Don’t Be a Grass Grinch: 12 Benefits Your Lawn Delivers Year-Round
You won’t have to leave a trail of hoof prints, elf tricks, or cookie crumbs to find some very special gifts waiting right outside your door this holiday season. According to the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute, the grass in your lawn delivers twelve gifts that benefit you, your family and your community year-round.
Gift #1: Extends the living space of your home into nature. Outdoor dining areas, barbecue pits, play areas, and gathering spaces help you bring your living outside.
Gift #2: Relieves your stress. Researchers found that just looking out a window at green spaces can lower stress levels. One research study found that walking or running in green spaces led to decreased anger, fatigue and feelings of depression, while increasing attention levels.
Gift #3: Helps kids and pets live healthier lives. Outdoor play increases fitness levels and builds active, healthy bodies for kids and pets. Research shows that children reap numerous health, social and personal benefits from spending time outside playing.
Gift #4: Provides habitat for birds, pollinators and wildlife. Even in highly populated urban areas, your lawn contains worms, insects and other creatures that are part of the life cycle. Pollinators like bees, birds and wildlife depend on home lawns for habitat and sustenance.
Gift #5: Produces oxygen – and a lot of it. If you have a family of four and a relative small lawn of only 50 square feet, your lawn generates enough oxygen to cover your family’s daily requirements.
Gift #6: Dissipates the heat island effect in urban areas. All those hard and plastic surfaces in cities can heat up. Your lawn can be 31 degrees cooler than asphalt and 20 degrees cooler than bare soil, thanks to grass’s process called evapotranspiration.
Gift #7: Combats global warming. Your home lawn is on the front line of the fight against global warming. It decreases your carbon footprint by sequestering carbon. In fact, turfgrass is the largest carbon sink in the country.
Gift #8: Reduces the code red effect. Your lawn removes pollutants from the air you breathe. Grass removes harmful airborne pollutants, dust and smoke from the atmosphere.
Gift #9: Cleans rain water. Rain water filtered through a healthy lawn is often as much as 10 times less acidic than water running off a hard surface.
Gift #10: Controls water runoff. When the downpours from El Niño arrive, your grass will soak up the rain like a sponge and filter it. Your lawn will also ensure that those raindrops don’t turn into fast moving flood waters that erode the land and sediment.
Gift #11: Reduces noise pollution. Grassy areas absorb noise, which cut down on excessive sound, a growing problem in urban areas, where hardscape and pavement reverberate sound.
Gift #12: Protects your home from fire and crime. Green grass retards the spread of wildfires because of its low fuel value, and it provides a defendable space around structures where firefighters can work effectively. Those open spaces also deter crime and break-ins.
Don’t be a grass Grinch this year and rip out your lawn to install plastic grass, hardscape or mulch. Doing these things destroys the living landscape found in your yard and obliterates the many gifts that grass gives you and your family every day.
Even if you live in a drought-stricken area, it is possible to keep your lawn and be water responsible. There are many varieties of grass that need very little water, can handle the heat, and deliver all these benefits for you and your family. To get more information and tips visit www.opei.org/stewardship/
