Grasscycling and Haymaking

Some of our urban and suburban homesteads are getting downright countrified. Here and elsewhere, folks in increasing numbers are raising chickens and growing more of their own food. And so the question has come up: Can grass clippings be used to make hay? That’s hay as in food for chickens, rabbits, horses, and other animals. Not the “hay” that is the thing we must make while the sun shines, whatever that is.

Homer'sScythe

Winslow Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field

The answer, in short, is no. Hay is dried grass, but the only way to make it from our urb/suburb landscapes is to let our lawns grow realllly long (like a foot high) and cut it with hedge clippers or a scythe as Homer’s veteran does in the artwork, at left, or as Frost does in the poem, below. Not terribly practical — even before you spread it out and let it dry for weeks. (A lawn mower — gas or electric — cuts it in too many small pieces.)

While not good for making hay, grass clippings can serve us well if we just let them lie. Mulching plugs in Solar Mowing’s machines finely chop the clippings and distribute them evenly across the lawn. Made up mostly of water, these clippings quickly break down and return key nutrients (nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus) to the soil.

Grasscycling, as it’s called, helps keep our lawns healthy. Here in the urb/suburb, cut grass serves as a valuable natural fertilizer, but as a source of hay? Nay.

Mowing

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

Robert Frost, 1913