Sustainable Lawn Care: Part I of my 3x3 Course

Today is a wonderful day! Releasing our free course called 3x3: Nine keystone actions you can take today for a healthier lawn and landscape.

Here is the audio of the first lesson for you. The workbook, videos, and graphics are all available for free at MinnesotaGardening.com.

Want to switch to more environmentally-responsible landscape and lawn care practices but don't know where to start?

Join our movement bringing together Midwest homeowners so that we can to make the world a better place for our kids and grandkids by building up strong local ecosystems for songbirds, pollinators, and our families to thrive.

Learn more at MinnesotaGardening.com.

Chapters

• 2:48 3x3 Course
• 6:01 Sustainable Lawn Care Action Items

Transcript

Brad Tabke (00:08.238)
Hello and welcome my friend to the Minnesota Gardening Podcast. My name is Brad Tabke. I'm the host and founder here at MinnesotaGardening.com and I'm so, happy to have you here with us today where we are a group of homeowners transitioning to more environmentally friendly lawn and landscape practices where we are also learning to feed pollinators, eliminate chemicals, store carbon and save clean water in our home landscapes. And so today I have the audio

from a brand new free course that we have available just for you at minnesota gardening.com is called three by three. And it's nine actions you can take today on improving the environmental friendliness of your lawn and landscape. So I'm pretty excited about it. Again, it's just totally a free course and I want you to go check it out. And so this is the first two lessons, the welcome and the sustainable lawn care lesson from three by three, nine ways you can act right now, take keystone actions,

right now to make the world a better place with more environment and friendly landscape and lawn. So head to minnesota gardening.com. You can download the workbook again, all of it for free and check it out today. Hello and welcome my friend. My name is Brad Tabke. I am the founder and host here at Minnesota gardening and I'm super excited to have you here for our free course. It's called three by three, where we give you nine actionable items where you can

take today in your home lawn and landscape to make it more environmentally responsible. And so we all have a lot of work to do around environmental responsibility and our home landscape is a great place to start. It's the number one place where we have autonomy, we have the ability to get things done, and we're going to give you nine things you can do, maybe more. So stick around to the end that you can do today in order to help with that. So we are going to get right started here with a quick welcome.

just want to let you know that this is broken in to three different sections. So we have a welcome section, we have three different pieces where you can continue to learn. So we've got three keystone items here around sustainable lawn care, environmental landscape and planting helpful plants. And so we've got three keystone actions that you can take in each of these three areas.

Brad Tabke (02:26.359)
And so how we learn here at Minnesota gardening, we give people what they need and how they want to grow and learn. So you've got video, as we've got right here, we've also got a written section where you can go into each of the lessons at Minnesota gardening and the three by three course and check everything out there. And everything's a little bit different. So we highly recommend that you go through and check them all out. And then also make sure to download the workbook that is just below this video here. So download the workbook and you can print it off if you want, you can use it. It's

available PDFs. And so it gives you more information and context around the different things that we've got going on and helps you follow along with what we are learning here at Minnesota gardening. So here in Minnesota gardening, just so you know who we are, we're community of homeowners in the upper Midwest switching to more environmentally friendly lawn and landscape practices. And so we're working on being more responsible so that we are able to fit within our framework of feeding pollinators.

eliminating chemicals, saving water and storing carbon in order so that we can learn and work together on making the world a better place. So we will dive right into sustainable lawn care in the next in the next section. So right below this has a next lesson. And so you can head to that first lesson and we'll get started in sustainable lawn care. And so if you stick around to the end, we've got a lot of really great things going on here within these each of these lessons.

And if you have any questions, if you need anything, there's a comment section below. You can ask comments and our great community will help to answer those questions and roll from there. So I will see you again in the next lesson all about sustainable lawn care. All right. The next section that we're going to roll with is lawn care. And so if you haven't watched the welcome video, my name is Brad Tabke, host and founder here at Minnesota Gardening. And so we are going to talk now about lawn care and sustainable lawn care. And so this is one of my favorite

graphics on lawn care and this comes from the University of Minnesota and What this does a great job of showing is the differences between not just the top growth and what you see in the lawn It also shows what happens underneath the ground and underneath the ground is actually really really important So here at Minnesota gardening we like to work together with the natural cycles of things and how things generally happen in nature and how that looks

Brad Tabke (04:45.517)
when you're in the woods or when you're in the prairie or how that is. And sustainable lawn care is no different. Problem with lawns is the fact that lawns weren't meant to grow here. They just simply aren't meant to grow here. They are native to other regions in the world. Scotland has a very different climate, a lot more rain, a lot cooler, doesn't have the seasonal changes that we have here in the upper Midwest. And that causes big problems with lawn care. And so we have to use

lot of water. We have to use a lot of chemicals. We have to use a lot of fertilizer. Petroleum based fertilizer is what's generally used in order to get this grass to grow into this utopian perfect world. So it's no secret here at Minnesota Gardening that I am not a fan of lawns. They're pretty unnecessary. And especially the way that we take care of them, there's a ton of inputs, there's a ton of time, a ton of energy that is just unnecessary and

The results that we get from lawns are extremely problematic. the, lawn that is taken care of in a typical suburban normal lawn type system doesn't have any food for pollinators. doesn't store any carbon whatsoever. doesn't, uses a ton of chemicals. uses a lot of water and it's highly problematic on a lot of reasons. And it's just genuinely unhealthy. There are so many studies that are coming forward right now.

about the dangers and carcinogenic parts of using pesticides in our lawns. And then as I said earlier, fertilizers are all petroleum based, generally petroleum based. And so it's a really highly problematic thing. So what we want to do to get the most out of our lawns without having to put a ton of inputs into there and spend a ton of time and energy is to work with the natural cycle of our lawns.

And so with that, we want to focus on fall as the best time because it gets two seasons of growth before it gets that really hard summer season in order to beef them up. And so we're going to talk about three keystone items you can take here in lawn care. So number one thing you can do in lawn care is mow higher.

Brad Tabke (06:53.933)
There are really important reasons for this. You want to mow to the highest setting you have at least four inches high on your mower. And so it'll make it look a little shaggy and a little different than what you're used to normally seeing. But what this does is it shades the ground so that it doesn't lose water. We don't have evaporation of the water. There's more water that stays in the ground. And then that also helps the plant to grow longer roots and to access more water in the ground. And so you want to mow higher is the number one thing you can do.

to avoid your lawn from going into dormancy and avoid your lawn having a lot of weeds in it and go from there. Number two in our list of nine things is fertilize only one time in the fall. We've been sold a bill of goods that we need to fertilize all the time and we need to have this perfectly green lawn all the time and that we need to use a ton of petroleum based fertilizers on our lawns. And so we don't

In fact, need to do that. We don't need to have these perfect lawns that look like center field at target field or the, know, the force fairway and your favorite golf course. We don't need our lawns to look like that. We need our lawns to be useful for our families. need to lawns to be safe for our families and using a ton of chemicals and fertilizer is not the way to do that. So what we recommend for a good enough lawn that will not embarrass you in front of your neighbors. It will take care of things.

And actually what it will also do is a really important piece is it reduces erosion. so it doesn't have when you don't fertilize turf genuinely needs nitrogen. so when you don't fertilize, it makes the grass really sparse. And so we have a lot of runoff, which ends up having a lot of micronutrients and harmful things from the soils get into the water system. And so we don't want that to have happening. So we want to have a generally healthy lawn that

is fertilized once a year. So you just need to fertilize once a year in the fall when it is hitting that good growth cycle. So right around Labor Day, August 15, whenever that is convenient for you. Sometime in there you want to fertilize with just half a pound of nitrogen, a half pound of organic fertilizer per thousand square feet. And so if that's if in the spring your lawn doesn't look quite the way you want it, you can also fertilize in the spring with the same thing, half a pound of fertilizer, organic fertilizer per thousand square feet. So that's number two.

Brad Tabke (09:10.571)
is fertilize one time in the fall a second time in spring if you need to but don't put as much as the bag says and just do half a pound per thousand square feet and if you have downloaded the workbook there's a little worksheet in there so you can figure out exactly how much that is for your lawn. Number three is stop absolutely stop do not use weed and feed products and so weed and feed products are bagged products that are generally again petroleum fertilizer petroleum based fertilizer with

pesticides in them and so we don't need to be killing all of the weeds by any stretch of the imagination in our lawn you can eliminate the vast majority of your weed control and if there are things that you don't like you can spot spray those don't recommend it generally but you can but what happens with the weed and feed product is it just puts pesticide everywhere and it's extremely harmful it's also significantly pre emergent and so pre emergent are extremely carcinogenic and

they have some big problems that we need to make sure that we are reducing their use as much as you possibly can on your lawn. And if you're a member of Minnesota Gardening, we go into extreme detail about all those kinds of things and help you out there, but just stop using weed and feed. is unnecessary pesticide use. is carcinogenic and cancer causing. And if there are things that you need for reducing and eliminating weeds, you can spot spray where necessary. Thistles, I spray the thistles. I'm not a purist here at Minnesota Gardening.

And so there are things that need to be sprayed and killed things like poison ivy, nettles, that kind of stuff. But the vast majority of the rest of the weeds we let go. So that is the first three items that we have going on here. And so next lesson is environmental landscape. So go to the next lesson. Now you can click the button below and roll there and I'll see you in the next lesson. So I hope you enjoyed that first lesson from Minnesota gardenings three by three course.

free course again for everyone. head to minnesota gardening.com and check it out. Download the workbook. And also while you're there, make sure to check out all the other things we have going on at Minnesota gardening. You can also get a two week free membership to Minnesota gardening. And so we are sustained by members of Minnesota gardening. We help to this content out to

Brad Tabke (11:27.637)
help feed pollinators, help eliminate chemicals, teach you how to save water and store carbon, again, to make the world a better place for your local ecosystem and your neighborhood, your community, and our entire world. And so it's a really important work that we are doing together as a community. And I urge you to check out the membership. So the membership is free for two weeks and it's $37 a month. After that, there's a membership area. There's a curated area where we make sure that

you're not getting any bad information, not like you get on Facebook and Google. You also get access to plant, helpful plants. so it's a giant database, which has all sorts of different plants that are really, really great to be putting in here in the upper Midwest. And the most important part is just a beautiful community of people who are working together to transition to a more environmentally responsible lawn and landscape at their home. And so it is a really great thing.

Share what you've learned, share what your experiences are, and I hope to see you there at MinnesotaGardening.com.