Gardener Says the Secret to Their Stunning Lawn Is a Costco Product and a Specific Mower Setting

The wild grasses rising from the soil of your lawn desire growth. When conditions are favorable, these grass blades burst from the ground, tipped with spikes that reach for the sky. Irrespective of their unflinching desire for growth, they need to be cut from time to time. That’s why people use mowers. Mowing grass is like taking one step back to move two steps further. But there’s another mystery that mowers need to consider. Reddit gardener u/Classic-Setting-736 shared a secret mower setting they used to style their lawn in a perfectly manicured look.

The gardener in question was a resident of the Twin Cities area in Minnesota, North America. The picture postcard they shared displays a handsome lawn. On the other side of the road dividing the lawn, trimmed ridges are running over the turf grass, silhouetted by surreal patterns cast by the shadows of surrounding trees. One corner has a lush cluster of yellow-green foliage bursting with delicate flowering shrubs bubbling with purplish-white petals. Here and there is a small bushel of grasses and leaves.

This description might not offer justice to the immaculate finesse with which the gardener groomed this lawn. “So many neighbors have asked how I got my lawn to this point,” they shared in the post. Nutrition, they said, is important, for sure. But that’s not the secret sauce behind the pristine transformation of their lawn. The reason, according to them, is Costco’s Scotts fertilizer. The gardener said they spray this fertilizer on their plants about once a month during the growing season to feed them micronutrients, cytogro, and liquid iron.

That’s not the only secret. There’s a mysterious trick, too, that they employed to turn their lawn into a flawless piece of art. “I mow tall... and that changed the game,” they revealed. Referring to the folks in the South, they said, “People in the north gotta realize that we use the same mowers as folks in the south, and we're supposed to mow on the taller settings here. And because of this, I've only watered once this year; my lawn is capable of locking in moisture for weeks, doesn't have weeds because they're shaded out, and it's thriving.”

They are likely referring to the infamous difference between the lawns maintained by people of the North versus people of the South. Writing in LawnSite, a person pointed out that grasses in Southern regions are more rigid, hardy, and adaptive to harsh heat. The grasses in the North tend to turn mushy when the climate turns humid or too hot. 

“For those of you in the north, set your mower to your tallest setting; you won't regret it,” the Reddit gardener exclaimed. Setting the mower to the tallest setting implies that the mower is set to the largest cutting height, which is somewhere between 3.25 and 4 inches, according to Michigan State University. This setting ensures that the grasses are trimmed neatly, so the soil is able to hold more water and weeds aren’t propagating. Adding to the surprise, the lawn-carer shared that this technique eliminated their need for a sprinkler system. 

Fellow gardeners across Reddit jumped into the comments box. Many of them resonated with the “mowing tall” hack. “Yeah, I doubled my height of cut this year in Chicago, and it's been way more tolerant to the heat this summer,” commented u/kschwa7. Replying to their comment, u/BeezyBates offered an elaborate equation to explain this, based on principles of biology and chemistry. “Tall grass = soil shade."

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