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What to Know About No Mow May

By Jean Siers

May 10, 2024

I had never heard of No Mow May until a couple of years ago. We had just bought our house in Salisbury and were traveling back and forth between Charlotte, NC, in preparation to move to the Delmarva Peninsula. Our Realtor Bob — a great guy — offered to find someone to keep our lawn mowed until we moved in. Every couple of weeks, we would arrive in Salisbury, our car packed to the gills with plants and yard art and more, to find the lawn a foot tall with rangy grass and weeds. It turned out the lawn guy wasn’t as helpful and reliable as Bob. Our yard looked terrible, and we worried what our new neighbors would think of us. “It’s not a problem,” Bob said. “Just tell them you observe No Mow May!”

The No Mow May movement began in Britain in 2019. Early spring is a difficult period for pollinators, when they wake up and begin flying about, but there are not a lot of flowers blooming to sustain them. Leaving the lawn and some flowering weeds unmowed can help fill the gap until food for pollinators becomes more abundant in late spring and summer. The concept caught on and spread like crabgrass in a flowerbed! In 2020, Appleton, WI, became the first US city to give residents the option to skip mowing for the month of May.

On the face of it, No Mow May seems like a great idea. Many farmers tell me they leave swaths of early weeds on the edges of their fields to provide food for the pollinators that will soon be busy pollinating blueberries, peaches, strawberries and more.

Early weeds that provide food for our Maryland pollinators include henbit (a member of the mint family that spreads like crazy but has lots of purple flowers filled with pollen), chickweed (with its shallow root system and tiny white flowers), white clover and dandelions. I could visit my yard right now and find every one of these growing in abundance!

If weeds are good for our pollinator friends, does that mean No Mow May is good as a policy? Many would argue it is not. Simply letting fescue grass grow doesn’t provide food for bees or other pollinators. If the lawn has been treated with herbicides, simply having taller grass isn’t beneficial. Plus, letting grass grow tall can actually lead to damage when it is finally mowed. Cutting more than one-third of the grass’s height stresses the plant, which in turn might lead homeowners to use fertilizer and other chemicals later in the season to offset earlier damage, and those chemicals can wash into our waterways, exacerbating toxic algal blooms and dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay.

Plus, if we let those delicious (to pollinators) flowers grow for a month and then eliminate them, says native plant proponent and University of Delaware professor Doug Tallamy, we’re doing nothing but teasing pollinators. We let them become accustomed to a food source that will soon disappear.

A better answer is to provide consistent access to native plants and flowers for the widest variety of pollinators and other animals. We can do that best by eliminating a portion of our monoculture lawns and replacing them with native perennials, shrubs, and trees.

The City of Salisbury is an official Bee City, USA, actively promoting better habitat for bees and other pollinators. In 2021, the Salisbury City Council enacted a pollinator meadow program, allowing homeowners to have pocket meadows on their property. This is from the City’s website: “Meadows are a planned, intentional, and maintained planting of native grasses and wildflowers that are commonly found in meadow and prairie plant communities. They are small, native plantings offering the same ecological benefits of wild meadows but on a more manageable scale. They represent a valuable habitat by providing pollen, nectar, seed resources, nesting sites, and a protected environment for the City’s native bee and butterfly species.”

If you choose not to mow in May, go right ahead. (A few more weeks without the roar of lawnmowers is in itself a good thing!) But if you want to do the most good for the most pollinators, think instead about reducing your lawn and adding a variety of native plants to your yard. It’s a great way to make a huge difference.

Jean Siers is the Regional Director of Society of St. Andrew’s Delmarva office, a WET board member, and a Maryland Extension Master Gardener Intern.