Renowned Entomologist Says ‘Get Rid of Your Lawn’
news.wttw.com
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Everything from fruit trees to berries, flowers to vegetables, herbs to herbal teas like chamomile.
Strongly recommend looking at what will grow in your area and start replacing your lawn. Chunk out a four by four foot section and grow some sugar peas and tell me it wasn't a thousand times more rewarding than a lawn.
The irony is that people think a lawn is easier to maintain because it looks simpler
Weekly maintenance is similar - just mow it (though let it grow long when it's flowering - cut off the flowers and you lose the pollinators).
Not really, but I hate the stuff. I finally managed to get most of it plucked out of my front yard. Hopefully the additional clover will displace it fully next season.
It's particularly difficult with the mild Winters we have had of late because it's almost as if spring goes from December to May now. Sods like Bermuda or St Augustine still go dormant in fall but the weeds don't stop growing.
Grass types are a reflection of the climate and vary dramatically due to factors such as sun, growing season, and soil composition. In Florida the soil composition is mostly sand, and they receive a lot of year round sun so the predominant grass is St. Augustine because it thrives and produces thick turf that chokes out weeds.
St. Augustine is also very similar to Crab Grass, which is considered a weed in many places, like Georgia. And it is easily killed by all but a few herbicides (e.g. MSM). So while St. Augustine is great in Florida, doesn't work well in Georgia where the soil composition promotes more aggressive weeds, and the tree canopy inhibits St. Augustine's growth.
In other words, Florida grass is Georgia weeds.
> Up here it's mostly weeding, adding soil where needed and reseeding every spring, mowing it every couple of weeks, and watering once in a while. Maybe 2-3 rounds of chemicals a year if you want that healthy deep green lawn look.
In the south your yard can grow 4-6 inches a week and during the growing season you sometimes have to mow as frequently as every 5 days. The mowing season in Georgia is from March to November for grasses that go dormant, it's year round for those that don't.
Weeding is a year-round chore and many people opt for year round weed services that spray for weeds on a monthly basis if not more frequently. Pre-emergent weed control is put down in February or March, and other herbicides are used through out the spring and summer.
Fertilizer is only done a couple times a year and varies depending on the type of grass.
It's OK to kill plants so just get a small variety and see which ones take over. They sort themselves out or they don't and you try again next year.
Source: friends and I installed native lawns.
I'm personally a huge fan of native lawns, but this is always in the back of my mind and I haven't seen it addressed.
Just mowing less isn't perhaps simpler by the definition of it but is way better for biodiversity. You could try it in just a small piece of your current lawn and see what happens. Mow once near the end of spring and again once 3 to 4 months later. Shouldn't take long before native flowering plants will pop up.
We on the other hand make hay. Meaning depending on the year, we spend several hours once or twice a year to cut the meadow (by scythe, but that's just because I like that). And then some more time to turn the hay and bale it to produce something which is then worth some money. And yields vivid fauna&flora (we also never cut everything every year, some random parts can stay till the next year). Still I get neighbours telling me 'wow that's a lot of work you put in there'. At first I thought they were joking but theye are not: I really have to do the math for them to make them realize several hours every month is way more work than what I do (and that's not even talking about the money spent). I'm not sure why that is. Maybe they perceive running behind a mower or sitting on one not as work. Or not as lost time. Or they see a scythe and think it's extremely hard work.
> you might just as well have concrete and paint it green
No, you would miss out on the feel of soft grass under your bare feet, and your kids and dogs would be having a whole lot less fun playing in the yard.
> Maybe they perceive running behind a mower or sitting on one not as work. Or not as lost time.
A lot of people find lawn-mowing relaxing. It's light physical labor, it has an immediate payoff, it involves motors and/or engines and/or tools depending on your preference, and the smell of fresh-cut grass is amazing.
Should have made this more clear perhaps, but I only put in that farmer's concrete quote (which I don't agree with for the reasons you mention) for the biodiversity aspect not everything else grass-related :)
A lot of people find lawn-mowing relaxing.
Yes but that is true for me as well so doesn't really explain why more than one neighbour made a similar comment about me spending more time mowing than they do while in reality it's the opposite, by far. Maybe it's just coincidence (N=3) and/or maybe they were just making conversation or so.
probably better
Considering the biological side, it's way beyond 'probably'. For example [1] gives a rather high-level overview and [2] goes into (one of) the more specific aspects. [3] also talks about the history/future bits.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19092 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632071... [3] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6411/148.full
The mowing is the easiest part, at least for my relatively small lawn.
* Aerate/seed (realistically not necessary to do every year).
* Fertilize.
* Pull weeds (mostly dandelions).
Compared to a well established bed of flowers, which every season at the very least needs:
* Fertilize
* Trim plants that begin taking over.
For a vegetable garden there is significantly more work involved.
* Germinate
* Ready the soil
* Work in manure
* Plant / transplant
* Keep weeds down.
* Some plants need a trellis.
* Mulch.
* Keep weeds down where the mulch failed.
* Continuously maintain the vegetables health to ensure good harvest.
* Harvest
* Clean up the beds
* Plant green manure
* Plan next year, rotate crops ect.
If you live a place where it rains enough for the grass to make it on it's own, it's the path of least resistance only bested by a concrete slab, or perhaps tiled that you spray to kill weeds.
A woodchip mulched strawberry patch uses requires zero human labor except from harvest and the occasional propagation of runner plants which 4x each year. All you have to do is cover with leaves, straw, or evergreen branches to help the crowns over winter and they will be back each year.
Raspberry canes will literally walk all over your property and only need to be mulched (with leaves, grass clippings, or woodchips) to keep them looking tidy)
The gas used to power mowers is a huge subsidy. A vegetable garden bed uses a lot less energy and time. Remember to cover vegetable garden beds in fall and winter.
All of the bullets on your list are optional in a veg garden and perennial garden. I don't rotate my crops unless I have a compelling reason to do so (like a pest eating all my potatoes)
For perennial crops, you still need to do more work. Manure (and you have to source it too), mulch and pruning is a bare minimum. If you care about the harvest, you have to continuously keep an eye on it and treat various problems. For apples in particular it's imperative to remove monilia infected fruit continuously, and especially after harvest. You also have to prune the crop to ensure a larger harvest.
A garden is as much or as little work as you make it, but a lawn is probably the lowest bar of minimum work if you get enough rain to water it. It didn't become popular because it's more useful that everything else, but because you really don't have to do much work to keep it.
If you have a grass that matches where you live and don’t mind your lawn occasionally being brown, none of that is needed.
When Roomba came out everyone flipped like it was an amazing invention that nobody had thought of. All I could think of was that little yellow lawn mower diligently mowing its grass. Cute little guy is still running today.
Why don't more people have these? I'm gonna buy one when I have a yard.
edit: I see they are decently expensive. If they work still totally worth it.
With a kid, I’m suddenly super grateful for my little lawn.
I loved playing in that yard. It had great places to hide. Ample trees to climb. Wildlife to look for and learn about. A variety of fun tasks to perform, from picking fruit and berries to making jam and juice.
When my younger brother turned 10, our parents decided that he had to play football. Almost all of the trees were felled. Everything I loved about that place was destroyed, and replaced by one, big, boring, lifeless lawn.
Instead of fun tasks, I was thenceforth assigned the task of mowing the lawn. Which I resented and continue to detest to this day.
A garden is always going to be better than a lawn. A garden of plants that grow faster than trees may be higher-maintenance, though.
Playing in his yard was way more fun.
I have a kid and I'm grateful we gave up our lawn. She plants in the spring, harvests, cooks, and preserves with us. She's excited to make pickles, jam, squash, pumpkins, corn, etc from things she's grown and tended to. She even got to pick out some of the flowers and make her own little square.
Watching her step out to grab some blueberries, raspberries, or strawberries is one of the best feelings in the world.
We read seed catalogs together in the winters and plan what we could grow (Ooh, what if we grew purple cauliflower? Or rhubarb for pie!)
I'd agree if you have a house big enough to have a playroom, and have open space close by, it's probably easy enough.
Our lawn is kinda a tiny, tiny, wildflower meadow, ie it's not cut much. The bees love the Clover.
There's also a substantial difference between a "natural" lawn, where clover and other plants are allowed vs the stereotypical "perfect" lawn (in the US) with a single grass species (and heavy application of herbicides and fertilizers).
It's almost like sweeping statements such as "no one should have a lawn" need modifiers. ;o)
I'd guess grass is still better environmentally than gravel; so long as you don't over tend it (and our mower was rescued from the dump).
Have fun.
You have to mow it. You have to mow it every week. You have to mow it every week even if you're tired, or sick, or it's hot, or it's cold, or it's rainy, or your friends are playing a game, or you had a sleepover. No excuses, no exceptions. You can't mow it too early in the morning, or too late in the evening. You can't stop halfway through and do the rest later (back yard/front yard perhaps, but not half of the front yard). The grass does not care what your reasons are. It just cares that you didn't mow it. If you don't, it punishes you. Sometimes the neighbors do, too.
In theory they understand this, in practice there are plenty of other activities that result in a litany of renegotiations. Grass. Doesn't. Care.
You know, lawns were simply not a major factor in that, outside of perhaps once-in-a-year water gun fights with some neighbor kids, the wilderness held far more appeal. Back-lot tracks, untilled fields, marginal scrubland running along stream beds. That was where the majority of my 'green time' took place.
I do remember a few families around the village that had completely unkept, wilderness yards. They provided far more entertainment than any with manicured lawns.
Edit: To add a bit of context here a lot of people are talking about pesticides and fertilizer and stuff like that but we don't do anything like that, we just mow it when it gets a bit long. Does that mean our lawn is technically a meadow?
A meadow, or natural lawn, or whatever you want to call it would be a mix of grass, clover, and other "weeds". It wouldn't require anywhere near as much chemical treatment (if any) and could be mowed and watered far less often. To me, it would also be allowed to grow long enough to flower, to promote pollinating insects.
In my limited experience (ex cub leader [mixed sex groups], church kids helper, worked with children for 15 years; kids and nieces/nephews of my own) most boys behaviour declines rapidly if you don't "run them", but most girls aren't affected in the same way.
On our scout camps (mixed sex, mixed age, for the last 20 years at least) in free time the girls _tend_ to retreat to their tents and chat and the boys _tend_ to hit the field and run around like idiots. There's obviously a lot of selection bias in these groups too, they do outdoor pursuits, rough camping, etc. -- these girls are fit and hardy and as capable at kayaking/hiking/climbing/backwoodsmanship as the boys (indeed at the top end, 14yo, the girls are often fitter and stronger as they tend to grow a little earlier than the boys do). There's probably some observer bias too, of course, and this is anecdotal (but longitudinal).
My observations of toddlers at "mums & toddlers" groups suggests the ones who run around with a pram are usually boys (though that's far from exclusive; and the mothers [it's about 1:30 men] have very strong gender bias, which might be the origin of that effect).
YMMV.
Interested in other observations, FWIW I'm in the UK.
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/exercise/physical-activity-guid...
If you have an HOA - there might be a bit of problem...
We've replaced our lawn with wild savanna, and it's zero work. We just let it go. It looks totally wild, and I'm happy with that. (Getting it in place - removing the invasives, improving the soil, planting trees, and spreading native wildflower and grass seeds was a lot of work - but since its established its very little work. Just occasionally walking through it and pulling out the invasives that are trying to move back in.)
Part of the change that needs to happen is a change in our aesthetics.
Community reputation means a lot more than some people realize. Source: I've been on both sides of this one.
Personally, I've never experienced a neighborhood with a strict HOA that I could stand to stick around in. There always seems to be a minority with too much time on their hands playing neighborhood CIA operative and acting like they've just received power for the first time in their lives. I know that might be a little harsh but there always seems to be some variant of this around.
I live in a condo now where those people still exist, but it is so much better. They have much less power and visibility.
There's nothing wrong with a yard full of native plants. You should stop trying to keep up with the neighbors and start letting people live their lives without your input.
The reality is that the community around you can and _does_ produce effects material to your life, even if you aren't aware of them. Maybe you weren't invited to that BBQ? Maybe you then missed the opportunity to connect with someone in your field of work? Who knows...
That's a 1946 ideal. In the same way that it was a 1946 ideal to build a residential-only neighborhood away from the big city, with racist covenants and redlines to keep the black people out. It was designed to evoke the manicured lawns of English and French castles, especially the "green carpet" at Versailles. Mount Vernon and Monticello and the White House featured grass lawns. And the mechanical lawnmower opened that aristocratic status symbol up to those without herds of grazing animals or scything slaves to keep it close-cropped. That, and lawn bowling and golf courses, made everyone crazy for grass lawns.
Abraham Levitt (of Levittown) and Frederick Law Olmstead then installed a whole complex of unreasonability into generations of Americans.
It is reasonable to surround yourself with people, each of whom arranges their affairs such that they need not have similar opinions on the disposition and upkeep of each other's properties. It is reasonable to mind your own business when someone else rips out their useless bermudagrass and replaces it with edible flowering herbs. It is very unreasonable to march up to their door to wave HOA covenants and city landscaping ordinances in their face in an effort to make them replant the grass. Yet that is what neighborhood busybodies do on a regular basis. We can't get rid of them, because they have the 1946 racists on their side, and they got there first, and they built entrenchments--legally, of course, as actual entrenchments would ruin the neighborhood aesthetic.
If you want a lawn, buy yourself a nice, square mile of property in the country, build a castle on it, and cut down everything that could hide approaching infantry. Rotate your herds around so that the grazing fodder is kept short. Then you can also have the formal gardens in the back, and maybe also a hedge maze. If you want a lawn in the suburbs, fine, but keep it on your own property and don't try to grow it over your neighbors' properties with some sick legal scheme.
Chickens are another option.
This is about learning how to fit ourselves comfortably in to nature - because pretending we can be above, outside, or removed from it is sending us careening towards disaster.
It's gonna be a hard sell to get people to enjoy something their grandparents overwhelmingly knew to be inferior.
The mosquites were here before the transformation - they come from the scrapyard up the road - and the changes we've made have actually reduced them in the local area. We've increased the number of frogs, bats, and dragonflies to keep them under control. We don't have ticks to speak of, the possums take care of them.
As for hay fever, you get that in suburbia just as bad or worse. You realize that the Yew bushes that everyone loves planting are among the worst producers of allergenic pollen, right?
Again, this is part of the aesthetic change we need to make. Realizing that we are a part of and depend upon the natural environment. And figuring out how to fit ourselves into it comfortably, instead of trying to remove ourselves from it or pretend we are somehow above it or separate from it.
We have the benefit of better science and a bit of hindsight and can see how the move to lawns has caused pollution on a massive scale and reduced native insect populations. I think at the very least stopping the use of fertilizers and adding wildflower gardens at the borders of your yard is a good plan.
Focus on how sustainability is good for people and how it will improve their lives. If they prefer orderly, manicured lawns, don't look down at them saying they need to change their aesthetics.
I'm sure the landlord went with it because it drops their groundskeeping costs to something approaching zero. But it's been great for everyone else involved, too.
1) grow things like wildflowers that don't get eaten (but do get pollinated) 2) grow things that produce more than you need (tomatoes in our case, but summer squash is another good example) 3) grow things that produce more than can be eaten by the critters (pumpkins) 4) grow things that most critters don't want (chili peppers, basil) 5) enjoy the fact that some critters got something to eat, instead of treating it like a problem. We don't try to keep anybody out of anything.
#5 is easier for us than it is for a lot of people, I'm sure, but it's easier if you get #1-4 right. If I were growing things that took lots of effort I might be annoyed but where we live (southeastern Pennsylvania), most things just grow.
Other things I tried that did not work:
Repellents, both natural and synthetic including but not limited to deer blood, other animal blood, predator urines (tried multiple types and brands), soaps and bitter and/or spicy repent sprays and gels.
Fake snakes, fake predator models and even real predators (not uncommon for foxes and coyotes are to be seen in our neighborhood).
Noisemakers and motion activated lights.
Lots more.
I wasted a ton of time and money trying the above, not to mention all the time spent gardening only to have it eaten by our woodland friends. A fence just works and does not harm animals. It can look very attractive too and can be relatively inexpensive if you keep an open mind w/r/t materials and look out for good deals/craigslist.
Probably works better in a square lot than a rectangular one.
If there's a local butcher they're a ready supply of the stuff, and it helps your local markets so win-win. Or if you already hunt for meat (or have friends that do), it's just making sure you're using even more of the animal, so again, win-win. If you don't think that locally sourced meats are ethically/environmentally sustainable then... ummm... /shrug; there's other methods, but none that have been as effective for our plot size.
Most other yardwork activities can be done in the damp, or even in the rain (hello REI/Patagonia). Gardeners will tell you never to dig in wet soil, but the clay content in coastal soils is so low in many areas that it's a non-issue.
Agriculture is a major user of ground and surface water in the United States, accounting for approximately 80 percent of the Nation's consumptive water use and over 90 percent in many Western States.[0]
Households only make up a small percentage of the total water consumption worldwide[1].
Recommendations to cut foods that require an inordinate amount of water per calorie are probably better served(if you care about freshwater consumption) and it appears the simplest way to reduce this would be to cut out bovine meat.[2]
[0] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-practices-management/ir...
[1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/water-in-water-ou...
[2] - https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...
The somewhat ludicrous figure provided at that link - of 15,415 litres of water per kilogram of meat - is oft' cited by vegetarians and vegans, but doesn't bear scrutiny.
CAFOs are undeniably bad for everyone (the land, the animals, and the consumers) and while they doubtless skew the stats, those grossly artificial environments are clearly not locking up 15 tonnes of water per kilogram of meat.
Something closer to natural - say pastured raised cattle - are using much more reasonable volumes of water, especially at low stocking rates. But the whole 'using water' claim is muddied. The water the animal drinks passes through it and into the ground. Irrigation of the pasture, if performed, can't be thought of as 'lost' water either, as some will go underground, some will be lost as transpiration / evaporation, and some will be stored in the plant to then be consumed by the animal (qv).
> Why do lawns even factor into the equation when the reality is ...
Because lawns are, for most people, for most of the time, pointless wastes of land, water, pesticides, and energy. There are myriad (good) reasons to surrender some lawn and instead grow some of your own food -- TFA just pointed out one of the less obvious ones.
Yes, it's not like the water is destroyed. It may be diverted from directly flowing into a river, sure, and perhaps goes straight back to the atmosphere rather than into the sea via evaporation, exhalation, and transpiration... but it's not gone.
It's still not a perfect perspective, because the exact nature of what's in the water can be an issue (i.e., urine is "bad" for most uses, but may fertilize well, etc.). But it's at least closer to the truth than the mindset that water is poured into a cow and disappears from the universe entirely. If goodness and pureness was a one-time consumable item that way, the way some people seem to conceive of it, the ecosystem would have run out of it billions of years ago. It is a renewable resource.
Evaporated water will come down again as precipitation.
Your example (cotton) is a truly horrendous crop / textile, but that story sounds like a combination of very poor crop choices for the environment and spectacularly poor resource management.
Also, if you apply water at or beneath the ground/mulch layer, overnight, then your loss to evaporation is very low. Similarly, even suspended drip irrigation (think grapes or other trellis grown plants) versus mist or sprinkler systems.
Lawns, coming back to TFA, are almost exclusively irrigated by sprinklers, and because they're primarily residential (ie. no automated irrigation systems) they're often watered by hand during the day -- so incur a high evaporation loss.
I agree, most of our water is technically "reused". However, one minor caveat is that if it goes down the drain then it most likely gets mixed-in with sewage and thus needs to be treated before being released. Which can definitely be some sort of resource burden.
Edit: Formatting.
CAFOs are objectively horrendous things. Feeding grain to ruminants is also horrendous.
Using lots of fresh water, pesticides, herbicides, and fossil fuels to grow grain on high quality land -- rather than allowing grazing animals to graze on marginal lands -- is a highly dubious practice.
Nothing about that cycle is good for any of us, any of the animals involved, or the soil or water resource management.
Hint: Turf grass.
Figure all the land used to grow lawns plus all the land used to grow grass seed plus all the land to grow sod... It's absolutely staggering amount of land, whole integer multiples of the land we use for corn or any other irrigated crop.
Link to the actual paper, from 2005, is in the article.
USDA estimate for corn crop in the US is almost 92 million acres.
Note that the paper claims that turfgrass is 3x larger than the largest irrigated crop, not that it's larger than all crops. Only about 20% of US corn is irrigated (~80% is rain watered only).
[1] - https://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVI/8-W27/milesi.pdf
[2] - https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/07/29/corn-americas-lar...
Note that the suburban lawn does not need chemicals. If you want green colored lawn you need them. If you want green as in good for the environment a lawn without chemical input does fairly well, but it won't look as nice.
When you get people to make small changes like this, they’re more likely to support big changes in polls and at the ballot box. That’s the lever by which one moves government and industry.
> “Get rid of your lawns,” she said. “Lawns are total biological deserts. It’s just grass with pesticides. The way it’s grown does not support a lot of biodiversity.”
You are responsible for yours and who it infects. Is yours a sustainable one? If not, you're likely programming the world to die off.
It's not only about you. It's about the ripple effects of you and a greater understanding of responsibility in the face of culture as a force to reckon with.
Most of the world is in neither one of those places.
But if doing that was as pervasive as owning a lawn? You’d bet[1].
That's not what this article is about at all. But that's cool, I guess.
It’s just grass with pesticides.
I take care of about two acres of lawns across a few properties for a few decades. I’ve never put pesticides on the lawns. Herbicides, sure, sometimes lots of herbicides, but all very much plant specific. I suppose some places must use pesticides, but here in the middle of the US grass just sort of uses sun, water, nitrogen, and some other stuff and grows.
Also the sentence attributing Illinois prairie loss to global warming is hogwash. Global warming didn’t turn the prairies into giant farms.
So, grumpy stuff said, I do keep lots of varied native plants too. Grass is just for the area that want to survive occasional foot traffic and be open to show something else.
It wasn't perfect, nobody cared. There were dandelions, there was some clover.
If you can bear to tolerate the fact that your lawn isn't going to look like a putting green, you can do literally nothing but cut it and perhaps water it if your climate requires and be done with it. If there are plants you don't want in your lawn, take them out with your hands or a hoe. If you can't be bothered, then be happy with what you have. If your lawn really can't grow without intense chemical assistance, then maybe don't have a lawn.
as lawn owner, i like the flowers, and abhor the dense wad of ugly they leave behind after seeding, which in my experience actively displaces the grass that was trying to grow there.
It reads wrong to me but I get it.
Upvoted to try to fix the balance of downvotes.
The infection needs to be removed and defended. Entire neighbourhoods need to work together on this; one lazy house is enough to poison the block.
We have a corner of garden that we left to nature to get a little wildlife oasis. The nettles and brambles nature added need regular effort to keep controlled, the dandelions are mostly benign in amongst the 6"-foot long grass, they don't dominate like they do on a cricket pitch length lawn.
Nah. A weed is an undesired plant, primarily, but also typically one that grows and spreads aggressively and doesn't play nice with the sort of plants one actually wants to cultivate in an area.
This is the easiest way to prevent them from multiplying while not wasting them.
Dandelions are pioneer species, they out complete grass but they have a really long tap root and are pulling up minerals from deep and bring them to the surface. They are very short and cannot complete with the shrub layer, the vining layer, and tree layer, and the canopy layer.
Heck they cannot even complete with normal prairie plants which grow 4 to 8 feet tall at my house.
A lot of dandelions taking over an area is a hint that that area is lacking a lot of basic needs of other plants. The dandelion fills a void to make the place more suitable for other life, not the other way around.
Steam the leaves to reduce the bitter taste. Wash the white latex from leaf stems which is also bitter.
Herbicides—like insecticides, fungicides, and rodenticides—are a subset of pesticides. So it is impossible for you to never have put pesticides on the lawns if you have put herbicides on them.
Also, glyphosate (RoundUp) is debated as far as safety... and unfortunately for Monsanto, they got too cozy with the EPA and trying to ghostwrite positive scientific studies that no matter the scientific evidence one way or another, a jury found them responsible for causing cancer in civil trials. [2]
[1] http://www.npic.orst.edu/factsheets/triclogen.pdf [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/05/30/727914874/sa...
Herbicides are a type of pesticide.
[1] https://www.graffitiboeke.co.za/af/a/Soek/0/price+DESC/Erik%...
> Instead, plant native flowers that provide nectar and pollen for pollinators, Berenbaum said.
I see this a lot recently where I live in Germany, but at the same time I see the opposite as well. Lawn replaced by gravel, often pitch black one. I don't mean that people replace their lawn with parking lots, I mean nice green front gardens turn into minimalist charcoal stone gardens. It has its appeal but not if it is overdone. Is it good for insects? I don't know, certainly not for the flying ones.
My wife and I feel like we are being looked down on by some of our neighbors because we only maw our lawn twice a year and don't use store bought fertilizer or any pesticides. Before our neighbors gave up on us they would tell us a lot about having to get rid of all stinging nettles (especially after getting children!) and the need for yearly scarifying the grass area (which we are actually trying to turn into a rough pasture) and cutting every bush down to a single twig every year so it wouldn't get out of control.
The good news is, if you talk to those people about your own rationale, they sometimes tend to soften their position or even change it completely and relax themselves a bit. Personally I can't wait the day I can sit outside during spring or summer and not be surrounded by the constant buzz of lawnmowers.
Maybe there's more diversity in types of lawns than the anti-lawn crowd like to consider?
If you’re not sure what to plant, walk around your neighborhood and see what plants are thriving. If you see something growing well in a lot of gardens it will probably do well in yours too.
I'm building systems which hold and sequester large amounts of both water and carbon.
We should start a movement, I have an awesome domain name for the project, if anyone wants to join up, (unturf.com)
I'm using less and less gas each year on the remaining sparse lawn. Next year I plan to use my battery powered weed whacker for the majority of my lawn work (Christmas gift).
My long term goal is no use of gas to maintain my property, and I'm well on track.
For free woodchips, checkout CHIPDROP, it's amazing and growing.
On my 3/4 acre hillside plot I have a thriving baby orchard of 4 years with about 13 apple trees, 6 peach trees, 5 plum trees. My kids love it.
https://social.unturf.com/@russell
I'll link to long form posts from there, planning a few soon.
Here are a couple basic posts to show examples of whats to come:
https://social.unturf.com/@russell/102787710856378930
https://social.unturf.com/@russell/102787713603718588
Here you can see me create both a garden path, and a new garden bed with nothing but a spade shovel and woodchips.
However, this has nothing to do with why the city's ordinances require a properly maintained lawn.
Subsection B6 states that "The following are hereby declared to be health nuisances affecting public health ... rank growths of vegetation upon private property [which] ... harbors rodents or vermin". This is one of the first 3 reasons listed.
https://library.municode.com/ok/tulsa/codes/code_of_ordinanc...
Sadly, garden souls are often in much worse shape than what natives need (usually very compacted and lacking in organic matter). Some native plants are native to moist soils and would require more water than a (non-invasive) plant from the Mediterranean, for example. But native plants are tremendous fun and there are ton of resources available to help you find the right plant for the right spot.
I've been replacing grass with mulched gardens consisting of perennials such as russian sage, black-eyed susans, catmint, various bushes..
It was our old pal Louis and his Versailles palace that introduced the close-cropped grass lawn. It was kept short by grazers and gardeners. The poor used their near-house property to grow vegetables and culinary herbs. The rich used it to feed cows or sheep.
It wasn't until the mechanical lawnmower that the grass lawns became entirely useless. Grass is ruminant food, and ruminants are meat.
But we don't keep herds of sheep and cows in the grass-friendly suburbs now, because we don't like stepping in or smelling ruminant poop. And all the pesticides and herbicides would be dangerous for the animals and anyone who ate them.
But ruminants were never a part of the American suburban lawn the way they were in old world villages and wealthy estates. American lawns are almost completely post lawn-mower.
The American suburban lawn is an explicitly visual copy by the post-war working class of the luxuries previously available only to the upper classes of both American and European societies, minus the undesirable aspects like manure.
The new resistance to lawns is occurring in places where the post-war fantasy of pseudo aristocratic life for the working class is breaking down, for either economic or environmental reasons.
Checking Internet... mechanical lawnmower 1830 exactly, tennis invented between 1859 and 1865, and Oakhurst Links is the oldest 9-hole golf course in America since 1884. Croquet apparently became popular in the 1860s. So that all checks out.
The lawnmower made the lawn. The lawn games and status-associations made them desirable to have.
So the lawn is essentially a long-enduring symbol of upper-class lifestyle. Resistance to grass lawn mono-culture is a symbolic rejection of aspirational wealth. People who live in personal fantasy-lands love their symbology; undermining their symbols can reveal the lies behind them. Those folks that reject the lawn are essentially admitting that they will never get rich. Maybe America will finally stop being a land of temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and start being one that eats home-grown dandelion salads when not eating the rich.
Of course, when everyone has a perfect lawn is it doesn't serve that symbolic purpose nearly as well (other things take it's place, like exotic travel photos), and it increasingly just becomes a maintenance hassle.
Some of the healthiest old wise ladies I've ever known have had the most vibrant gardens in the neighborhood, whereas the clean/white picket fence guys all seem to be grouc
With a bit more TLC over the next few years, I think we’ll be in good shape as a little oasis nestled amongst the cornfields and pastures. We fortunately don’t have wild parsnip and the garlic mustard is almost gone. Japanese barberry runs rampant in the woods, though. That will take some effort to get rid of.
I thought the mosquitoes would be terrible, but, while present, they seem to have been kept in check by the wind and the birds.
Careful, it has more ticks than anything else, and the first time you get bitten you’re not going outside for 21 days.
It would be nice for the vaccine to come back - I was able to get the vaccine (and a booster a couple years later) when the vaccine was available (quite some time ago).
I've also actually gotten Lyme disease (which I was able to catch early thanks to the bullseye rash and treat successfully with antibiotics, so did not progress to the bad symptoms).
This summer I stopped at a petrol station located in some remote forest area. There were literally heaps of dead bugs inside and under the neon panels. Since then I have been wondering how much of the insects are killed simply by the lights that we keep on in the outdoors.
Some of my neighbours would even spray a single dandelion growing in between pavement stones with pesticide spray.
Many different flowers and grasses grow, along with strawberries, clover, etc.
This may depend on climate; they’re in eastern canada. And I’m sure there would be arrange things to create an even better bug environment. But the default lawn can be quite good for insects if you just let it grow. I always hated those sterile green lawns people made; the varied lawn we had was much prettier.
The highly visible actions of a few who have the time to take those actions (or pay for those actions) is not representative of the rest of us.
I don’t see how you can avoid street canyons otherwise.
Are you claiming that you're not allowed to plant trees or a native ground cover?
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/7/28/grassy-lawns-e...
And so the 'front lawn' is my vegie patch. Potatoes are dead easy to grow from eyes and pumpkins (winter squash) self-germinate from compost. This summer I'm experimenting with Jerusalem artichokes, which sprouted from 70¢ worth of store-bought tubers.
All you need is water and a spade - and no lawn police, I guess.
But, we’re all stuck with this until we unlock Intellectual Integrity off the SMAC tech tree.
If you're curious about it: we have a nicely sloped back yard but one small part is 1)shrouded by the fence and 2)a tad lower/steeper than the rest, and so it's a mudhole where nothing will grow.
Our HOA is constantly angry about it, as our back yard now doesn't have the required square feet of grass coverage.
Similarly, others have problems getting grass growing in front yards because of house position, slope, and other factors. Constant harassment from the HOA that amounts to "why aren't you spending hundreds of dollars a year constantly re-sodding your tiny patch of townhouse front yard".
My experience is common around here, FWIW. I have friends in different nearby neighborhoods with the same kind of snooping, nitpicking "fix it or we'll put a lien on your house" stuff.
The perfectly manicured lawn, in many places in the US, is a strong signal associated with middle to upper middle class status. It's a signal that you have the expendable income and time to spend on something non-essential.
Many HOAs are used to enforce that signaling, rather than limiting themselves to ensuring physical safety through proper maintenance of homes. You can see this in HOAs that disallow front yard vegetable gardens (though that was recently banned in FL[1]).
HOAs are actually necessary when homes occupy a shared parcel of land, like with townhouses or condominiums. In those arrangements, the landscaping is commonly owned.
The aesthetic enforcement of things like lawns vs native grasses happens more in HOAs that govern large areas of suburban tract housing, where the HOA enforces rules on property that isn't actually held in common.
1. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-p...
A lawn is a terrible waste of land. In most such plots, let food gardens grow. The work is worth it.
Personally, I think people don't appreciate how little manual labor can help you focus and keep things in perspective.
I keep trying it in Seattle, but the invasive blackberry bushes and scotch broom keep throttling the native stuff.
When Jan Smuts coined the term [1], he was unfortunately at a too immature scientific stage to pave the way for a careful and thorough academic field of study. Moreover, due to his political full time occupation he never got to the stage of forming a precise idea of what he wanted his book to be about. I personally think that his book should have been a fine ecological assessment rather that a somewhat philosophical treatise.
But to answer your question, I think absolutely they are able to provide such advice, with the limitation that it would be holistic in a small and specific context. For example, recently a scientist commented to me that wildebeests being replaced by cattle (wildebeests are not endangered) does actually not negatively affect the microbial biodiversity. But the comment was about specific biomes in a specific area. When you move from grasslands to bushveld, then cattle have a side effect of stimulating the growth of sekelbos [2].
The way I take it, Holism and Evolution was Smuts's response to Darwin's work and in a more ideal world, Smuts's work could have been a nice addition to On the Origin of Species. Smuts's main observation was that the whole is often "greater than the sums of parts". I lament the lost opportunity, but this kind of idea even occurs in pure mathematics. That is why you take transitive closure when you take the union of two or more equivalence relations.
In the ecological context, what he essentially meant is that two species in isolation from each other, as a whole, has a smaller ecological impact than those same two species living interactively.
I have not read his book, but I understand it to be (in the scientific formulation sense) unfinished.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holism, first sentence [2] https://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sekelbos
It has been widely observed that humans, having adapted to life in the African savannah, have a tendency to turn everything into an idealised version of their natural habitat.
Regents Park, or your local golf course, is like a superstimulus version of the nicer parts of prehistoric Kenya. Lots of nice green grass; not too long, indicating grazing animals nearby. Trees scattered around for shade, but not too many. A bunch of clearly visible landmarks for easy navigation. Flowers, indicating... fruit maybe? I’m not sure. Either way, it’s exactly the sort of environment that an omnivorous savannah ape ought to prefer over any other.
Anyway, I like lawns because my genes tell me to like lawns.
To reset my mind I take trees (that often come with some wild meadow and grass), or forest every time. A neatly trimmed lawn is for sports pitches.
Citation needed. My anecdotal experience doesn't agree.
> It has been widely observed...
Really? By who?
> ...that humans, having adapted to life in the African savannah,
Citation, again, needed. As far as I know, practically no ancient hominid artifacts have been found in the 'African savannah'.
> ...have a tendency to turn everything into an idealised version of their natural habitat.
Except that lawns are absolutely nothing at all like an 'African savannah'. And the fact that the largest part of humanity (India, China) live in habitats that resemble ant hills more than they do a savanna.
I for one would like drought tolerant (in CA anyway) native plant species to fill our lawn spaces...especially the ones that get rarely used.
it does require maintenance but choosing the right plants can do wonders
But broadly speaking, I'm skeptical of taking advice from a domain expert rather than some form of generalist who synthesizes understanding across the board.
I want to know what the civil engineer has to say. I want to hear from the urban planner, the child psychologist, the sports medicine expert, etc. My yard is used in a lot of ways.
I agree with the latter sentence - I want to hear from a lot of people with narrow expertise and different perspectives on anything important, but I probably don't care what a generalist thinks, because why should they be better at synthesizing the experts than me?
For me I pick and choose. I pretty much leave my car and rooftop to the experts but I dabble in electrical, plumming, carpentry, landscaping, etc. Etc.
I love single-family houses but hate lawns, so that was one thing I was looking forward to about moving. Alas, it never happened. The main reason I was expecting to have to move evaporated, and I love my city enough that I don't want to move unless I have to, even despite lawns.
He found a few people to let him grow plants in their yards and ended up with abundance, diversity, and joy.
I live in Connecticut, and I think at least for my first attempt, I will try a week, and then a month of eating and foraging only from my land and neighborhood.
But otherwise I have kids and such a while they love to climb through the wild areas, they also love playing on the open lawn too.... I'm not ready to take that from them even if it was feasible.
If I were in the southwest where lawns were more or less optional then yeah, but not where I am now.
There are more sustainable ways to live, we just have to be open to discussing them. You want a lawn - how often do your children play on it? An hour per day? That means your lawn is unused 96% of the time.
How about we redesign our living spaces so we have one large common lawn that many residences can share. Kids will be more encouraged to play outside and play together. And we can put markets within walking distance of these residences, and movie theaters and other stores.
Suddenly our children are more social, we're getting more exercise, driving less, not having insect-killing monospecies lawns that aren't used 96% of the time and many other benefits.
There are solutions to this but if we put our fingers in our ears and say we want things how they've been for the last 60 years then we are no smarter than the cyanobacteria that converted so much carbon dioxide to oxygen that they suffocated themselves 2.5 billion years ago.
My neighborhood probabbly isn't going to be reconfigured anytime soon... so that really didn't change anything.
The problem is new neighborhoods are being put up literally every day across the country and we are cookie-cutting them out the same way we've done since the 1940s because everyone has the same attitude you've exhibited of "Don't care, want my lawn."
I mean here I am reading the article and obviously interested, I talk about the practical impact of what it would mean to change existing lawns, the fact that I leave a bunch of my lawn wild, and you basically ignore that and boil down my point of view into something it isn't.
It's not surprising we have such a divides about such issues.
Healthy grass, cut somewhat higher than typical will outcompete most weeds. The only weed I wasn't able to control effectively enough this way were grassy weeds (poa trivialis and poa annua). Triv patches had to be mechanically removed and annua needed late summer chemical pre-emergent (CGM isn't effective enough there). Once those were dramatically reduced (from the "yard" I inherited when we bought the place), the organic system was effective in keeping a >95th percentile lawn. That lawn was more resilient and beautiful than any of the chemically fertilized lawns (whether high or low input) I've maintained. In addition, we had more wild rabbits than I've ever seen, providing additional entertainment for the kids.
The big issue with the organic lawn feeding is that it's quite bulky. No more 15 pound bag of sulfur coated urea that would do two fertilizer applications on my small city lawn. Instead, it was 30-50# bags of organic material that had to bought at Agway or Tractor Supply (necessitating a car trip) and couldn't reasonably be stored for a long time due to bulk and being organic (subject to rotting and rodent infestation). It's also more expensive than the chemical feeding, but still not prohibitive.
At an industrial scale, the land used to grow that "fertilizer" could be put to better use growing actual food!
(Quibble: unless the animal feed is itself certified organic, it is not an "organic diet" for your lawn in the recognised sense of the word.)
Note, if you lawn has a wetland or stream do not cut closer than 1 meter to the wetland, the uncut lawn will filter runoff for the wetland/stream and keep everything healthier.
They say exactly that in the article.