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Comment by zackmorris | Hacker News Reader

The best thing we can do on a personal level is to stop using broadleaf weedkillers like Scott's Weed and Feed and other herbicides like glyphosate (Roundup).

I've been doing handyman work at my boss's house during COVID-19 and he has clover growing in his yard. He has a fair number of bees, certainly more than on my end of town which is all chemlawns.

It's arguably ok to use a little weed killer by hand on dandelions if you must (better to spray 2-3 courses of vinegar instead). But killing all clover, morning glories, and other broadleaf flowers in lawns has led to the near-extinction of bees in residential areas. Herbicides and pesticides in agriculture wiped out the rest.

Edit: fixed the first sentence to distinguish between broadleaf herbicides and glyphosate (which kills everything).

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I never going the obsession with pristine lawns without clover, daisies, moss and such. I actually think it looks quite nice with some variation.

My wife is militant about this, insisting that our lawn is sprayed with horrible chemicals at least once a year to kill off the clover, daisies and moss.

Seems such a pointless thing to do, and very obviously not good for wildlife.

Clover also doesn’t get as tall as grass, which obviates the need for mowing the lawn. And the rabbits quite like it.

Bumblebees like the clover too.

Don't forget that it's nitrogen fixing, too!

It sorts out the soil too by fixing nitrogen. https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/966-the-role-of-cl...

A friend of mine worked at an agronomist's, and at one point a customer walked in looking to buy a bag of clover for his garden. My friend gave him the wrong bag by mistake, and the customer came back a few months later to tell the agronomist that he now had to park his car over the new spinach plants EVERYWHERE.

Clover lawns use to be common but went out of fashion. I saw an episode of This Old House where they visited a grass farm and we're shown a new clover breed they were developing for lawns.

Do everything you can to convince her otherwise, we need those bugs desperately.

In my case its the HOA that cares.

As a non-American I have never understood why a people that values personal liberties are sometimes happy to be dictated to by housing authorities. I get it with apartment buildings with shared walls and communal property, but I just don't get why you would with suburban homes.

They aren't happy to be dictated to by housing authorities, it's just something they have to put up with in order to live.

The cost of resisting is too high, so people end up picking their battles.

There is a surprisingly small overlap between walkable neighborhoods and HOAs.

These are, in fact, battles you can pick. HOAs feel like living in an apartment but you're also the superintendent.

> These are, in fact, battles you can pick

In some sections of the US, you can’t buy a single-family home built after 1980 without being part of an HOA.

I’m not sure what that has to do with walkable neighborhoods?

most likely the reason some Americans are fine with a HOA is because they do give up some liberties/freedoms for the other benefits that come with a HOA. Such as amenities, security, upkeep of surroundings, and other benefits from the pooling of resources (ie hoa fees). You also have essentially an arbitrator to deal with disputes between neighbors (mainly over appearances). (and generally when homes are constructed together/all at once and on a single large plot of land; their final costs are much less thus you can purchase homes for cheaper). In the case of subdivisions like this, Not all come with an HOA but that is generally the case.

I'm on the fence, so to speak. have lived in subs with and without HOA, and mostly haven't noticed much of a difference. we did get a curt letter once about a trashcan "visible from the street" but they didn't followup when I asked for more info. Depending on what street you're on, it might be visible against the back of the house, but it wasn't visible from the front street, which is all I'd assume we'd care about.

One of the values I've found is that it does provide a way to collectively prevent certain eyesores. I don't really want to have someone with 5 cars in the street on in their driveway for extended periods of time. Having a BBQ party? Sure - have 15 cars there for a few hours. Want to collect cars and work on them and leave cars 'in repair' out the street for weeks at a time? I'd rather you didn't, and would rather there be some agreed upon process to resolve those disputes.

I do understand some HOAs have people that get power hungry - grass being a 1/4" too tall, etc. That's generally bullshit, and I think there's probably other things going on in those cases where the HOA issue is the public face of some other private neighbor disputes going on.

Oh, we did have a letter once or twice about "your lawn is not kept properly". We have a lawn service and they got delayed, then it rained heavy for 3 days, and they were backed up again, and... we had really long grass. It was cut the moment someone could cut it at that point. Nature happens. If the worst that came out of that was a $50 fine or something... meh.

A lot of HOA's send letters about things they don't have authority over, and people comply anyway. If you push back or ask for clarification, they just drop it so they aren't exposed as lacking authority.

Americans only seem to value freedom from government interference in their lives. There's far more control from schools, universities, workplaces, and HOAs. Many rights like freedom of speech are curtailed in schools and workspaces, for example.

You are talking as if somehow non-Americans have access to more liberties across non-government entities in their lives. If anything, Americans treasure and enjoy the most freedoms across the widest gamut of institutions vs. non Americans.

Germans for example have an expectation of privacy at the workplace. It's not allowed to monitor a German employee's web browsing on a work computer. In the US the employer can monitor them all they want.

That does not seem very enforceable. Surely their internal DNS server and routers keep logs for example.

The use and access of those logs is strictly regulated, and yes, it is enforced.

Given that Germany has a much healthier employee representation than the US, it's much more difficult for management to slide in surveillance under the radar. (It's also rather painful if they get caught)

I wonder if those German workplace freedoms stem from a different legal system of culpability.

In some US states, for example, an employee who commits a crime using his employer’s computer has opened up his employer to civil liability. If the employer can show that the employee actively sidestepped the employer’s controls, the employer can make a good case against liability.

I wonder if anything like that can happen in Germany. If not, then employee privacy on employer-owned devices makes sense.

Usually, the locale employee organization ("Betriebsrat") will negotiate a contract with the employer ("Betriebsvereinbarung") where the usage of company equipment for private use is regulated. Haven't read one in years, but would assume, that this case is handled there, and gives the employer the right to check logs etc in case of criminal/legal inquiries.

It's likely an effect of data privacy being established as one of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the German constitution and further strengthened by specific laws like the German data privacy law, which is a lot older than GDPR.

Interestingly data privacy (more precisely the "Recht auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung") is not named explicitly in the constitution, but has been "created" by the German constitutional court in 1983 in the context of a law suite against the German census of 1983 [1].

Historically I would argue all of this is the result of the experience 1933-1945 and also the (what was known at that time) experience in East Germany, the communist German Democratic Republic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_self-determinati...

“In some US states, for example, an employee who commits a crime using his employer’s computer has opened up his employer to civil liability. “

I always find this reasoning strange and inconsistent . Companies give company cars to employees which could injure people. Or I could stab somebody with an employer provided knife.

It's enforced to the point where the access control system to the building, even if it tracks entry and exit timestamps, cannot be used for e.g. time keeping or to monitor employee attendance. German companies will have to have a separate time keeping system, even if the access control system uses the exact same (RFID) cards for identification.

Property rights are more "first class" than privacy rights; in the US, the idea that a company is not allowed to monitor the use of company equipment by employees is absurd- to the extent that many institutions are regulated to require it (i.e. monitoring for data exfiltration, etc).

Of course, most companies' monitoring is pretty shallow and reasonable, but there are exceptions, and I certainly wouldn't choose to work for one of the exceptions.

That makes sense. Property ownership seems to be one of the most important values in the US. Which leads to property owners having the freedom to restrict the freedoms of other people. You can see that in companies where employees are assumed to basically have no rights while working. Same in the west here where property owners fence off large areas of land and nobody can pass through. In Germany there usually is some kind of path where people can pass through. This can make hiking in CA quite difficult because you often run into a fence.

Though there are historical reasons for allowing land owners to restrict unauthorized access, realize too that property extends to anything that can be owned, not just land.

If a company has a commercial kitchen, it seems reasonable to be to prohibit employees from running their own food delivery startup out of the kitchen... If you get access to a company car (I.e. travelling salesman), the company should reasonably expect to be able to take action against you if you use ot to go drag racing, or for a personal vacation.

Likewise, the notion that an employee should expect to have free reign over a company computer and company internet access is just strange to me.

People in other countries are sometimes less burdened by interference from non-governmental organizations. Countries with strong unions offer workers freedom from the worst of workplace strictures - think the right to assemble or to speak out against your employer or blow a whistle without being fired. Most countries don't have HOAs and far fewer rules around how you can build and maintain your own house. You can paint your house bright pink in most places in India and no one will stop you.

The American body politic's focus on rights as the defining feature of the social contract isn't shared everywhere else. For example, in many countries, the focus is on the material benefits the government can provide for you ("development"). And because of that, there's less reflexive distrust in government as an institution able to benefit your life, in principle. Parts of the American citizenry absolve themselves of the expectation that government can, even in principle, improve your life.

America is living in the long 18th century - Enlightenment liberalism worked out over three centuries.

I don't think that's true. Coming from Germany I feel that in the average US citizen living as an employee has less rights and freedoms than the average German citizen. In principle you can live a very free lifestyle in the US but you either have to have lots of money or check out from the lifestyle most people live.

That's true. If you want freedoms and rights in America, you're either not a part of the 'normal' American way of working and likely not making much money, or you're wealthy. Workplaces are authoritarian and remove a lot of rights when you walk in the door or sign into your computer, even doing surveillance on work devices that are further than simply asset tracking & data protection.

Home owner associations or your average American Beauty style dystopia is much rarer outside the US because people haven't voluntarily locked themselves into suburbia.

In Europe the middle class generally moves into cities and not out of them where you're for the most part left to your own devices rather than being bullied around by activist neighbours or your church parish or what have you. I mean just take a look at fiction, from Steven King's small town horror, to the Truman Show, or PK Dick, this sort of provincial clampdown on people is quite uniquely American. Between boyscouts and girlscouts and the cheerleading team there's not that much freedom left.

I noticed this most in my encounters with American college students abroad. They're like oversized children. It's quite striking how managed American life is. From school until the evening to clubs and on-campus living, into the nuclear family and then retirement in Florida.

> from Steven King's small town horror, to the Truman Show, or PK Dick

And then there is The Addams Family. The 2019 film addresses their conflict with American suburbia quite well. In the end, the neighborhood accepts them. Sometimes art does not imitate life.

HOAs provide some value, in some cases mowing, upkeep, and snow removal. I'd never live in a place with HOA dues/restrictions but for older folks who aren't as physically capable it can be really nice.

Yeah but they could also seek that out on their own without an HOA.

Of course! No one is forced to buy into an HOA. For some Americans though I think it's less about giving up their freedoms and more about controlling their neighbors :)

An HOA that represents more people can get a better deal for the residents than a single home can on their own.

My HOA has 100 home owners (large town home complex), that type of buying power puts us all in a really good negotiating position.

Not to mention they save me all the time I'd spend on arranging various home services, from window washing to roof cleaning to pest removal to repaving driveways. Having an HOA means I worry about what is inside my walls and nothing else.

Ours definitely does, what I pay for HOA dues is nothing compared to what I'd be paying if they didn't cover my cable, internet + HBO. They bundle it up for every resident. I've seen what others pay for cable, my HOA dues basically are in the ballpark of a pretty basic internet + cable plan (in Florida) now imagine paying double, cause that's what it'd be like if they didn't bundle it. I'm pretty sure our HOA pays like $30 - $50 per house or something for plans that normally cost $100+ so it's definitely severely discounted.

They provide some value but they also attract control freaks who want to shape everything in the way they want. Most people don't want to engage in HOA so the people who do (and often are control freaks) have a lot of power.

I've personally never lived in an HOA (and would refuse to move into one), but the best ones, from what I've heard of through friends and family, are those that are hands-off, namely:

1) Optional -- This puts the onus on the HOA to actually serve its residents, because if enough people dislike it enough to leave (after, say, a few elected residents go on a power trip), it will collapse.

2) Give access to neighborhood amenities (e.g. a pool or clubhouse)

3) Provide neighborhood services (e.g. snow removal or tree trimming, extra trash collection)

4) Are NOT in the business of mandating minutiae such as grass length, paint color, approving remodel plans, handing out fines, etc

5) Are NOT part of a private developer's subdivision (usually goes hand in hand with point 4) so much as a collection of residents which formed organically

Basically, I like the idea of HOAs if they're more similar to Los Angeles's Neighborhood Councils than LAPD: Home Edition (although, for so many other reasons, I think LA's Neighborhood Councils are unrepresentative and ineffective at serving the wider community's best interest so much as they benefit exclusively the homeowner's interest). Otherwise, I strongly believe they cause more harm than good -- not to mention they can easily be weaponized against a minority homeowner moving into a majority-white community.

Unfortunately, it seems like HOAs as described above are in the vanishing minority.

The impressive thing is how HOAs are even legal.

Why are they impressive in that regard? You’re not forced to purchase a home that has legal obligations.

I’m about the same sense that I’m not forced to buy electricity from the local power utility

Large parts of the country have very little housing stock, especially newer housing, that isn’t HOA-encumbered.

This. We bought a house in an HOA and I definitely had a moment where I was like, "Wait a minute, some guy bought this land, subdivided it, and created this HOA out of thin air and now here we are, 40 years later, living under that HOA he made up. None of the original owners even live here anymore!"

That’s not really any different than municipalities who tax and impose restrictions.

Except it’s basically the creation of one man who bound everyone that he sold the subdivided lots to.

My dad has a property that's it's in a homeowner's association. Mostly it's just because there's a private road to a bunch of houses that needs to be maintained. That's pretty much the main thing that the HOA is concerned with. Time could come when there's some option for bringing broadband in too.

An HOA is typically formed by people who live in the neighborhood to allow a housing development to represent itself as a single larger entity instead of several smaller ones.

Like any human collaboration they can be awesome or terrible. A good HOA can manage resources for ammenities like pools and sports courts, they can help homeowners settle disputes over things like fencing and street parking. Like many volunteer orgs, they're run by those willing to volunteer - which are not usually the most capable at the job.

At the end of the day HOAs do get a lot of heat because they often enforce community guidelines on things like mowing your lawn and not painting your garage door to be the nazi flag. Like anything, this is a tradeoff - you may want to run a ham antenna in your backyard and be told you're not allowed.

> Like many volunteer orgs, they're run by those willing to volunteer - which are not usually the most capable at the job.

Sounds like a good use-case for sortition. Require that people "submit to the potential for being drafted for HOA service" as part of the purchase agreement of the houses built in the development. Then at least the HOA will mostly be composed of harried people who don't want to do the job and want to get it over with as quickly as possible; rather than busybodies with idle hands.

This isn't, at all, how most HOAs come to be in the US. Not even close.

Most HOA's are formed when a developer plats a subdivision. They attach the Covenants and other deed restrictions at the property at that time. They do it so they can maintain control over properties they have already sold until they have sold every property in the development. They want to maintain that control so they can cultivate the image for the neighborhood that maximizes their ability to profit from it.

This notion that HOA's get created for altruistic reasons is almost universally false, and should go away. Yes, some HOA's survive in a way that isn't toxic, but even that is really in the eyes of the beholder.

On the plus side - while HAM antennas aren't protected, video reception antennas are [1].

[1]: https://www.fcc.gov/media/over-air-reception-devices-rule

I wonder the same about zoning, can’t still wrap my head around it actually. Your neighbor dictating what you can or can’t do with your property is communism.

I don’t understand. You are ok with a coal plant or wind farm or slaughterhouse being built in a residential neighborhood? That doesn’t happen right now because of zoning.

This sounds bad in theory but in practice I am not sure why developers would purchase an expensive city land to build a coal plant there. But okay, let's have residential/industrial zoning. I am not okay with any restrictions inside the residential zone though. If someone wants to build an apartment tower on their single-family house lot, that should be allowed.

The roads in a gated community are "communal property" in about the same sense as hallways are in an apartment building. I suppose you could care if someone is driving an oversized load through the community and so wearing down the roads; or if they're parking a car on the road that's leaking oil.

There's also noise and odor/smoke pollution. An HOA is pretty much the only mechanism to ensure that a group of people who don't smoke marijuana can band together to live in marijuana-smoke-free air. (Yes, some people smoke enough potent skunkweed for the stink to carry multiple houses away. No, the police don't care.)

Most of the things HOAs care about are indeed idiotic, though. IMHO, the HOA's right to dictate what I'm doing ends where my property begins. The point of the HOA is to control/constrain the externalities you have on other houses/communal properties. If you put a garden gnome on your lawn, there's no externality.

> IMHO, the HOA's right to dictate what I'm doing ends where my property begins.

Actually, the HOA’s right to dictate ends with whatever you agreed to by contract when you bought the property. And the HOA can enforce that contract in court, to the point of foreclosing on your home if necessary.

So, yeah, when you buy a house in an HOA, read those covenants before you sign. They are usually at the bottom of the 90 page stack of papers when you close.

There are two types of HOAs, right? There's the type where the property is itself "part of" the HOA from the start (because the HOA is built into the legal structure of the development); and then there's the kind where the HOA is just a contract you enter into independently from buying the property–and which, at least in theory, you don't need to enter into.

HOAs created out of regular separately-developed SFH dwellings are the latter kind, and what I was referring to in my previous comment. (I kind of forgot that the baked-into-the-property kind existed for a moment. Oops!) In the voluntarist kind of HOA, it really is up for debate where the HOA's right to tell you what to do ends, because ultimately the HOA's power in such a voluntarist contract derives from the other members' willingness to shun you, annoy you, or at most refuse to give you access to communal resources like tennis courts, for failure to comply.

So in an HOA is it more like a leasehold or a freehold? From my understanding if it is legitimately a freehold I don't see why they'd have any legal right to do shit to you if you told them to do one. It is very confusing. Why does some external force other than law enforcement have any legal right to tell you what to do on your own property?

Exactly, I actually had to hunt to buy homes I wife would like that do not have a HOA.

I guess it is the 'community' aspect.

Most homes that do not have HOAs are on busy streets, which are less desirable.

Well in my case, I put up with it because it's where the better schools are for my son, so I choose the lesser of 2 evils.

Why would someone insist on it? Seems like an odd thing to be focused on.

Appearances? Just because everyone else does it? Some people are just stuck in certain ways?

I've never got a straight answer on this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What is even worse are the people in deserts and desert-like areas who insist on Kentucky bluegrass and other non-native plants. The water waste is repulsive.

My neighbors recently installed AstroTurf in their backyard because of this.

My experiences are one part appearances and the other part moving to a new area. Where my wife and I grew up neither of our families did any regular fertilizer or anything just occasional weeding and lawns would be thick and green. Now we live in another part of the country and the soil is terrible. So it’s hard to have a lawn take hold, without constant irrigation. We live on a well so I’m not interested also that’s a pretty big waste of water. I don’t mind the clover we have but the crabgrass is out of control.

My wife seems to think all boxes with pictures of lawns on are the same.

About three years in a row now she's tried to get lawn seed and poured a load of cheap weed and feed on instead. Completely going overboard on the quantities for good measure. At this point I'm amazed we have anything left to grow.

I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, but you can't put down seed and weed & feed in the same season - you'll kill your seedlings. It actually says this on the bags of weed & feed.

pretty sure he was saying she gets the weed & feed by accident because the box has a picture of a lawn.

At the very least moss is beautiful. Personally I don't have a problem with "weeds" as Americans see them.

If covid ever lets up, you should try taking your wife on a trip to Japan. The moss in Japanese gardens is extraordinary!

We've actually been to Japan, and both loved the "moss lawns"!

They are really nice to walk on too - almost springy.

I assume it has to do with the US house price laws that mandate one takes care of the lawn, or risk incurring in fines or losing the house (quoting an US friend not sure about the details)

There are no such laws. What some neighborhoods do have are homeowners associations which, in practice, function as micro governments, and can mandate such things. About 25% of all homes in the US have an HOA, and those will all vary in what maintenance they require. Some are expensive and strict, some are optional and just there to take care of a sign and lighting at the front entrances.

In addition to HOAs, some municipalities have ordinances for keeping yards tidy (e.g. cutting the lawn) but usually much less restrictive. In historical districts and houses deemed landmarks they have ordinances closer to and sometimes stricter than HOAs.

Some cities will come mow your lawn then send a bill to the land owner.

You can't lose your house. Maybe an HOA can fine you if you don't mow your weeds.

Recovering a lawn that is overrun with weeds is very expensive, time consuming, and hard work under the hot sun. A well maintained lawn only needs a few maintenance applications of weed killer every season, or can even be handled by hand. If you want flowers for the insects (I'm all for it) plant flowers. But just "let it go wild" never ends well.

Also, when it is time to sell your house a buyer is going to look at a wild lawn and just see a money/time sink.

Your wife was indoctrinated and you should work on changing her views. There's plenty of evidence to support your case.

You can achieve a very homogeneous lawn without herbicides. Plenty of water, some aeration, some fertilizer, iron against moss, weekly lawn mowing and occasionally use a daisy grubber. Eventually the lawn will displace most weeds.

If one does not want their lawn to look like a piece of nature, they could as well remove the pesky plants and put some artificial grass, as used on football fields. Both pristine-looking and honest.

I actually suggested that, and got a dagger-stare in return...

I'm renting a place where the lawn was moderately overrun with dandelions. They kill of the grass, and the ground becomes uneven. You can't run through your yard without the fear of twisting your ankle. Not to mention they continue to spread like wildfire into your neighbors' lawns.

And wild blackberry vines come up straight from hell.

Old lawns (1950s) had clover by design. Even the lawn seed had clover seed already in it. Clover produces nitrogen which grass consumes, so it is a nice synergy. Clover eventually fell out of style because kids stepping on bees isn't desirable, and fertilizer and herbicides made an all grass lawn feasible.

Scott's first herbicide killed clover, so they stopped putting it in their seed mix.

I've added mini-clover to my back yard. It's only been 2 months but the yard is already much healthier.

My backyard this year is an experiment in doing my best to encourage something that takes care of itself and is more supportive of local fauna. I laid down clover and what the local university's agriculture dept recommends for native-friendly grass seed. I've used no weed killer back there. I'm growing some ornamental grasses and flowers native to the area for decoration.

I feel like it's been nice. I think the clover is pretty, and I feel like we have many more butterflies this year than any of the previous years. The grass has been thriving. Dandelions don't seem to enjoy growing with clover very much, so there's less of them this year, although goosefoots seem more than happy to coexist with clover.

The clover has held up well to dogs, too, which has been a nice bonus.

I think I'd like to add some creeping thyme next year.

Nice. We haven’t done as well as you with planting but took a different rack. A crowd near me was letting you rent beehives. They managed them and we got a lot of honey. This made a striking difference to trees and plants in our garden and our neighbours. I was cutting unripe fruit off trees to stop their branches snapping.

Agreed. Ending the chemical era in modern agriculture will be big (and enabled by SV) https://thinkingagriculture.io/innovation-efficiency-chemica...

I would say in Germany that balance is a little different. Herbicides and pesticides in lawns and gardens aren't so widely used as in the US (agriculture of course different story). At the same time, light pollution by streetlights is a lot worse because streetlights are in every street and overall the streets are more brightly lit. In the US its comparably fewer streetlights (and people often leave on their porch lights to light the street).

Clover is great for lawn health as it fixes (adds) nitrogen to the soil.

Before the widespread use of herbicides having some clover in the lawn was viewed as a good thing because of this. Lawn seeds even included a bit of clover.

When herbicides came out that killed clover as a side effect then we saw people saying (marketing) that clover is bad.

>... other broadleaf herbicides like glyphosate (Roundup).

Glyphosate kills everything. If you use it as a broadleaf herbicide you are going to have a very bad week...

Ah thanks you're right, I updated my comment.

I don't use any chemicals in my yard mainly because I don't want to expose my dogs to that stuff. The result is a yard similar to your boss's. When the clover flowers we get plenty of bees, and there are other tiny flying insects, which attracts birds. Never really gave much mind to birds, but it's really nice going out and seeing cardinals on a daily basis. We've even had multiple robin nests around the house, which is fun to see their hatching cycle.

>But killing all clover, morning glories, and other broadleaf flowers in lawns has led to the near-extinction of bees in residential areas. Herbicides and pesticides in agriculture wiped out the rest.

Is that the case for sure?

I thought the state of the bee population wasn't quite that well understood...

I have no doubt that various herbicides hurt, but I'm not sure that just that science means their current population is entirely due to such use.

There are numerous studies, but since bee populations declined so drastically in the last 20 years, it's looking like the increase in glyphosate for GMO crops is one of the main culprits, or at least strongly correlated with the deaths:

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/25/651618685/study-roundup-weed-...

Admittedly, my sample size is only 1 as far as clover. I'd recommend anyone reading this to go to a clover honey farm near where you live, to see for yourself.

Part of the problem is that so many of us live in cities now that we have no personal experience about the issue, which leaves us more vulnerable to misinformation/propaganda from big agribusiness corporations, their lobbyists and the politicians beholden to them.

I just want to add that I happened to stumble onto a clover lawn mix from Scotts, and it's even Amazon's Choice:

https://www.amazon.com/Scotts-Turf-Builder-Clover-Lawn/dp/B0...

After seeing this, I realized it was perhaps a bit unfair to assign so much blame to one company, and even bought a bag.

My understanding is that these are not legal in most first world countries anymore -- I know they are banned in Canada and parts of Europe at least.

It sounds like Germany is already on their way to banning glyphosate[0]

0: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/04/germany-...

So what is the recommended replacement for glyphosate?

For who? The home owner or big-ag? There is no replacement that doesn't entail more work, hense the massive resistance to change. Entitlement. Who cares about the bees if I have to change my behavior.

For the home owner, you can use alternatives like vinegar, or even better, manual removal of dandilions, etc. Entire towns have gone spray-free, but that requires a team of dedicated people out there in the parks removing.

For big-ag, they don't have a replacement. They are way too dependent.

It's like asking what is the replacement for petrolium. A whole lot of pain and much extra work.

So what are big-ag in Canada and Europe doing?

EU renewed it but may ban it in 2022. https://www.dw.com/en/eu-lawmakers-vote-to-ban-glyphosate-we...

US just renewed it. https://foodandwaterwatch.org/news/why-it-should-anger-all-u...

any suggestions for a poison ivy patch? I'm doing the rounds of vinegar and placing tarps/boxes over the area, trying to avoid the nuclear option.

Can you not dig it up?

That's kind of a very very long repeated / endless process for poison ivy in my experience. Especially if it is in a less than easy access location.

I think that's going to be part of my plan, but my housemate is extremely sensitive/allergic, so if I can avoid getting near the plant that would be awesome.

Do you have a way to get a lot of newspaper or large format cardboard? If the former, look up Morag Gamble, the latter, sheet mulching. Weed barriers will buy you a few years and then need to be dug up. Cardboard or paper biodegrade in a year (an extra thick layer of wood chips extends the effective period), so nothing to dig up and no microplastics.

Weeds are opportunists. They tend to grow where other things don't want to. Better soil will invite other things in besides weeds.

1) Trim what you can

2) Dig up what you can

3) See if you can find a syringe so that you can actually inject vinegar directly into whatever is left. Apply as close to the root as possible.

Cut it back and suffocate it in mulch. Might take a while before the roots run out of power.

Poison ivy is an acceptable use case for glyphosphate in my opinion. Get rid of that stuff asap.

Some options:

* If the ivy is near pavement, you could scald it with a tea kettle.

* Add a bird bath and/or salt lick to the yard to encourage white-tailed deer to snack on it.

* Get a goat.

You may already know this, but for anyone who doesn't: fire is not an option. The oils in poison ivy can become an aerosol, and get into your lungs. Don't use a flame weeder, or a burn barrel.

I live in the high desert of central Oregon and finally got sick and tired of trying to maintain a lawn in the desert. I removed the lawn then planted a ton of zone 4/5 draught tolerant native plants, most of which flower. There are bees everywhere now. And drip irrigation so much less water used. Feels great!

my parents have been avoiding using stuff like glyphosate for years.

They would describe it better than I can, but they can get away with e.g. just having plants that are repulsive to aphids (and plants that attracts insects that eat them).

They sometimes do have to use stuff like bordeaux mix but very rarely (if ever) use glyphosate.

Their garden is pretty amazing as a result. There are tons of birds (they have bird feeders) and insects. Bats in the summer as well.

Definitely how I see my garden if I ever get a house (I have been living in large cities all my adult life).

Other comment would be the agriculture use of chemicals dwarfs residential (and also land mass too). Need to figure out agriculture use of chemicals before we worry about residential use (although its easier to 'see' the results)

I don't know why people hate clover. I'm planting clover along with grass, because it looks nice and helps the soil.

Was reserving lawns for humans and all of the countryside for bees not already a pretty sweet deal? How are we being out-negotiated by insects?

They hold (most) all the cards when it comes to food source sustainability. I'd even dare say our current negotiation position is over leveraged.

Edit: they hold many other cards too - Food source sustainability was just the first to mind.

That’s not really how it works.

Wouldn't you rather share a garden with insects? I would.

https://miro.medium.com/max/750/1*MzqQm_K3sdO8RFibufJJBA.jpe...

The countryside is mostly reserved for agriculture.

>has led to the near-extinction of bees in residential areas

Why do you want bees in residential areas ? I think that it's illegal to keep bees in some proximity to residential areas around here (my grandparents used to keep bees).

Most bees do not lives in hives and are solitary (they tend to live in bushes, walls, trees or in the ground). They don't even sting.

A more accurate framing of the question would be "Should we wantonly destroy massive ecosystems covering vast fractions of available land area for the sake of socially constructed vanity?"

Framing the question indeed...

I'm allergic to bee stings and I'd prefer not to have my neck swell up to the point where I can't breathe because I accidentally sat on or pinched an insect. And I don't want random insects biting me or my children, spreading disieses, etc.

Residential areas are called that because they are built to accommodate humans, I don't see anything particularly problematic about not having bees there.

And I do realise they pollinate a lot of plants - again residential area - I don't have anything against bees on farms or in nature.

Why do you want apples on your trees, or squash in your garden. Better to give that up than to have to risk being stung.

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