Safelawns is a company that provides organic lawncare & landscaping services at an individual’s home or business. They have soil testing on site as part of the services they provide. Organic Landscaper Scott Reil of Safelawns & Landscapes, LLC sat down with Eyewitness News.

EWN: Why is soil testing so important?
Reil: It's like they say at the baseball game: You can't tell the players without a scorecard, we can't tell what's going on with your soil until we've actually tested it. So basically we ask people to go throughout their yards, take a couple sample points. If we're coming out, we'll do it ourselves.The soil can be distinctly different throughout your yard. If you have a low wet spot versus a high sandy bank, you want to try to get the average of the two. If they're very, very different and they're big enough spots, you may want to create separate soil samples rather than just test a single soil sample.

EWN: What do you test the soil for?
Reil: (We test for) nitrates and ammonias. We also test conductivity - which is the amount of salts and whatnot in the soil - that's another separate test. And then eventually things move on to our photospectrometer where we actually break the soil down in elemental pieces so we can tell exactly how much or how little of any specific nutrient there is in the soil.

EWN: Why not use chemical products to enhance a lawn?
Reil: You have to remember even in organic culture, there are elemental parts to the soil. There's naturally occurring nitrogen. There's naturally occurring phosphorous. There's naturally occurring potassium. What we're saying is you don't have to add these things to your lawn in chemical forms. If you stimulate the biology in your lawn properly, it begins to naturally release these things in the soil. If you kill that biology ... Nobody home. There's nothing … and all the plants will starve. Which is why, when you see a chemical lawn where the chemical fertilization has been stopped, or pulled from that lawn, you get almost an instantaneous death. And that's because they've killed the biology that would naturally make it work itself and you're no longer what plants need chemically.

EWN: What other reasons are there to use only natural products on a lawn?
Reil: There are billions of organisms in a handful of soil. There are six million organisms in a teaspoon of soil. That same teaspoonful of soil holds almost five miles of fungal hifi - little strands of funguses - and fungus is incredibly important to any ecosystem. For a lawn, things like micorizal fungi expand root systems three to four times their normal size through a symbiot relationship with the plant. The plant gives it sugars. It gives it nutrients and water and air. The first thing that dies when you put down a chemical fertilizer will be the fungus in your soil. So we find that if you're able to go back and supplement these items in the soil (naturally), rather than using methods to feed your grass to kill it, in the long term you create healthier soil and healthier plants.

EWN: You told us that by cutting grass high and by keeping the chemicals off the lawns, that the roots extend deeper. You said about a foot. Why is that important?
Reil: In chemical culture, you're lucky to get three or four inches. But because we've introduced the micorizal fungi, because we do things that the other guys don't - by introducing the biology, by introducing the flora and the fauna that makes the rest of the system tick - we can eliminate a lot of what those other people call the 'organic bump' or the organic transitional period.

EWN: If someone chooses to go organic, someone told us that your lawn would get that ‘bump’ where it wouldn’t look good for the first few years.
Reil: There can be that ‘bump’ in the beginning, simply based on the fact that if somebody has been doing chemicals for a long time, they don’t disappear completely overnight.

EWN: Do you need to buy organic grass seed to get an organic lawn?
Reil: That's a topic of discussion out there a lot, whether it needs to be organic seed or not. We've found that you can take any type of seed and with organic practices, be less chemically intensive, be a lot friendlier to the environment, be a lot friendlier to the soil and i think that's a far more important thing to look at than whether or not you're purchasing a seed that's been raised organically. That said, if you really want the minimal footprint it's something to look for, but there aren't that many organic grass seed suppliers out there.

EWN: You said something about a benefit to keeping grass high …
Reil: One of the best things you can do to start going green is to start cutting your lawn higher. Your roots will stretch further and they'll grab water from more depth, they'll create much higher levels of photosynthesis and make it much easier for your grass to compete with the weeds, in particular hot season grasses like crabgrass. If you can shade that crabgrass out this time of year when it's still too cool for crabgrass - just starting to germinate now - if it's shaded underneath three or four inches of good cool-season grasses, it never gets a good start.

EWN: Aside from keeping grass high and eliminating the use of chemical lawncare programs, how does the average homeowner go organic?
Reil: I'd start with the organic fertilizers and most particularly in trying to find a way to move some soil biologies onto your lawn. One of the best things you might do in a case like that would be to come in and top dress with compost.

EWN: What kind of compost?
Reil: The best thing I can tell you about compost is spend as much money as your budget allows, because really good organic compost is 1) not cheap 2) not in great supply out there 3) and it's so loaded with incredible biologies - both flora and fauna, animals and plants - that are going to jump start the ecology in your soil.

EWN: What are your feelings about lime?
Reil: One of the reasons we do soil testing is we find is there's a tendency for people to lime every year, whether they need it or not. And we often find high sources. The other thing is - specifically - most of the lime sold in Connecticut is dolomitic lime, which means it has a part magnesium to it. And we often find high magnesium levels especially in lawns that have been limed up a lot.

EWN: We understand your company is involved in a testing project in Washington, DC.
Reil: Our company has taken on a renovation of the National Mall in a three year study along with the EPA and the National Parks Service … to show chemical culture up against organic culture and to show we can do it as well or better.

EWN: How is that being conducted?
Reil: There are three plots that are being tested. The National Park Services has a plot with conventional lawn care methods. The second plot is being tested by the National Park Services with organic products supplied by Safelawns. The third plot is a total renovation that Safelawns did alone, using tons of organic compost they brought in.