How did people fertilize lawns , plants before chemical fertilizers?
Until around 1900 there were no lawns except for the very rich and they used to graze sheep on their swaths of grass to weed, mow and feed the lawn. Very small lawns were hand cut with scissors. Sometime in the late 1800 the lawn mower was invented but it was loud, big, dangerous and expensive so it did not catch on at first. when they made mowers smaller and easier to use people started putting in lawns and getting rid of their veg and flower gardens. Chemical fertilizers came into their own after WWII, around 1947 as did herbicides. I don’t believe the early lawn farmers had monocropped lawns as we see today and likely were not as phobic about clover (which is a great addition to the lawn as it adds a lot of nitrogen which grass needs). And this is one of the ways early lawns were fertilized-they were not just one or two species of plant but a large hodgepodge of pasture plants.
