Since the grass blades will have more surface to utilize the sunlight to manufacture necessary nutrients to feed the plants roots and those roots will then send out more grass plants you will find that the grass will get thicker and will be greener and you may not even need to apply the soybean meal, which is one of the largest Genetically Engineered crops grown in the USA.

I've been mowing high for years and have only one problem with it: dirty looks and (less frequent) rude comments from neighbors. My grass looks about the same after mowing as theirs does before.

Okmoreh, maybe we can help with that. What kind of grass do you have? How often do you water in addition to rainfall? Can you post a picture?

Just to add my personal anecdote, my neighbors both mowed low yesterday and already their lawns look dried out. I mowed and watered last week and it at least doesn't look dry. I'm going out to water it right now. I need to take a picture of my one neighbor's lawn where he seeded winter rye and it choked out his main turf in places. Now that rye has died and he's going to have bare spots. That's what happens in the south but people do it every year.

I would say that you should wait until weeds begin to invade, but they probably use chemicals anyways. Bleh.

My neighbor is pretty lazy and cuts his grass every month on the lowest possible setting and leaves huge mats of grass everywhere (perhaps he thinks he doesn't have to mow as much doing this). Needless to say, his entire lawn is now clover and crabgrass. I just hope it doesn't spread over to my lawn

DCH, I don't know the kind of grass - planted before I lived here. But the point I was making was that I mow the grass DOWN to the height at which most of my neighbors think theirs needs to be mowed AGAIN.

Once, only, a neighbor and I nearly ended up in court over it. The neighbor was mowing a part of my lawn, down to about 1/2 inch, and I asked him to stop. He said he was doing it because my high mowing (3 inches) was exposing his granddaughter to Lyme disease. This was in the Town of East Lyme, Connecticut, to be clear, where it's endemic. (Granddaughter wasn't trespassing: there was a legal right-of-way across that end of my property.)

I don't water my lawn at all. There's no need here unless you are constantly scalping it - last summer it rained 6 days out of 7 all season long. The problem is finding a day when it's dry enough to mow.

did your neighbor seed in Winter Rye, a grain crop, or annual ryegrass

Good question. I'm going to guess it was annual ryegrass. It's the grass commonly overseeded in the south so the lawn is green during the winter. I think one of the common names here is 'winter rye' when in fact it is annual ryegrass. I'll check with the local authorities and try to be more careful with my common names.

okmoreh, so your grass looks fine to you but your neighbors simply want you to conform to their standards? I got the impression that it looked straggly or uneven after you mowed. Ticks are a difficult issue with lawns. It is said that ticks wait in "high grass" for a host to come by. I have not seen high defined but I think your neighbor is overly cautious. How high do you let yours get before mowing (guess it depends on the weather)? Would he and you entertain the idea of getting a guinea hen to patrol your lawns to eradicate any ticks? Even a chicken does a pretty good job of eating insects, but guineas have a better reputation for that.