Greener lawn care.

Byline: Beth Botts

At last, summer is sweeping over lawns. Once again, the grass is green and inviting. Perhaps you considered letting go of those 40-pound bags of chemical fertilizers and bottles of scary weed killers.

Let your grass out of its chemical prison so it can spread its roots in healthy, safe, full-of-life soil.

In the long run, you'll not only free yourself from worry about what lawn chemicals might do to your family and the world; you'll rid yourself of a lot of work.

"You don't need chemicals to take care of your lawn," says Rachel Rosenberg, executive director of the Safer Pest Control Project in Chicago (http://spcpweb.org) and former owner of a lawn-care service. "What you need is understanding."

Traditional lawn care _ blanketing the lawn with standardized chemical treatments, squirting poison on any weed or disease that appears, cutting too short and watering too often _ makes grass weak by ruining the soil it grows in.

Healthy soil is a rich sea of life, with billions of bacteria, fungi, single-celled protozoa, tiny wormlike nematodes, minuscule arthropods and other bustling organisms. As they consume organic…