‘Green’ lawncare key for environment: There are more than 20 million domestic garden lawns in the UK and one man is driving a campaign to ensure that British gardeners get the latest and best possible ‘green’ advice on lawncare.

“There is a place for the occasional use of chemicals in lawncare but there is also a rapidly increasing range of totally green options that are just as effective.  I want to ensure that the new breed of specialist lawncare advisors promote this green route,” says Richard Salmon, managing director of ProLawnCareUK.

He has spent his entire career in lawn and grass care and is one of the UK’s foremost experts.   Part of his work is training people who want to establish businesses as domestic lawncare advisors and his two and four day courses focus strongly on the environmentally friendly approach.    He believes that too many professional lawncare advisors rely on strong chemical treatments and over-feeding grass with manufactured, expensive and not kind to the environment Nitrogen.  They do this to ensure a quick-fix and a bright green lawn, deliberately ignoring the more gentle and natural true green alternatives.

“We all want verdant green lawns but trying to force this to happen by applying excessive Nitrogen is neither beneficial to the lawns or environment nor is it sustainable.    Steady rain, and even snow, does deliver useful amounts of nitrogen for free.  The problem comes from torrential rain that can wash it away again.”

There are three cornerstones of his training courses: ensuring lawns are compaction free, having access to balanced nutrition and some basic lawn management tips that home owners can undertake.

The benefits of a lawn being compaction free are:

• Allowing roots to grow deep in search of natural nutrients and water.
• Allowing rain to percolate down to the roots and not waterlogging the lawn.
• Preventing the grass from suffocating and dying through lack of oxygen.

“A compaction free lawn will have a healthy soil microbial population,” says Richard.  “The soil is a larder full of natural nutrients vital to grass and delivers it in a form that the roots can take up.   This way there is no need for synthetic fertilisers.”

With this combined treatment package lawn owners should mow little and often.  Richard believes that mulching is best as nutrients are retained in the leaf and put pack into the soil.  In excessively dry weather irrigate using harvested rainwater.  This combination will create a thick sward that keeps weeds and moss at bay.

“Our 20 million domestic lawns, collectively, cover an area larger than any UK National Park.  Lawn owners have a responsibility to ensure that their small part of such a large area is treated with the utmost respect and care for the environment.  It is important that when lawn owners seek professional help and advice, they are not offered a chemical package that runs counter to this objective.  Once trained they will find that being able to promote themselves as environmentally responsible lawncare experts will be a major sales boost,” says Richard.

Courses run throughout the year in Cambridge

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