Beginners guide to lawn mowing Mulching vs Bagging vs Side Discharge. Understand the pros and cons to each method and which one is right for you to handle your grass clippings and benefit your lawn.

I cover Lawn Bagging, Mulching & Side Discharge and the pros and cons to each and help you choose the one that is right for you.

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39 Comments

  1. If you care about not soil/degradation over years/decades, the only think to do is mow with a mulching blade and let the clippings remain as they lay. Too many people don’t think about this, but especially in America, we’re literally burning our soil to eventual but assured exhaustion.

  2. I have zero respect for anyone that show's some girl's butt in their thumbnail for clicks. Hope your channel goes straight down the toilet.

  3. wait…what?…side discharge not popular any longer ?
    better work on some better facts, side discharge is on most all available mowers.

  4. I bought a device on Amazon called the Bag Buddy Bag Holder that you can put up to a 45 gallon lawn and leaf bag on and it spreads open the bag for you so you can take your shovel or pitchfork and pick your clippings up and put them in the bag. It's a single person operation, I love it.

  5. Bagging is the worst for me. When I cut the grass I always used a mulching mower. Putting back the organic component in a lawn grown originally in rock hard clay worked fine. My landscape service bags the grass. After a few years I have dead patches. The ground has gone gray as opposed to the old black. Going to try adding 0.25 inch to a half inch of organic mix on top the grass as soon as I figure out how to do it.

  6. I have a hand me down commercial mower, this has convinced me to keep it side discharge. Thank you for the informative video sir.

  7. Mulching will also cause your lawn to build-up/raise-up over time. Our mulched sodded lawn is six years old and we need to dig up and raise all the sprinkler heads (in the near future). Our mortared brick edging now also needs a new course added to the top. Thus I am a bagger now going forward.

  8. Very thorough and very helpful. Based on this video I will be bagging for most of my cuts with mulching maybe twice per season.

  9. I prefer the side discharge for both professional and personally at home. If you have a problem with the area just double but your outline and when you turn always turn where the discharge is controlled. Even if that means making those 3 point turns to control the clippings

  10. What about mulching as a method of lawn leveling? Anyone every witness over time their ground get smoother as clippings settle into low spots in the soil?

  11. Used riding mulcher for years. Wouldn't do it any other way. Cut it often enough, leaves no clippings. If it does, drive over them again.

  12. im going with side discharge to spread the grass seeds that you should be waiting for before cutting your grass…

  13. Finally thanks to your video I was able to understand the differences between different ways of cutting the grass.

  14. One obvious thing that is missing here is that side-discharge is a form of mulching. The grass cuttings get blown out over the lawn.

    I usually find that it's better than actual mulching because the discharge spreads the grass out better and it's less likely to clump together and require more work or kill grass in spots. Free fertilizer too.

    I have a "natural" lawn, so there are no downsides to any kind of mulching. Grass, clover, dandelion, crabgrass – all mixed together. And I cut it high so the lawn has deep roots and requires much less water.

    Lawn is always green, few bare spots, low cost, and hardly any maintenance besides mowing.

    To each his own lawn warriors!

  15. I put a crate 10hp B&S engine on a 21 inch push mower with a good mulch blade for my 1/3 acres lot. No lack of power to mulch. Can go as fast as I like. A little heavier than a standard 21 inch mower but I don’t mind the exercise. Fertilize 3x per year and have irrigation system. Awesome lawn.

  16. You started saying you were going to talk about the effects of each type of mowing on your lawn, you ended up only talking about the power of the mower….

  17. I have an old side discharge push mower that the discharge is in front of the front wheel. I have tried a center discharge between the wheels and I just hated it. It always plugs up. But when the discharge is in front of both wheels it cuts so easy, even higher grass. But they just don't make that type mower any more, so I half to keep patching mine, to still have that type of mower. I can't even find a used one to fix up,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

  18. Grass clippings are known as 'Gardner's Gold', to people who understand what gardening is.
    My 1/2 acre in Virginia Beach had not one blade of grass. I preferred plantings and pathways,
    unlike my neighbors who seeded, thatched, fertilized, watered, mowed and bagged weekly.

  19. I'm 2 years late, but it still matters. I've side-discharged my front yard for years, and — in the busy mow season — I mow once a week, so I'm not cutting off much off of the top on each session. But two things:
    1 – Mow side-discharge in strips, each time running over the side-discharge from the previous pass. In doing so, you prevent a lot of grass-clipping build-up on the top. It also half-way mulches it, because you're mowing over the already mowed over grass clippings.
    2 – My lawn was sluggish this year, and I bought dethatching rake, and I can scarcely believe the amount of thatch/debris that I got up. I suspect that had I been "bagging" all along, that this would not have happened. After dethatching, my lawn has become notably healthier.

  20. While my property is not huge , it’s not small but I have a natural wooded fence line on all sides except the front so while I produce many bags of grass it’s easy for me to dump so I choose to bag majority of the time, in later summer when the grass isn’t growing as much, at least for me in the northeast I will sometimes side discharge or even mulch if the conditions are right

  21. Fertilizer for lawns should be ILLEGAL, they've done more harm to the planet than….well, some other thing. Lawns themselves should be illegal but thats another story, they do more harm to the planet than cocaine ever has. When immigrants come to north america thats the first thing they say: "this is crazy, you put all this energy and money into something you almost never use?". ANY problem you are having with your lawn is because of a lack of soil. Grass can grow in the rocks beside a highway for petes sake. But as mentioned, if you don't mow very often then mulching and side discharge isn't going to help your lawn.

  22. I only bag when I need mulch for the vegetable garden. Grass clippings are awesome to keep weeds down around veggie plants. The rest of the time I mulch, the only thing there is you must mow more frequently. If you wait too long and let the weeds go to seed, and then mow, you're just seeding your lawn with weed seeds. When I wait too long, and the weeds go to seed, I bag and compost the clippings

  23. So nobody really mention it. But what about using mulching blades with side discharge? Seems to work great for me.

  24. I find with my John Deere X350 mower when I mow wet grass or even slightly tall grass the grass clippings get clogged up in it’s chute

  25. I only bag if the grass has grown too long to mulch. If I keep my blades sharp on my Honda HRX217 it does a pretty decent job. Another issue with bagging is the mower can get heavy and the front of the mower can get too light which can produce uneven cuts if you aren't paying attention.

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