“Why is my lawn green? A healthy lawn is the sign of a healthy home and my lawn is yellow. Allthe lawns here are yellow and we all fertilize and feed and do all we’resupposed to but the lawns are still yellow. Could it be the water?”

Sad to say, but the little kid in us wants to say, ” Gretchen, your neighborhood needs a leash law to keep wandering dogs from peeing all over your lawns!” Ha ha. Yep. The kid in us has not, yet, grown up all the way… and we hope it never does! 🙂

On a more serious note, if every lawn in your neighborhood has the same issue (bad grass), then it stands to reason that all of your lawns have at least SOMEthing in common. Typically all yards in a development will share a similar soil type (i.e. composition, pH, etc.), environmental conditions (rainfall, amount of sunlight, etc.) and quality of water used to keep them hydrated.

Since we know very little about soil we will pass on the opportunity to discuss that topic and move in for the kill on a topic we DO know something about: Water. Since you say your lawns stay yellow, a sure sign of a dead or dying lawn, perhaps your lawns don’t particularly care for something in the water?

As our first guess, we cast our vote for chlorine. Most municipal water systems use a form of chlorine to keep biological contaminants from growing in the water and water lines. Once out of the water line, however, chlorine will continue to wage war on biological organism… like the grass in your lawn.

Chlorine in my water?

How do you know if your tap water contains chlorine? Perform a simple test for chlorine using a product such as the WaterWorks 2 Free & Total Chlorine Test Strip. We like this product because it provides reliable test results for both free and total chlorine concentrations in water at the same time and in just a few minutes.

There’s chlorine in my water… Now what?

Well if the chlorine poses a problem (i.e. it kills your grass!) then we heartily suggest removing it from the water you use on your lawn. The products below from Gar’n’Gro should have the ability to help with that task.

For those interesting removing chlorine from their drinking water, you may want to consider installing a simple, yet effective, faucet filter such as the Crystal Quest W2 in your kitchen.

If you have chlorine in the water going into your home, you also have it coming out of the spigots on the side of your house and therefore it also flows out of your garden hoses, lawn sprinklers, etc.

For those of you with nice cars that you like to hand wash or gardens that you’d like to keep chlorine-free, you may want to look into the the Gard’n Grow Water Filter designed to convert potentially harmful chlorine into harmless chloride compounds via a simple “redox” reaction catalyzed by a special copper and zinc.

Easily installed between the average garden hose and the faucet/spigot on the side of the house, the Gard’n Grow Filter by Rainshow’r uses KDF as its filtration media in a replaceable cartridge which lasts for up to 40,000 gallons, does not decrease flow rate by much, and removes 85% of chlorine from source water.

Rainshow’r produces high-quality, 100% carbon-free shower filters, chlorine-removing bath balls and garden water filters. You may find their products distributed under both the Rainshower and Rainshow’r brand names.