Don't let lawn obsession override Earth consideration

Joye Brown

May 4, 2008

It was well into a warm, dark evening when members of the venerable Nassau Hiking & Outdoor Club filed into a room at Eisenhower Park for a lesson in building the perfect Long Island lawn.

Come closer, the instructor said.

And so everybody did, settling down into metal folding chairs. (And being kind enough to let me settle down among them.)

For the next 90 minutes, on one of the first warm evenings of the season, we learned of corn gluten. And nematodes. About compost tea. Earthworms. Mail-order ladybugs.

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About the multitude of creatures, great and microscopically small, ready, willing and perfectly able to make lawns perfect.

But let's stop right here for a minute.

Somewhere today, in Nassau and Suffolk, somebody's pouring chemicals onto a great Long Island lawn. (Or they are laying out synthetic turf, to give the illusion of it.)

These few weeks are critical, experts say, for great summer greenery. Now's the time to feed the lawn, sow seed, and stop weeds in their tracks.

"When you travel around the country you don't see lawns like you see on Long Island," Vinnie Drzewucki, a Farmingdale State-trained horticulturist, said Friday. "It's an obsession here, which is a good thing and a bad thing."

The "good thing" is in full bloom everywhere.

There are blocks and blocks of homes in Massapequa, for example, where postage-stamp-sized lawns are so well-manicured that I would not be stunned to learn that homeowners tend each blade by hand.

And because times are tight, according to garden center stores I checked in Nassau and Suffolk, more and more residents appear to be taking on work that in years past they might have left to expert gardeners and lawn-care services.

All of which brings us to the "bad thing" about Lawn Island.

While pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers get the job done, they leach into the groundwater and are the largest source of pollutants in local waterways.

That's why municipalities in both counties are taking measures to try to limit them.

It's relatively easy to get and keep a great lawn, using chemicals - which basically kill most of the beneficial organisms in the soil.

It's hard to seed the microorganisms that will aerate and fertilize the soil, that will help the perfect Long Island lawn grow.

Or so I was whining to Drzewucki (JA-UUH-SKEE), who puts his training and comforting manner to good use - as the horticultural information specialist at Hicks Nurseries in Westbury, one of the few on Long Island with a large organic lawn section - helping residents make the transition.

"It's not hard," he cooed. "A lot of folks are new to this. It takes time, but your goal is to put life back into the soil and then do what's necessary to let the organisms do their thing."

But now, let's get back to that night at Eisenhower Park, where we've reached the end of our Organic Lawn 101 class.

We know we need to test our soil (which, locally, tends toward acidic); and not be stingy with compost.

We know to seed heavily, with fescue and other grasses.

We know to cut the lawn long and water less often, but give it time enough to let the water seep at least 3 inches into the soil. (Which we test by using a spade and our fingers to see how deeply the water has settled.)

We know corn gluten will keep weeds from growing. And we know to look for earthworms - a lot of them means we're making progress. We also know we're in for some hard physical labor, at least at the beginning.

"I'm thinking of killing my lawn and starting fresh," a man in the back says.

We'll do anything, for that perfect Long Island lawn.