A typical grass lawn requires thousands of gallons of water per year to maintain. Unless you're cutting it with a push mower, it uses electricity or gas to trim, as well. On top of all of that, many homeowners use chemical fertilizers to keep their lawns looking lush and green.
Why Moss?
What if there were a way to have a lovely lawn without all of the maintenance and waste?
There is! More and more folks are embracing the moss lawn. It's a little counter-intuitive at first. Homeowners spend a lot of time and energy trying to keep moss off of their lawns. Once you get past the idea of moss as a pest, though, you can really start to appreciate its virtues. Once it's established, the moss requires hardly any watering. It grows great in shady areas and provides a soft, low-maintenance ground cover.
Moss lawns don't require any nasty fertilizers or herbicides. They don't need to be mowed, and once established they only need to be moistened with water occasionally, when things look a bit dry.
My husband and I have been coveting a moss lawn for quite some time. We had a few mossy patches already, and we've been secretly hoping that it would spread on its own. That didn't work out so well, but last weekend we noticed an abundance of beautiful moss on the rocks at a nearby creek. We gathered a couple of grocery bags' worth and decided to give this thing a go!
How to Start a Moss Lawn
We'd been reading up on starting our moss lawn and ran across several great resources!
If you're not fortunate enough to collect your own moss, there is a company that makes moss milkshakes and starter moss for your yard.
Feeling a little more DIY? It's super simple to make your own moss milkshake! You just need some scavenged moss and lots of beer or buttermilk. Kerry over at e-How explains how to make the milkshake in your blender.
The e-How tutorial didn't give a lot of information on what to do once you're all milkshaked up, but don't fret! Moss Acres has a ton of advice on transplanting that moss. It takes quite a bit of water to get the moss established, but once it's taken hold the maintenance is pretty low-key.
Have any of you gotten a moss lawn going? We'd love to hear about it in the comments!
Follow Becky Striepe on Twitter: 
While this sounds very tempting I have to wonder how well moss lawns deal when your neighbors have their lawns treated and you get the inevitable overspray of herbicide.
That’s a great question, and I’m not sure. We’re fortunate that our lawn isn’t adjacent to any neighboring lawns – there’s a shared driveway on one side and our neighbor’s driveway runs the length of his property on the other.
I’m actually a bit surprised to read that they take less water, because when I’d looked into moss yards before, I was told that the very sunny, dry condition of my yard wouldn’t work for moss. I’ll have to recheck that.
It takes quite a bit of water to establish, but as I understand it once it’s going, moss is quite hardy. It doesn’t do well in direct sunlight at all, though. Shady areas are where moss thrives.
Moss Milkshake is available in individual cartons at http://mossacres.com/shade-plants.asp#Milkshake.
Most mosses, especially those in the Moss Milkshake, require extensive shade with some dappled sunlight. Moss also requires a constant level of moisture to get established from the Milkshake or from fragments or transplanted sheets or clumps. However, once established, moss requires little to no watering. By “constant level of moisture” I mean it should be misted or sprayed once every hour or so for 10 minutes or so. It will need time to “breathe” in between, and should never sit in a pool or pond of water.
Nancy Church
nancy@mossacres.com
Thanks for the tips, Nancy! We’re definitely not watering ours constantly enough, since we don’t have a sprinkler, just a hose.
The mossy areas in my lawn die down every year as soon as the rainy season’s over.
I never water my lawn on purpose. It gets watered the few times a year I rinse off my car, but that’s it. And never any chemicals. And I have chickens, who love to eat grass and do a pretty good job of preventing need to bust out my reel/girlpowered mower until mid to late april.
I think moss VS grass really depends on your climate.
Interesting! I bet you’re right. It’s quite humid around here, and our mossy areas stay pretty much constantly covered.
I love the idea of letting the chickens help with maintaining the lawn! I bet those are some happy chickadees.