Give Your Yard Back to Nature
popularmechanics.com
popularmechanics.com
While not mowing is nonstarter in my and essentially every other neighborhood, I've completely come to terms with the clover and random broadleaf weeds we have, they're part of the yard. Trying to get that picturesque carpet led me down a path of using questionable chemicals and spending tons of unnecessary time killing native vegetation that _wanted_ to grow and has thrived here in western PA.
I'm now consigning certain sections to wildflowers and just overseeding the rest of the yard with native grasses in the fall to naturally work up the more desirable stuff and thicken it. No more chemicals, and mowing slightly more frequently has also helped keep the dandelions down. Slowly I'll mulch other areas, especially around the trees, and try to put in some more low-maintenance landscaping like this article suggests.
In particular, clover is good for the lawn as it is nitrogen-fixing. Some clover are much better at this than others, so you might even deliberately choose a clover for your lawn.
Clover used to be a standard part of the mix for lawns (maybe as long ago as Victorian times) for this reason, it helps make the lawn self-sustaining.
To me it looks weird to have a mono-culture lawn, like you're emulating a shag carpet.
It's actually prettier with the occasional dandelion, and poppy.
(Of course, the answer here is to make sure you don't buy a house with an HOA.)
Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction.
I live in a town with a bylaw which says if you have a shared driveway, you're required to have an HOA. So, my deed and my neighbors' deeds all have an HOA built into them. It doesn't do anything, it isn't funded, but it exists on paper. When we were discussing one year the snow plowing of the shared driveway, I suggested perhaps we could have the HOA buy a truck and a plow and we could share it. My neighbors just looked at me sideways and said, "You actually want to bring an HOA to life?" I said, "yeah, good point," and that was the end of that.
I would love to have this happen. Unfortunately, many HOAs have managed to get embedded in home titles, and they have the ability to put a lien on your house if they decide they're entitled to something.
The HOA dues at the time were about $115 (the previously mentioned media agreement and neighborhood package was a major amount of it) so it wasn't because a month was missed (no one enjoyed invoking the lien process anyway as it incurs cost to the HOA as well). But as soon as the lien happens (after three letters saying the next step is lien), those who became delinquent started paying HOA dues (at least temporarily).
Now that we got out of the agreement and were able to get the HOA dues down to $25 (common area maintenance and insurance), I got off the board. I will say I've heard of some outright predatory HOAs that seemingly have it out for some homeowners, but liens as far as I'm aware are (second to) last resorts when you can't engage a homeowner to come into compliance. I hated paying for the media package too (internet and TV was garbage with them the last couple of years), but at the end of the day, the builder instituted that before any of us came into the neighborhood and all of those agreements were known to us before moving in so as trash as it is, we had to pay it.
It's not uncommon for all the available homes within a broad area (e.g. all those within walking distance of an employer) to have an HOA, making "just don't get a house with an HOA" not a viable option.
I'd love to have a "buyout" option.
In our town, supposedly (second hand info so grain of salt), one of the neighborhoods that sprung up without a HOA was pretty bad from the onset with poor maintenance on various houses (to the point of cardboard over broken glass windows) and the town somehow passed a requirement that all new developments belong to a HOA. Not sure the veracity of that (though I can confirm the spottiness of the neighborhood in question because they're adjacent from ours), but unfortunately it seems things are going more towards everything HOA route (outside of maybe buy a bunch of land on the outskirts of town and build a house. Which good luck with high speed internet and the like unless you're willing to pay to get them to install in your area).
I see pros and cons to HOAs, though even while the one I'm in isn't bad, I still am not a fan of them generally.
It's difficult and risky to push your property into a tax auction just to clear the HOA though. :)
Or possibly introduce local laws that specifically prohibit HOAs from introducing rules that are detrimental to the environment.
This is not a smart strategy.
It's very hard to change major rules because they require majority votes but a quorum is usually impossible because most people don't care enough to change the status quo.
And, when I lived in California, the HOA was pretty amenable to the xeriscaping required by town ordinance, but that is probably pretty variable by location.
My suggestion: next year plant rows of sunflowers or corn just behind the fence line. They'll grow as tall as an elephant's eye.
It requires an absurd amount of resources to keep you living comfortably when you could just choose a more reasonable climate.
For some pictures in California for example, see the California native plant society [0]. After visiting a native plant garden in SoCal I can't help but find the idea of a grass lawn absurd.
Aesthetically, you may be right. But yards are owned by and large by people with families. They have an important function to fulfill which is ruined by filling the space with plants.
However I rarely see anybody actually on those beautiful, irrigated lawns in Southern CA. People are usually inside or in an area with tiles or concrete on the ground.
There was grass in the mowed area, but also many, many other plants and insects. It was wonderful, as was the forest.
I find pure grass lawns very bland and unnatural, and in no way superior to a trimmed lawn with whatever plants happen to be growing. And you can have wilder areas too.
Perhaps you didn't mean 100% grass lawns, but that seems to be what a lot of American lawns aim for.
Beautiful No-Mow Yards: 50 Amazing Lawn Alternatives https://www.amazon.com/dp/1604692383/
Lawn Gone!: Low-Maintenance, Sustainable, Attractive Alternatives for Your Yard https://www.amazon.com/dp/1607743140/
In Colorado, check out the Colorado Native Plant Society or the Colorado Cactus & Succulent Society. Denver Botanic Gardens is also wonderful with outreach and education efforts, but they're not strictly focused on native plants (as far as I know).
Maybe it's because enough people have realized how nice their yard could be, maybe it's small spaces and hills, or maybe it's how difficult and irresponsible it would be to try to keep the grass green in the summer. Either way, I freaking love a lot of the landscaping around here, and have been extra-excited by yards massively overgrown with wildflowers, etc.
The areas that are more pleasant might be hard to replicate in a small space. You can't create a forest microclimate in a 1/4 acre yard.
In fact, an isolated 1/4 acre yard is an unnatural habitat in a lot of ways. The easiest thing to manage there other than a lawn is usually a crop of 8ft high weeds.
Yes you can! https://youtu.be/ng-VskDFPpM
It takes some work upfront to convert a lawn to a miniforest but it can be done.
Just imagine how wonderful suburbia could be if this was the norm and not the exception.
Edit: here's that same yard in early spring, where the fact that it's a normal suburban yard is more visible: https://youtu.be/CdthuPbn2uo . It's incredible how lush it is in the summer, you'd think it was miles away from civilization.
Further, I don't see what those trees have to do with the article's advice about native plants.
Surburbia might well be wonderful if that sort of backyard were the norm -- if we ditched the whole 19th and 20th century flight from urban agriculture -- I wouldn't mind being able to have a pig or a goat in the backyard, myself. But this article doesn't seem to have anything to do with that topic.
Convincing of what?
Really? I've had the opposite experience. Two pests I can't stand are mosquitos and cockroaches, and they both seem to thrive in lush, natural lawns. Whenever I mow, I notice an immediate and significant reduction in their numbers.
[0] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300086942/redesigning-am...
https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/why-mow-the-case-...
Also if someone is interested in what we are building: we are making a pass to access lush private backyard gardens for therapy, yoga, meditation etc. Some of our most interesting customers are VAs, elderly folks, stressed out engineers etc. The underlying goal is to help gardeners earn money that they put into building more lush gardens thus storing carbon into top soil.
Here's an instagram of someone who collects photos of that type of garden https://www.instagram.com/gaerten_des_grauens/
We have a sorry-looking conventional “Rasen” (grass lawn), but I’m looking into how to turn it over to clover for happier bees and less ongoing work.
Simply make the Rasen smaller: when you do add some bushes, berries or largeish plants on the borders, make the borders two meters deep and not just half a meter. You want to use many different sized plants to get achieve visual depth and colours. If you can squeeze in a little bench or chair hidden behind waist-high plants it's even better.
Couldn't find an authoritative list, but googling for "permaculture [state or city name]" will probably get you what you need.
Bonafides: 20 year homeowner with neighbors who have come to accept I'm not going to waste every weekend on yard care
I read a survey somewhere that modern expectations now are that if you have 25% (some places 15%) of your yard as turf your neighbors will be happy. 0% indicates you aren't "doing" something, just letting things grow.
One option not really mentioned in the article is to just let things grow, and only weed out annoying things (small trees poorly placed, things with thorns or bristles, etc). Not mentioned of course because you'll get in trouble even outside of a HOA.
I'll admit, as much as I want to be (and I think I am) tolerant, I do have a dislike of weedy tree overgrowth. A neighbor is dedicated to doing no lawn maintenance, and the result is not particularly lush or interesting, just a ground layer that's relatively bare beneath small trees and bushes that are all competing. If they avoided that, and had primarily vascular plants, I think the result would be more lush, representing a better natural landscape.
There's a kind of design challenge here that I don't know quite how to solve. Lawns are genuinely usable in a way that I appreciate. A more trendy approach is to add a bunch of hardscape or deck and then plant the rest... is that really better? Or, for instance, composting yard waste on-site helps support all the organisms that make use of that organic matter. People complain that it's also a great place for mice to nest. Which it is... and is that bad? I tend to change my mind when they try to come into the house in the fall. Overgrowth can be a hiding place and a safety concern. Of course lots of wildlife would like to hide, and so that very problem is also a feature. There's a challenge between having control and letting nature take its course... and neither is really right, and I believe good design goes beyond simple compromise.
I don't know... something I'd love to work on in my retirement.
Well actually I thought of an answer: Lots of things that take a lot of effort are done for not much more reason than to show how much effort they take. Which in turn reflects positively (supposedly) on the person who did it, testifying to their possession of ample extra resources to do the difficult thing. But I would think that would only be truly relevant for mating purposes. Like "This guy plays guitar, whose mastery takes an intellect, skill and devotion of time and resources that would potentially be available to you and your offspring if you were to mate with him" type logic. But what does it mean in the suburban lawn belonging to a complete family?
I've decided to avoid killing the clover and broadleaf "weeds" and want to plant as much as I can to encourage honeybees to live near me.
Thistle, mesquite, dandelion, and cactus don't really sit well with home-owners associations.
Saying that only "original" species count as native, how many centuries or millennia back do you draw the line?
These are things worth nurturing.
Our front yard is now weed cloth and chips. Inert, it looks great, and the town no longer cites us.
And yes, I water just enough so not to kill off the grass during dry spell.
Done poorly and it will look like a ghetto trash pile. Done well (it's non-trivial), it could look great!
Show us some actual examples of these yards!
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-07-11/single-mothe...
Contrast with Europe, where even in capitals you can have lawns so over-grown that you can't see the house behind them anymore. Nobody gives a fuck.
Lawns have some legitimate uses, entertainment and play space come to mind, but for the most part are a cultural statement.
I recommend keeping an open mind that “changing aesthetics” is the right way to go. More local biodiversity, less water use, more bee forage, insect habitat, birds, etc.
Often (but not always), just “doing nothing” is a great step forwards.