Sustainable Medfield is featuring Low Impact Yard Care

  (walkway by Don Nyren)

In response to Sustainable Medfield featuring Low Impact Yard Care, Deb and I are submitting some information about our new clover ground cover (replacing/supplementing half our lawn) to share our low-impact yard care.

Our clover was planted in the late fall of 2022 after half of our grass died because of the drought and near-total watering ban during the summer of 2022. We paid attention to the weather and took advantage of rainy days to sow the clover seeds. We may have had one or two instances of watering small sections with a hand-held hose, but not more than that. Once planted (and lucky with weather), the clover was on its own. It germinated and grew maybe only an inch before winter, but survived the winter and really took off in the spring.

While we didn’t need to replace all of the lawn (and have not yet done so), we can report that the area that is now clover resulted in a lot less mowing – that section of the yard was mowed only once last summer. The remainder of the yard (about half of the former “lawn” area) is sprinkled with clover, was mowed a few times (not regularly) and ultimately reassured us that the clover, after mowing, comes right back.

We do have an irrigation system that was installed years ago with the idea that it would reduce our work in restoring the lawn after the several times we lost large sections during dry and hot summers. The good news is we didn’t really use the irrigation system at all last summer as far as we can recall. Instead, we relied on rain and acknowledge that we were lucky with the weather that helped promote the growth of the clover.

We’ve been excited to find that the clover really does invite more pollinators to your yard (noting that some might not want more pollinators with little ones who want to run through a yard). What we found last summer, though, is that the clover (and clover mixed with unmown grasses) provided a habitat that welcomed greater biodiversity than we had contemplated, including a fair number of Northern Leopard Frogs.  Was it the clover, clover mixed with tall grasses, the rain or some combination that brought so many different species to the yard? We don’t know, but we’re looking forward to this spring, summer, and fall.

With our yard experiment we used White Dutch Clover for the most part, but did try some White Mini Clover in the mix.  The White Dutch Clover grew to about 6-8 inches tall, could be cut, and grew nicely. The Mini Clover was much more expensive to buy and is not really visible in our yard because the White Dutch Clover is that much taller. If you look closely, though, you’ll see the Mini Clover.

After first planting the clover in the late fall of 2022 (and aided by the rain) we decided to move into spring by adopting a “No Mow May” approach to lawn care. Leaving the clover section of the yard to fend for itself, we resisted the urge to mow and waited to see what we would get. Tall weeds were hand pulled. We did pay some attention to the area that remained predominantly grass and did mow that a few times, but not with any regularity. In the fall, we did one yard wide mowing to get winter ready.

As noted, we found a lot of visitors to our yard that we had not noticed before and some of our regular visitors appeared more often especially focused on snacking on the clover.

This coming summer will be our second season with clover.   We’ll probably seed again as it seems clover should be re-seeded every several years.  We are learning as we grow, but it has been really remarkable to  see the increased biodiversity and wonderful to see the deer eating the clover instead of the hemlock.  

This family of four deer were often in our clover.

Guest post mainly authored by Deb Bero.