No Mow May: is it actually worth it?

Every spring, the same argument plays out on every gardening forum in Britain: is No Mow May a genuine act of good garden stewardship, or an excuse dressed up in a hashtag?

Where it actually comes from

No Mow May is a real campaign, run by the conservation charity Plantlife, built on a fairly simple idea: an unmown lawn in May flowers — clover, self-heal, daisies, sometimes much more — and those flowers feed pollinators at exactly the point in the year when they're emerging and need it most. It's not folklore; it's a specific, deliberate trade of one month of tidiness for a real ecological benefit.

What it actually costs your lawn

Less than you'd think, and it's not lost — just delayed. Grass doesn't stop growing while you're not mowing it; the growth keeps accumulating. Turf Alert's mow trigger works the same way whether or not you've opted into No Mow May: it's driven by accumulated growth, not a fixed schedule, so pausing for a month doesn't confuse it — the trigger just picks up exactly where it left off the moment May ends, rather than either nagging you all month or forgetting the backlog existed.

The one real cost: a lawn that's grown a full month untouched needs a slightly more careful first cut back — raise the mower height for the first pass rather than scalping it back to your usual length in one go. Worth knowing going in, not a reason to skip it.

Should you do it?

If you like a consistently tidy lawn and don't especially care about pollinators, no — and that's a perfectly reasonable call, this isn't a moral obligation. If you'd like to give the local bees a real month of forage for basically no long-term cost to your lawn, it's a genuinely good trade.

Either way, Turf Alert has you covered — flip the No Mow May toggle at signup, or leave it off. Either way, the alerts adjust automatically; you don't have to remember to turn anything back on.