Clover Lawn Love

WRITTEN BY FORD SMITH

If you are looking to make a simple, eco-friendly and water-saving change to your lawn this summer, check out clover. There are many benefits of adding clover to your lawn. It uses significantly less water than monoculture grass lawns, fixes nitrogen out of the air with the help of rhizobia (a nitrogen fixing bacteria), doesn’t need to be mowed as often, fills in weak spots to make your lawn more resistant to noxious weeds like thistle and provides habitat for bees and other beneficial insects. This begs the question: Why isn’t the good word of clover being shouted from the peaks of the Bridgers?

The main reason is a dedicated marketing conspiracy led by the chemical lawn care industry to soil the good name of clover. We’ve all seen broadleaf herbicide sprays that promise to kill your “weeds’’ without killing your grass. Clover is a broadleaf. It is killed by the very same herbicides that the chemical lawn care industry sells to kill broadleaf “weeds,” mainly harmless dandelions. Rather than espouse the benefits of a lawn that includes healthy amounts of clover, the chemical lawn care industry branded it as a “weed” so we’d have no qualms about killing it.

But it goes deeper than this. Prior to World War II and the popularization of Carl Bosh’s discovery of how to fix nitrogen out of the air using fossil fuels, all lawn seed mixes contained clover. It is a legume that forms a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen fixing-rhizobia in its root nodules, allowing it to transform nitrogen in the atmosphere into a form that can be used by all plants. Without clover, the lawn care industry can extract more profit from consumers by selling them nitrogen fertilizers.

This highly successful marketing campaign by the chemical industry convinced us to take the clover seed out of our lawn mixes. A beautiful, soft legume that had, since time immemorial, been prized in any lawn or pasture mix, was suddenly lumped in with thistle. A quick search online shows that clover as a weed stigma is still going strong. Your local chemical lawn care company thrives on this marketing. Without it, why would you need to pay for chemical nitrogen or broadleaf herbicide sprays?

Not only do you pay for these chemical applications upfront, we also all pay for them again many times over in damages to our environmental and human/pet health. Chemical nitrogen applications quickly break down into nitrates that move through the soil solution into our streams, rivers and groundwater. This nitrate causes a cascading series of pollution issues the whole way downstream until it eventually expands the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. These are the same nitrates that cause blue baby syndrome. This chemical nitrogen application applied to clover-free lawns all over the country is also converted into nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide and a significant contributor to climate related disasters. As for chemical herbicide applications, they have been widely shown to cause cancer in humans and pets.

As the owner of Organic Lawn, I have tried to avoid scaring people into trying a better approach. We have focused on pushing good lawn management, like mowing tall and watering deeply and infrequently. For the past five years we have been testing the best ways to incorporate clover back into our lawns and our lives. This year we are ready to roll it out and help homeowners more easily exit the high input monoculture grass game. We are excited about clover and hope you are too!

Feel free to check out our website, organiclawnmt.com, email us at info@ organiclawnmt.com, or call 406-2197414, with any questions about what clover can do for you.