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Comment by jws | Hacker News Reader

The article seems sloppy.

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.

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My family never put anything on the, eh, 3 acres of grass I regularly had to mow as a kid.

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.

What's sad is dandelions are neither ugly nor bad for your lawn. They feed bees and the tap roots draw nutrients from deep in the soil, which also benefits the grass.

As the parent of a toddler I love dandelions because he loves to pick them and blow their seeds into the air.

Your neighbours may not appreciate this as much as you do. I have my toddler gather me the flowers pre-puffball as bouquets for Mummy which helps prevent them from getting a chance to go to seed.

You should at least brew the dandilion flowers into a tea using a French press. Super tasty and very nutritional.

Upvoted to try to fix the balance of downvotes.

I'm guessing your toddler enjoys this but this comment reads as if trick your toddler into doing work so your neighbors don't have to deal with a few extra dandelions.

It reads wrong to me but I get it.

I don't owe a dandelion-free yard to my neighbors, nor do they owe one to me. Our yards are not hospital rooms.

> What's sad is dandelions are neither ugly

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.

Cut the grass after flowering (you might need to use a scythe) and remove the hay. Never spread fertilisers on the lawn.

Dandelions are definitely ugly. The problem is that they're weeds: they will grow with abandon and fill up every single possible spot on your lawn, crowding each other out in their rabid attempts to get some delicious sun. Mow them down and you're just acting as an evolutionary selection filter for short, creeping dandelions instead. It only takes a month or two of mowing to end up with a totally different, fully adapted short dandelion population. Leave your lawn fallow for a few months and you'll instead get 6ft tall monsters.

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.

They are useful and edible.

Dandelions are also medicinal and nutritious.

This gets tricky. A weed is merely a plant in the wrong place.

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.

> A weed is merely a plant in the wrong place.

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.

Man,fuck that. Dandelions flower pretty much all year, which means I always have food for local pollinators and so my garden always has pollinators nearby ready to fertilize my crops. On top of that they are decent eating. I have zero use for normal lawn grass other than to help prevent erosion

Having different preferences in garden plants from you doesn't make someone lazy.

Dandelions are food. Try picking all the yellow flowers and steep them for 10-20 minutes in a French press.

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.

Why would I do all that when coffee

Don't forget you can eat them! Pick the heads and batter them to make a fascinating yellow tempura, just remember to cook them quickly because otherwise the flowers will close up. (You can also use the roots to make drinks but I find them rather bitter)

The leaves also make for a good salad.

I always loved dandelions and I wondered why I had to mow the lawn when I preferred it to be long and shaggy.

My lawn (not large) was devastated this year by red thread. By the middle of the summer, the entire thing was turning brown. It was really disappointing.

Some homeowner associations have rules about what can be grown on a property. Some (many? I'm not in a HOA) require it be a traditional lawn. Some people try to do alternative lawns like native bushes, or even raised bed gardens, and then have legal push back to turn it back into a lawn. I think it sucks.

My father constantly battled the HOA where I grew up. It was strictly written up in the HOA agreement the requirements around lawn care and changes to landscaping and I personally hated it as I was stuck doing the work (my father hated it for different reasons).

I have never heard a story about an HOA that gave me any positive thoughts about them. The lesson is, never bind yourself to an HOA's rules.

> I’ve never put pesticides on the lawns. Herbicides, sure, sometimes lots of herbicides, but all very much plant specific.

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.

Yeah, an herbicide like triclopyr breaks down quickly, but still can bioaccumulate in wildlife and humans need proper protection during application [1].

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...

> I’ve never put pesticides on the lawns. Herbicides, sure, sometimes lots of herbicides

Herbicides are a type of pesticide.

Furthermore they are a pesticide that often targets food sources like dandelions and clover.

you are the minority.

We have a renowned entomologist [1] here in South Africa too and I think that he has learnt too much from his insect friends. In fact, I think he models his behaviour according to insects of the blood sucking kind. I also think that he has learnt a lot from ants (ants carry things away)... He is an intelligent fellow, though, and his less philosophical contributions are useful.

[1] https://www.graffitiboeke.co.za/af/a/Soek/0/price+DESC/Erik%...

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