SIX USES FOR LAWN MOWINGS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 631, 6 April 1929, Page 28

SIX USES FOR LAWN MOWINGS

Lawn-mowings are too often consigned to the rubbish heap as useless, j but this is deliberate waste of a really | valuable home product. They may be j used (a) as manure and (b) as a surface dressing. During the next i few weeks there will be quantities of lawn mowings to be disposed of, and everyone should be able to employ them in one or more of the following ways: 1. In very hot, dry weather they may be left as they are cut, on the lawn itself. They act as the best protection against scorching, and consequent disfigurement of the grass. 2. In dry periods a thick mulch of lawn mowings, renewed at each weekly cutting and applied over the soil round plants and bushes, forms an admirable moisture conserver. They may be used, for example, round fruit %vees, along rows of peas, beans, sweet peas, and near herbaceous plants which dislike dryness at the roots. They are invaluable round newly-planted trees and shrubs, particularly evergreens. 3. They are equally as good as, if not better than, sand, when used as the medium for the spreading of paraffin, etc., between rows of carrots and onions to ward off the fly. If a thick mulch is spread on the bed, and this is

sprayed with paraffin, it will retain the odour much longer than sand, even though it becomes dry. 4. Grass-mowings are a strong heatgenerator, and may be mixed with manure in forming a hotbed. The heat arising is probably fiercier than that from a mixture of leaves and manure; therefore, care should be taken to allow it to subside before sowing or planting. 5. One of the best uses to which fresh lawn-mowings may be put is in planting potatoes; they generate warmth and promote growth. Potatoes planted in a good bed of grass mowings will give a crop of smoothskinned, shapely tubers even in rough and gravelly soils. 6. In a fresh state they are invaluable for pivtting in the trenches prepared for cqlery, and in the ground for runner or dwarf beans. They may be used as a thick layer above the manure, etc., or mixed with it. The best celery I have grown was from trenches containing nothing but decayed leaves and fresh grass mowings.