The Lawn's Harvest
We begin to cut our lawns with mowing machines, though the dairymen complain of the sad lack of young grass. Now this lawn grass is, or should be, a most useful product. To start with, it is full of food. It may supply, for example, a good part of the fodder for a fattening pig. It is also a good manure ; and to my thinking one of the best of all mulches. Spread fairly thick, it will kill out weeds and thereafter enrich the soil. It is, I hold, particularly valuable as such for ,small fruits, raspberries above others. The thing to avoid is to leave it in heaps. It heats rapidly and because of the warmth is a favourite resort of breeding flies. Keepers of golf greens are particularly careless—in my experience —in this regard. They leave heaps almost alongside the greens and fairways, and so breed flies numerous enough to reach the proportions of a plague. The one place where a heap is to be recommended is in a corner of the hen-run. As to mulching, someone recommended, I think in the Countryman, strips of old sacking, which fulfilled all the gardeners' desires—warming the earth, killing weeds and preserving moisture. It is surprising that such forms of mulch have not become a popular form of commerce, especially in these gardenerless days.
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