By DEBORAH GERTZ HUSAR

Herald-Whig Staff Writer

Mike Nowak's best advice about lawn care might be to do less, with less lawn.

"My philosophy is when in doubt, rip it out. We could be putting plants in that are more useful to the fauna of our region," said Nowak, a master gardener, host of a popular Sunday morning gardening radio show in Chicago and a writer for Chicagoland Gardening Magazine.

"If we're planting just turf, it's not very biodiverse. We need to maybe go in another direction. But as long as we're going to be lawn-obsessed, we might as well be doing it safely."

Nowak will share his tips for environmentally friendly, synthetic fertilizer-free lawn care as keynote speaker for Gardener's Palette 2009. The annual program is March 7 at John Wood Community College. It will help participants "go green" in their homes and gardens.

"We're always emphasizing ways to use sound, sustainable practices when gardening," said Deborah Lee, horticulture coordinator with the University of Illinois Extension Adams/Brown Unit. "Of the 14 classes we're offering, seven will be specifically geared to looking at more environmentally sound practices, giving people some understanding and some options."

Nowak said the average homeowner is not well-informed about the impact of lawn-care fertilizer use.

"I always ask the question, why do they call it 'weed and feed'? It sounds happy," he said. "We're weeding and feeding at the same time, but the problem is we're weeding with poison and feeding with synthetics. We're overfertilizing, putting too much nitrogen into our soil."

Nowak hopes to change the mind-set of taking preventive measures across the entire lawn before a problem even appears in one small area.

"We've got to teach people how to tolerate a few of what they call weeds," he said. "With clover, I can't believe people think it's a weed. It's a legume. It takes nitrogen out of the air, puts it in the ground and does it for free."

Speakers from across the Midwest will highlight a variety of other gardening topics. Lee said there will slide presentations with many classes, and handouts will be available for most topics.

-- dhusar@whig.com/221-3379