The Vintage Brookville Lawn

The Vintage Brookville Lawn—
Lawns, power mowers, fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides are big business. Large corporations have a vested interest in maintaining the ideas that created new industries and made stockholders wealthy. Snow blowers, garden tractors and tillers produce income in seasons when grass is not being cut.

A few years ago we bagged grass clippings because we were told, by the "Lawn Experts" that it was the proper thing to do. Some old timers knew better but went along with the experts. Then the experts changed their advice when confronted with dumps filled with grass clippings.

When the city and county land fills got full of vegetation, they said, "No more grass." City officials were warned that the cost of dumping city trash would increase dramatically if any bags of grass were in the dumpsters. That threat eliminated the practice of bagging grass clippings for the trash men to haul off to the dumps.


Almost overnight, power mowers were introduced that chomped and ground and re-cut the grass until it was just about invisible. They were called "Mulching Mowers."After that cost of living in Brookville theme simmered down, the city got the idea of selling very large paper bags the citizens could buy to put their yard/lawn wastes in and set it out or take it to the city garage and put it in one of their large trailers yourself. As far as I know that is still the policy.

We bought a new mulching mower that had no chute for the grass to exit. The mower blade was bent and twisted in such a way that it was supposed to keep the grass cuttings in the air to be repeatedly cut by the ugly looking blade until there wasn't anything left to cut.

But after several years, the virtues of buying paper bags and setting them out only to see them go into the same dumpsters at the city garage dulled the virtues of cleaning up our dumps and buying paper bags to do it. The yard debris and small trashy limbs and stuff have been bagged in black plastic and set out on trash day to be picked up.

These were sold and still are sold to anybody buying a new mower. And suddenly, the experts who once told us that grass clippings were bad for lawns now said it was OK to leave them on the ground. They also said that they did not produce thatch buildup which was something we all knew but trusted them to know better.

The pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers have destroyed most ground bacteria. And that has made finding a night crawler next to impossible except at bait stores.

Interesting reading and photographs from the period—
Restoring American Gardens An encyclopedia of heirloom ornamental plants 1640 - 1940