Transform your lawn into an eco-friendly oasis! In the United States, lawn care requires a lot of water, gasoline, and pesticide use.  Check out these tips on how to make your lawn even greener!

Why Update Your Lawn?

Although lush, green lawns are beautiful to look at, maintaining them can be hard on our environment. Every year, lawn maintenance in the United States uses around 3 trillion gallons of water, 200 million gallons of gasoline, and 70 million pounds of pesticide.

Lawns also lack habitat for pollinators and other living things that promote a healthy ecosystem. Pesticides used to keep unwanted pests off of our lawns can be ingested by wildlife and can contaminate rivers, lakes, streams and oceans through rainwater runoff.

How to Update Your Lawn?

Leave Your Lawn to Grow

Join the No-Mow Movement and stop mowing your lawn! Refraining from mowing your lawn can help lower air pollution and lessen gasoline emissions from your lawnmower. Just remember to keep up with weeding out invasive plants like ragweed and dandelion so they don’t crowd out native ones!

Start a Food Garden

Replacing part of your lawn with a food garden is a great way to promote your health and the health of the environment. Food gardens require less water than turfgrass and provide you with a fun new hobby and delicious produce.

Add Native Plants

Native plants are already adapted to local conditions and therefore require less pesticide and no fertilizer. They also promote biodiversity, help prevent erosion, provide food for wildlife, and make your lawn more beautiful! 

Planting native plants in your yard also supports pollinators and helps to curb the decline of insects. (To learn more about our effort to curb the decline of insects, check out the Insect Effect campaign.)

Try Xeriscaping

Xeriscaping is a form of landscaping that uses drought-tolerant plants in order to conserve water and improve waste efficiency. Xeriscaping can be done by grouping plants according to their water needs, incorporating mulch to reduce evaporation, and using drought-tolerant turf like Bermuda grass, Bahia grass, and zoysia grass.

Information from NRDC, UF/IFAS, and U.S. Forest Service.