General

Investing time and money into the value of your home is important. Our homes are some of the largest investments we’ll ever make and obviously we want them to be presentable. The effort to achieve a perfect looking lawn though is really a rather new thing since the 1950’s. With each year that passes companies have found more and more ways to add costs to maintaining a beautiful lawn. If you’ve never added up how much your grass has been costing you, the numbers may be surprising. Let’s break down how much it truly costs to keep a lawn looking as green as possible. The first problem with attempting to figure out an average cost is that there’s a lot of different services you can do for your lawn. Not everyone is using pesticides for instance. Another obvious problem is most lawns are different sizes and shapes. Plus lawns exist in different climates meaning they require different things. For our purposes, let’s look at the cost of maintaining a one acre lawn in the Finger Lakes region. To make things a little more simple, we’ll just talk about the cost of maintenance, assuming the lawn is already installed. Here’s a quick list, but I’ve broken down the math in each section below. Lawn Mower Costs For a one-acre lot, it’s likely that you’ll want a riding mower. After a quick look on Home Depot’s website, a medium-sized riding mower with at least a 46″ deck starts at $2,800. At the top end, they list a Toro 48″ zero-turn for $6,800. You won’t need a $7k lawn mower of course, but for a 46-48″ deck you’ll average $4,000 just to buy new. Technically, a mower should have annual tune-ups that include cleaning the deck, sharpening blades, and greasing gears plus a few other things. Depending on the size of the mower and what you want done, an annual tune up averages about $50 to $150. (Of course if you’re handy and up for the task you can save money by doing it yourself.) With a $4,000 mower that you keep ten years, that averages about $500 annually. Remember: we didn’t even talk about the cost of gas you’re using to fuel it or any other maintenance costs! If you’re looking for a total on your lawn care cost estimate, you’ll want to add those costs. Watering Watering costs will depend on two things: 1. How green you want your lawn, and 2. How much rain you’re getting. Usually in the Finger Lakes springtime means more rain. Unless it’s an unusually dry spring or you’re doing a new lawn install, you probably won’t need to water the first couple of months after the thaw. Once we hit late June the rain usually comes less frequently and grasses tend to slow their growth. If it’s a particularly dry summer, they may even go dormant. Even with water being the cheapest of a homeowner’s utilities, if you water regularly it’ll add up. To keep […]

Naturally Green is embarking on a third phase! I started as a lawn and landscape design company in 1989. Then in 1994 things moved to the airwaves and the Naturally Green radio show began. Weekly the hour-long show talked about all things gardening in the Rochester area and ran twenty-six years. During the lawn and landscape phase, I maintained over a hundred lawns for quite a few years. Lawns require a significant amount of maintenance when they have sun and decent soil, but even more work when poor soils, shade, tree roots, lack of rain, and pests challenge the goal of a green carpet. I regularly encouraged people to do something else in shady areas or on steep slopes. (The seed companies should really market the “shady” grass seed as “less sunny” grass seed, but of course they would sell less of it.) My Own Lawn-lessness When we bought our house in 1992, it had the traditional lawn with a couple of shrubs along the foundation of the house. Immediately I used newspaper covered with mulch to smother the grass and let it compost in place. I wasn’t trying to create a nature sanctuary then–I just didn’t want to mow the yard 25-30 times a year! Through my landscape business I found trees and shrubs that needed a second chance and brought them home for a new life. Our Hinoki Cypress and Japanese Maples were being thrown away by a nursery and the Kousa Dogwood had to be replaced with a new one for a landscape customer. My favorite plant in our front yard was a gift from a lawn customer. I mentioned how beautiful their Ironwood (Carpinus Caroliniana) was in their backyard. It was easy to recognize because a nursery owner in Rome, NY (Parker Scripture) had planted one of these in my parent’s yard sometime around 1975. I loved watching that tree change throughout the seasons. Several years after I noticed the Ironwood my clients found a seedling of the tree and gave it to me. This 3-4 inch seedling thrived amidst the Goldenrod and wild Asters, as well as St. John’s Wort, Siberian Iris, and Sweet Woodruff, but you couldn’t see it for most of the year. Twenty-five years later it is thirty feet high and has forced the Goldenrod to move out to the tree belt. I didn’t set out to create a landscape that would change so drastically over several decades, but I’ve grown to love the changes that have transpired. For the past 10-15 years I have only watered the front yard a couple of times if we were experiencing a severe drought. Even though last summer was extremely dry, I didn’t need to water at all. There are virtually no weeds because the ground is covered with plants. My tree lawn area has some field grasses in it that have been hard to remove because they are grown intertwined with lots of daffodils, Black-Eyed Susans, and Common Milkweed, but these grasses fit in […]