AMAZING Spring Lawn & Yard Care tips without the Chemicals! ( Also Great for your Gardening ! )

on a bright green lawn, but you don't want to wear a hazmat suit to go outside into your own yard. I get it. We know chemicals work, but chemicals also work their way down through the ground water and into your local ponds and streams, turning your local ponds into fluorescent green mats of algae that looks like something out of a Shrek movie. [music] So, let's talk about natural ways you can accomplish the same results without using chemicals. Let's get get into fertilization. Natural fertilizer comes in three forms. The first form is feather meal, the second form is peat moss, and the third form is worm castings. So, peat moss is basically just accumulated biomatter. So, this is uh this comes from peat bogs, and then you as the grower buy this dry stuff out. Sometimes it's like in a brick, and uh you break it up, you add water to it, you kind of mix it, and then you can plant into it. All of these are safe, natural alternatives that your grass is absolutely going to love. Worm castings are actually worm poop that make great fertilizer for your lawn or your garden. But, if you don't have those things available to you, there's other things that you can add into the soil that will act in almost the same way. We're going to call these the beneficial browns and the beneficial greens. The beneficial browns are leaves, dry leaves, but you can't just put leaves in a big pile and expect it to help your lawn. What you've got to do is you've got to finely chop those leaves over the entire yard. You should not be able to see those leaves. That's a rule of thumb. Another beneficial brown is newspapers. Yes, newspapers are fabulous for your yard, but you shouldn't be able to identify that you've just placed newspapers in your yard. When you put the newspapers out there, take your lawnmower and mulch them up. It's same process you use for the leaf. Turn it into as fine of a powder as you possibly can, and this will naturally incorporate back into the soil, adding more organic material. Two other beneficial browns are straw or hay and branches. Got to do the same process you do with the leaves, but let's get on to the beneficial greens. The beneficial greens includes fruit and vegetable scraps. They also include eggshells, coffee grounds, and grass clippings. Do the same thing with the beneficial greens as you did with the beneficial browns. You should never be able to identify anything you're placing in your yard. If you can, you need to pulverize it into a finer particulate matter. The winter can be very hard on your yard, especially if you live in areas that have high concentrations of snow. And if you also happen to have a yard that people tend to drive off the driveway and park in the yard in the wintertime, or areas where they pile snow up and leave it over the winter, you're going to experience soil compaction and soil contamination via higher concentrations of salt. There's two easy cures to this. The first thing you want to do is if you do have areas where they piled snow, you want to dilute the salt concentration that can build up. Easiest way to do that is a garden hose. Simply water the heck out of that area. That's going to disperse that salt and get rid of it. But, to decompact the soil, there's three ways to do this, two of which I'm going to recommend and one I'm going to tell you to stay away from. What I want you to stay away from to decompact your soil is dethatching. Dethatching loosens up the soil, but in the springtime, it's especially hard on the young grass that's trying to grow and pop down into that soil because dethatching tends to rip and tear through the roots. The best way to decompact your soil is with a process called aeration, and this is a machine that puts spikes into the ground, and then it vibrates, and it continues to roll along. This is hands-down the best decompaction method your lawn will absolutely love you if you can do aeration. If you don't have aeration available, you can use the old plug and pull method, which means you put spikes into the ground, you pull a core out, and you leave that core behind. Not as effective as aeration, but much better than dethatching. For areas where you have compacted soil, these two processes are what I recommend. core aeration, and really what you're doing is you're pulling portions of the ground out and leaving them on top. See, you yank this right out of the ground. Loosens up the soil, allows it to breathe. Here's a trick, something that I like to do after a hard winter where people have piled up snow and you get a little bit of sand accumulation and you don't want that, I use a power broom. Hey, how do you like that compared to a rake? Uh it's not even a comparison. Is it better? Way better. You can also use a rake. That's getting the thatch out, but that power broom did the same thing, didn't it? Yeah, it also got the rocks. Power broom's a little heavier, but this is still way more work. Yeah, I can tell. Just by watching you and listening to you talk while you're doing it. You would have just went zip zip twice with the power broom. Either one of these are great ways of getting that extra material that you don't want in your yard out of your yard. Both of them have an extra benefit associated with them. That is a light dethatching. What they do is they will lightly remove some of the dead grass that's built up while they're removing the extra sand. So, let's do a quick wrap up. After a harsh winter, you need to decompact your soil. Aeration is your number one method. Plug and pull is number two. Last and least, number three is dethatching, and I don't recommend you do this, especially if it's early in the spring. Let the grass reestablish. If you have salt concentration, you're going to dilute that by just simply adding water and hosing it off, getting rid of that material. If you have extra road base sand or things that accumulated over the winter mixed into your yard and you want to remove that, the trick I use is a power broom. You can also use a rake if you don't have that tool available to you. Now, you're going to want to fertilize. You're going to use browns, beneficial greens. Beneficial browns includes dry leaves, sticks, hay, and newspapers, but all of these things need to be pulverized into as fine a particulate matter as absolutely possible. Your beneficial greens, these include fruit and vegetable scraps, eggshells, grass clippings, and uh oh, coffee grounds. And coffee grounds, absolutely phenomenal uh uh beneficial green. Incorporate all of this into your soil. It's absolutely going to love you. Your gra- your lawn is going to pop. Make sure you subscribe for more yard care and landscaping tips, and tell me your lawn care secrets in the comments down below. I'd love hearing from you guys. This is how I put these videos together. The things you tell me get reused. God bless. Go get them. I forgot what I'm supposed to say. Something about worm castings. Worm castings are actually worm poop that make great What am I supposed to say? [laughter] Worm castings are actually worm poop, but it makes a great fertilizer for your lawn or garden. Okay. It's not going in my head for some reason. All right. Worm castings are actually worm poop that make great fertilizer for your lawn or your garden. What? [laughter] What am I supposed to do? A dance? No. Come on now. We're Let's try it again. Okay. [laughter] It's kind of a pain in the All right, ready?