked when someone learns what I do for a living is "after 40 years of harvesting sod is your farm now in a hole?"
No sod farming is actually a soil building industry. The fact that we only harvest an area on average of one time per year. Removing at most 1/2 inch of soil is less than the amount of soil being made by the mature grass. How can this be you say? The best explanation I can give is drive or walk in an old neighborhood near your town and look at the grass along the sidewalk. If the area is really old the grass is up off the sidewalk as much as 2 - 3 inches. This is because grass traps particles from the air as well as the decaying of leaf clippings and roots all build new healthy soil. An interesting and little known fact is that turfgrasses trap an estimated 12 million tons of dust and dirt released annually into the atmosphere.

For those of us that keep track of Carbon offsets you also might be interested in knowing that if people recycle their grass clippings, leaving them to decompose on the lawn, the U.S. lawn area could store up to 37 billion pounds of carbon each year.