Sudbury will host the Ocean River Institute’s Natural Lawn Care for Healthy Soils Challenge on Wednesday, June 8 from 10 am to 1 pm in front of Sudbury Coffee Works.
The initiative is designed to encourage people to participate in a friendly competition pledging to keep established lawns natural without the application of quick-release fertilizer and no chemical pesticides or herbicides. Sudbury is striving to have the most households committed to maintaining natural grass. The winning towns are those with the greatest number of households pledging to keep their lawns natural without the spreading of quick release fertilizer or harmful pesticides and herbicides.
Residents can save money on lawn care while saving bees, worms, microbes, archaea, springtails, nematodes, rotifers, tardigrades, and the full rhizosphere. Grass plants are fed by fungi and bacteria as part of the vast mycorrhizae network, called the wood wide web.
Lawn grasses are the best plants at fighting climate change because of a second major carbon cycle, often overlooked, the deep drawdown of carbon into soil. Following photosynthesis, grasses push out of their root tips carbohydrates, liquid carbon, to build soil — for every ton of root exudate, grasses pull out of the air four tons of carbon dioxide. A natural lawn can build an inch of soil in a year. For an acre of lawn, that means removing 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide withdrawn. With more than 2,000 square miles of residential lawns in Massachusetts, the institute says, there is much that can be done at home lawn by lawn and town by town to reverse climate change.
You may assist Team Sudbury virtually by signing their pledge form and up their total of savvy signers.
