How your Home Lawn Helps Mediate your Carbon Footprint
Well maintained lawns quickly affect people's moods. Feelings of serenity, privacy, thoughtfulness, and happiness are elevated. The yearly cycle of a lawns growth and color change lift human spirits. Connections to our roots with nature are remembered and established in a refreshing way.
Leisure Lawn offers lawn care that will help your home be as "green" as can be! Your lawn can be green and weed free with the least possible impact on your home environment when you have Leisure Lawn help you take care of your lawn. A well maintained and fertilized lawn helps to "green" your home!
- Well maintained lawns create Oxygen through improved photosynthesis processes. -- A small lawn of 50 by 50 feet (2500 square feet) can produce enough Oxygen for a family of four in one day.
- Turf absorbs pollutants, including Carbon Dioxide, thus reducing greenhouse gases and sequestering nearly 1 ton of Carbon per acre each year. An average home lawn of 10,000 square feet could sequester nearly 1/4th of a ton of Carbon a year. Every little bit helps!
- Lawns cool the air in summer. On a hot summer day, a turf area will be 30 degrees cooler than asphalt and 14 degrees cooler than bare soil. The cooling effect of an average lawn can be that of 3 3 ton air conditioners!
- Lawns help purify water which is entering underground aquifers. The root mass and soil microorganisms act as a filter to capture and break down many types of pollutants. Healthy turf reduces runoff and prevents soil erosion, a source of both sediment and phosphorus in lakes and streams. A 6 to 10 feet strip of established and maintained lawn will reduce nutrient and soil run-off by 50 to 100 percent.
- By controlling the number of weeds and increasing the root mass of the grass in your lawn, your lawn will trap particulate matter and reduce water run-off into streams and tributaries. Well maintained lawn have as few weeds in them as possible, they are better bio-filters. Most broadleaf weeds have tap root systems that puncture the fibrous root mass of an established lawn. Rather than absorbing water, weedy areas direct water to the soil surface where it runs off down slope.
- Limiting the number of broadcast applications of pesticides to absolutely only when necessary will control the lawn damaging pests and reduce the pesticide load on your home lawn. Leisure Lawn's lawn care program is at least 97% pesticide free!
- Lawns help to control dust and pollen, which can cause allergic reactions. Each year, lawns trap as much as 12 million tons of dust and dirt released into the atmosphere of the United States. Lawns reduce noise and discomforting glare. Not to mention that lawns provide a wonderful surface for all types of outdoor activities.
- Lawns can lead the way to recovery of good health! Recovery rates amoung hospitalized are quicker when their rooms view a landscaped area when compared to patients with non-landscaped views. Where vegetation grows, suicide and child mortality are less than places where there are no plants.
- According to buyers in a Gallup poll, a proper and well maintained landscape and lawn add 15% to a home's value. The investment recovery rate is 100% to 200% for a landscape improvement Compared to a deck or patio, these will recover 40% to 70% of their cost. Information derived from The Lawn Institute website http://www.thelawninstitute.org "How Turfgrass Affects the Environment" 25 Feb 2008