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Comment by core-questions | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

They are useful and edible.

Dandelions are also medicinal and nutritious.

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