Lawn mowing; Mulching or Bagging

In My Humble Opinion
21

I mulch. To be clear though, I just leave the clippings there. I’m don’t have the chute on the mower closed for mulching. I’ll change direction as I mow so I’m going over the clippings again, but that’s it. My lawn is very healthy where ever it gets sun, I have never understood the point of bagging or raking, you are just taking the nutrients out of your lawn and throwing them away.

When I had vegetable gardens I would have irrigation troughs between growing mounds and I would rake up some grass to throw in the troughs to compost and keep the weeds down.

22

Only mulching for me. If I were to bag, the only feesible option would be to throw the clippings in the garbage. Which, admittedly, I did do for the first year or so that I was a homeowner. But to dispose of them properly, in my city, is really difficult. City dump (for yard waste) has very restrictive hours and they charge quite a bit for access. The whole dump thing has been a big point of contention for the last 4 or 5 years in the city. In fact, it’s gotten to the point where people will dump old furniture around in random places around the city just to get rid of it.

Anyway, I mulch the vast majority of the time. Sure, sometimes the grass is a bit too tall and it leave those lines of piled up dead grass. But they mostly just blow away or get remulched the next time I mow (and they don’t bother me all that much).
The only time I bag is in fall when the city is actively picking up leaves raked into the street. I found it’s a whole lot easier to use the mower to suck up the leaves than to rake or blow them out there.

23

Ditto, and I figure it the same way…as it decomposes it puts back into the soil what it took out.

Also, Mrs. L gets out the leafblower for the road and sidewalk. Wet grass on the street is a big danger for motorcycles, I’m told. Plus I guess it clogs storm drains.

24

Funny you should mention but I’ve already been considering this. Is it more work to mow every week but without bagging or to mow every other week with the hassle of bagging? I’d better start a new spreadsheet.

For better or for worse, Chicago takes ANYTHING. Right after I bought my place, whoever was cleaning out the house obviously ran out of time and piled literal heaps of stuff in the alley. The previous occupant (aged 95 at the time) had been accumulating stuff since about 1950 and I’m talking furniture, paint cans, jugs of old fertilizers & weed killers, unpronounceable pesticides that had probably been banned in the 60s, rolls of carpet, aerosol cans (some so rusty you couldn’t read them anymore), bed frames, you name it. The heaps actually got pretty scattered around as the roving metal scrappers would dig around in the piles.
After the city garbage truck came, I was shocked to find they not only took the remains but actually swept the alley where stuff (mostly a jar of assorted nuts & bolts broke open) had spilled.

25

Another mulcher; primarily because bagging is such a pain in the ass.

The free fertilizer angle is valid too. When my house was built, the soil was an abominable mix of red clay and whatever kind of crummy fill they added to it to grade it, containing a fair amount of construction debris. Over the years, the decades, the clippings decomposing have created a nice dark soft loamy topsoil that seems fertile and doesn’t turn into cement like the clay did during hot and dry spells.

I core plug aerate ( hire someone ) every year or so to help the lawn breathe through the thatch.

26

The grass and leaves get bagged ( in winter the lawnmower is really just lawn vacuum cleaner)
I alternate dumping the bags onto the mulch pile or it gets taken away by the trash collection people.

27

I don’t do either. I lack a mulching mower, the blades do not recut the clippings into a size considered to be ‘mulch’.

I’m also rural as hell and never worried much about how good the lawn looks. It always recovers from whatever hit it (fire, flood, ruts from tree removal, rocks from snow plowing, my mowing technique) in relatively short order.

28

I do not do either. I live in a rural area without neighbors to keep happy or impress. My mower is capable of either bagging or mulching but I just leave the discharge open and spray the grass.

Mulching only works if you are cutting only a few inches of grass, and you have to go slow. I live in the wet, green, NW corner of Oregon and until the rain stops in July I can almost hear the grass growing. I will not mow more than once per week. And that can be 3 or 4 inches.

It is only an acre of land but I am not stopping to dump 5, 6, whatever bags of grass, so bagging is right out. See that unsightly area on the lawn where the clippings have built up and should have been bagged or mulched?

Yeah, I will be mowing that, again, tomorrow. Been 3 fucking days and if I skip one week we will never recover. Might even mow it in the rain.

29

Call me a bagman. Also in a rural area with a lot of grass to cut. But I grew up in Southern California suburbia. Unbeknownst to me, my Dad successfully brainwashed me (Manchurian Candidate) to believe the only proper lawn was a golf green.

I should point out to those that maintain they are fertilizing by mulching: wrong. You are doing a variant of item 3 below. Plants produce most of their food from photosynthesis, not by taking up soil particulates. When you fertilize plants you do so mainly by applying plant nutrient chemicals mixed with water. Water is what the plant takes up, with the trace nutrients.

(1) I bag because my various lawns look better and I suck up to my brainwashing.

(2) I bag because a thick layer of clippings on dirt are great for weed suppression.

(3) I bag because clippings introduce organic (i.e., non-dirt) components into an otherwise barren earthen surface. Worms eat grass clippings…eventually.

30

Mulch. Our riding mower doesn’t have a bagger, nor would I use it if it did. The push mower had a bag, but it’s long gone. Apart from not wanting the extra hassle involved with bagging and doing something with the clippings, our soil here is pretty awful, so any boost I can give it is a good thing.

As the leaves fall, we do have a mulcher/vac that we tow behind the riding mower, and that all gets dumped into one of the wooded parts of our yard (3 acres total, 2 of which are pretty much woods.)

31

I feel compelled to mention the rule of thumb that only one-third of the length of grass should be cut off in a mowing. Cutting off more than a third is bad for the roots.

32

Your #3 doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t you want organic matter in your soil? Healthy soil needs between 3 and 5% organic matter. That’s what holds onto nutrients and water (and brings air into clay soils).

And you’re wrong about clippings not fertilizing. As the clippings (or any other dead plant material, like alfalfa meal, kelp, distillers grains, feather meal) break down, they release nutrients into the soil, and are held there by the aforementioned organic matter, until the turf needs them.

And it’s not so much worms that eat the grass, it’s microbes. The microbes decompose the clippings. Overuse of chemical fertilizers kills those microbes (and worms in your soil), which stunts the composting process.

33

I don’t mow the current lawn, but in the past I always mulched. If the grass was too long I just ran over it a second time to whisk the clippings into the lower levels.

I feel compelled to point out that thatch is not made of clippings. In fact, leaving your clippings reduces thatch. Thatch is caused by shallow watering. The grass grows small thready roots near the surface to catch the water. If you water deep, and at night, then the roots will grow deep to absorb the water that sinks in. Even with a clay lot, the water will have time to sink down before it evaporates, so the roots will power through and break up the clay to get it. Leaving your clippings provides an easily penetrated layer which gives the water more time to sink in before it evaporates, thus preventing thatch.

34

True that you’re not adding fertilizer brought from elsewhere; but when you bag, by removing the clippings from the lawn, you’re removing nutrients from the lawn. Unless the soil was very poor to start with, if you don’t remove those nutrients, the lawn won’t need any fertilizer.

If you apply those grass clippings to some other field, you’re applying the nutrients in them. If you leave them where they came from, it’s reasonable to say that you’re applying them to the field that they came from.

If you include some clover or other nitrogen-fixer in your lawn mix, your lawn will pull nitrogen out of the air. While much of that nitrogen will be in the roots, some will be in the clippings.

That’s why I’m not bagging. (Well, that and having plenty of work to do without adding an IME entirely unnecessary job on top of it.) I presume you mean that you’re applying the bagged clippings somewhere else on your property that would be otherwise barren?

35

Not to get too off track here, but in my city, how to handle the dump site has become a political issue (with us being the pawns). It comes up at every election (regular and midterm) and everyone says they’re going to ‘fix’ it. For most citizens, a ‘fix’ would be that it’s either open 7 days a week for at least a few hours every day and be either free or some very nominal charge, like two or three dollars. Unfortunately, the director of the DPW is, excuse my language kind of a bitch (and I’ve had direct dealings with her and will confirm that). One of the ways to get a lot of DPW type things fixed would be to fire her (she’s hired, not elected). For whatever reason, the last two or three mayors haven’t chosen to do that, meaning their promises to fix the problem with the dump, don’t happen.

As of right now, they’re open on Thursdays and Saturdays for a few hours. They do not take lumber, building materials, furniture*. You can’t bring more than what fits in a 4x8 trailer (or 3/4 ton pick up), you must be a resident, with ID, but can’t be a contractor.
All they allow right now is appliances (but not furniture), yard waste, motor oil and concrete (but no contractors, remember).

Items not allowed at the dump have to be done by special pick up. Homeowners are allowed one free pick up per year and it has to be less than 7 yards (so, a pile about the size of two couches) and no item can weigh more than 150#. Regarding homeowners that means if you live in an apartment or rent a duplex, you don’t have access to this service*

Anything beyond any of that and you have to haul it out to the county dump and deal with whatever their procedures are.

At one point, the asked residents to drive all their yardwaste out to the country dump on their own ‘to save money’ (despite restricting dump hours and raising property taxes).

*Between no furniture allowed at the dump and renters not being allowed to use curbside pickup, that’s why, as I mentioned earlier, our city has an odd problem with furniture showing up around the city. Like you’ll be walking down the block and find a couch or a dresser or a TV tossed off to the side of the road.

Open the dump to anyone that lives, not owns a house, lives in the city and that problem will mostly take care of itself.

But I digress.

36

That’s what I did before I had a mulching mower. I’m not sure when they first became popular, but I hadn’t even heard of them when I was mowing the grass as a kid.

I was supposed to rake the grass after mowing, and found that, if instead I just ran over the clippings, I wouldn’t have anything to rake.

37

Happy_Lendervedder:

My #3 could have been better written by indicating that I do indeed take the clippings and spread them over other (barren) areas of my property. Yes, they break down and help change the soil characteristics.

I don’t agree that grass clippings act as a worthwhile fertilizing agent. The nutrients in the clippings are a trifle in comparison to what the plant gets with photosynthesis and irrigation.

You are correct. And the process will take 20 years to actually change the soil characteristics. But the clippings are free.

P.S. I do not use purchased fertilizers on any of my grassy areas. Mother Nature and irrigation do just fine.

38

Photosynthesis and irrigation do not create nitrogen or phosphorus, nor any of the other trace elements needed for healthy plants.

39

100% wrong. You aren’t getting nitrogen from the sun or water. Dead grass, whether it’s mulched turf or dried alfalfa meal is an excellent source of both nitrogen for your turf and organic matter for your soil. I say this as a certified organic turf manager.

I live by these rules:

  1. Mulch mow
  2. Mow high
  3. Water deeply (45-60 minutes at a time depending on soil structure)
  4. Overseed every late summer/early fall with a sun/shade grass seed mix. Adding Dutch White clover seed to the mix is also a great way to fill in gaps, fix nitrogen in your soil and keep out more unsightly and unpleasant weeds.

(Optional) 5. If you want to give your lawn a bigger boost of growth and green, add some of this in spring and/or fall.

But again, sun and water won’t fertilize (add nutrients to) your lawn.

40

Even if mulching does not return nutrients to the soil I am still not going to rake or bag because it’s pointless excess work. I’m still considering turning a large portion of my yard into a Christmas tree farm. Those things only need mowing once every 7 years.