If you’ve been doing a fair bit of research regarding gardening and other mower-related ideas, you’ve likely come across some unfamiliar terms such as bio-clipping, mulching, or recycling. In actuality, all of these terms revolve around the same central idea: feeding your earth.

Mulching is a process in which you return, or feed, the mowed-off clippings back to your lawn as valuable nutrients for enhancing its growth- this function depends on your type of lawn mower, as some may have dedicated mulching blades (a dedicated mulch blade can improve the quality of the nutrients you return). 

This guide will cover all the essential knowledge on mulching, so stay tuned and make sure you read it from start to finish!

Mulching 101: What is it?

Mulching is a highly efficient way to save yourself some money on fertiliser, while benefiting the environment at the same time- all while using the grass clippings. The greater the volume of clippings, the more mulch you can make- and dry clippings will result in a coarser, less moist mulch (higher volume of clippings will be a result of longer grass). 

You can help transform your lawn into, and maintain, and healthy and luscious green garden. This is done by re-circulating the glass clipping under your mower’s mowing deck, in turn producing a fine, easily distributable mulch. Depending on your mower’s mechanism (and specialist mulching blade), the mulch produced from your grass clippings will be pushed back onto your lawn, where it would start to decompose at a rapid rate, hence feeding your earth/soil with the nutrients needed for optimal growth. 

Another benefit to this process is that there’s little to no mess after mowing your lawn! You won’t have to keep disposing of the lawn clippings and end up spending money on fuel for trips to the disposal unit- this is both cost-effective and beneficial to the environment, due to the recycling of grass clippings. Your mower will collect all the grass clippings from the cutting blades/grass blades and turn them into a beneficial, recycled mulch-fertiliser. 

How to Mulch for A Healthy Lawn

Mulching will help you massively minimise, or even eliminate your entire need to rake the lawn post-mowing. There are some simple steps involved in the process of mulching, so make sure you follow them accurately:

1. Establish where you want to target the mulch disposal, and subsequently position your mower on the dry grass which needs to be cut, and ensure the exit chute is facing this part of the grass- now you’ll want to cut no more than a third of the length of the grass. This is known as the “one third rule”– even the best mulching decks from a dedicated mulching mower (let alone conventional cutting mowers with a conventional cutting blade) can’t handle an overload of grass clippings. 
2. Now, you’ll want to remove the collection facility/bagging attachment from your dedicated mulching mower (or any mower is fine- hand-propelled mowers, ride on mowers, or even a combi mower). Once you’ve done this, starting mowing towards the centre from the edges of your lawn, whilst following all the specified safety measures as instructed in your guide. This will deposit your mulch in an orderly manner, from the outside towards the centre. 
3. Mow in circular steps, to ensure the mulch remains in the designated area you decide to deposit it within. Once you’ve done this, pulverise your clipping mulch for the second time, after you’ve returned to the start position. Repeat the steps, travelling in the same direction. 
4. If there are any spots which you may have missed, just go over them with a rake, to tidy it up. We recommend grabbing a watering can and moistening your lawn to help the clippings settle down and infuse into the earth/grass more effectively and quickly.

Why Should I Get a Mulching Mower?

It’s true- any mower can be doubled up as a mulching mower if clever implementation of maneuvers are used, but this can be time-consuming and requires both skill and practice. To be frank- mulching can even be done manually- run your mower over fallen autumn leaves and collect them for mulch, rather than sucking them up or blowing them away for disposal with a leaf blower.

Mulching mowers will both simplify the task, and produce a higher-quality mulch. Lawn-mowers with mulching functionality actually deposit clippings as healthy compost for your grass, which is one of the things that make it so special!

Purchasing a mulching mower is an investment in your lawn, as you’ll be saving money on harmful fertilising chemicals, but also because it’s much more beneficial -as well as kind- to your lawn. The alternative is to purchase a regular lawnmower with a collection facility integrated. You will need to gather the clippings yourself, and add them to a compost heap to produce mulch. This is, yet again, a tedious method to go by so we highly recommend going for a mower with mulching functionality.