Replacing grass lawns with native plants | Hacker News Reader

Replacing grass lawns with native plants

chicagotribune.com

159 pointsgennarro190 comments

I have kids who like to play in our yard. All sorts of sports and running around. For that type of activity, grass is ideal.

In contrast, a yard full of native plants sounds nice ... but you can't really do anything in it. It becomes ornamental rather than functional. I can't play a game a baseball if my entire yard is ferns and flowers rather than grass.

That said, in garden beds and places where plants and trees do make sense, installing native species is a no-brainer. We're in the process of getting rid of a bunch of non-native shrubs and plants and replacing them with native.

And in that case, we're making a transition from ornamental to functional. Previously, the trees and shrubs looked nice, but the birds and bugs didn't particularly care for them. Now, the birds are eating the berries, the butterflies and bees are loving the flowering plants, and we spend less time on maintenance.

You can still cut the native plants, you know. They're effectively grass, they just don't look uniform.

There are native grasses. Most local wildflower seed mixes include them. The mix I just planted had 3 varieties of native grasses totalling 30% of the mix.

Also, odds are a lot of it is going to be grass if they are regularly cut. Grass is really good at being dominant when cut.

As a kid, I had more fun playing in untamed woods and patches at the edge of the property where plants did their own thing than I ever did on dried out, razor-sharp summer grass.

Kids aren’t too picky about what they play in. They’ll make do with anything.

Yeah good luck keeping plants with kids running around kicking a soccer ball

True.

Keeping native plants looking like the ones pictured in the article is nigh impossible with children. Keeping a perfectly manicured lawn is also impossible. Which looks best? I don't know? Neither is great in all honesty.

I think at some point if we have lots of kids running around a neighborhood we should be willing to accept the fact that some lawns, whether grass or plants, will just look janky.

If your goal is the softest and greenest grass in the neighborhood then yeah, it requires a lot of work and resources.

If your goal is just to prevent bare dirt for erosion purposes then grass is pretty easy to maintain, even with moderate traffic like running children. Just cut it back every week or two and the lawn will more or less take care of itself.

The picture is not a good example. Those plants are clumps of Hosta and ferns. This is the quintessential dapple shadow and deep shadow stuff. They probably could not grow a good lawn there, even if they tried.

This plants would get dormant and dissapear into the ground from October to March so will support children trotting around as good as any law for half of the year at least.

If your city properly prioritizes parks and makes them safe and easy for everyone to walk to, they're better for field games than a backyard anyways. Unfortunately children in the US aren't given a lot of freedom to explore and develop independence in public spaces, but that's a whole other issue. [1]

And planting native vegetation isn't black and white. You can still have a lawn with plenty of native vegetation.

[1] https://youtu.be/ul_xzyCDT98

Parks in my city are filled with encampments. They don’t even attempt to make them safe anymore.

Instead of trying to do the things they are used to in a new environment, they could try doing new things in their new environment - like gardening, playing with bugs, building playscape for their toys, etc. Lots of things to do besides trying to do the same thing.

Clover for example is fine with kids running around on top of it. Even grass gets killed off in high traffic areas, but the random walking around kids do in a back yard has a wide range of viable options.

Yeah this. We blew stuff up, made shelters, camped out and climbed up trees. The grass, asphalt and concrete was hot and boring.

This is what my wife is concerned about. She also wants to let our kids to be able to play in the backyard. (We have a 16 year old that locks herself in her room, and a 5 month old that will probably like moving around a lot).

There are a couple things on the other side of this:

- I'm not planning on making purely ornemental plants. What I'm planning are edible plants, and as such, there is great functionality.

- I'm not planting this for the whole yard, but rather, will have different things in different places

- Making it an edible landscape, perhaps even having a perennial food forest, teaches my children the things I want them to learn: that they are part of an ecosystem, that abundance is from the land and not from the grocery store.

- There are alternative cover plants that work better for the landscape, such as white dutch clover. White Dutch Clover are hardier towards drought, can fix its own nitrogen, and pollinators love them. You can get varieties that grow no more than 8" so you don't really have to mow them. Sure, you might piss off your neighbors who see it as weeds they have to kill with glysophate. Other perennials such as thyme or oregeno can make for better cover on paths between garden beds

- I have started on reshaping the topology by adding basins and bearms so that rainfall can be captured and stored. It reduces the space my kids can run, but I will also be bringing in the kind of things I think people seek out from hiking in nature or strolling through a garden.

- I can't play baseball, but we would be able to play things like lazer tag, which is more fun when you have cover.

- There's a great park about 10 min walk away from our house. We'd probablty go there for soccer (I don't like baseball).

I’m thinking of keeping a grass backyard for kids to play in, and building a food forest in my front yard instead

I believe that ultimately, people living on-site knows what works best for themselves and the community. There are alternative cover besides that kids can play in, but I personally think it is better to have something there than nothing.

Here in Phoenix, xeriscaping is very popular. It usually involves gravel laid on top of a weed barrier. The barrier does not work very well ... and you really can't play on the gravel. It's like the worst of all the options.

Even just putting in grass helps cool down the area around the house. If there is a way to put some kind of cover that is drought-resistant, does not require fertilizer, and can absorb the rains during monsoon, that's better than gravel-on-weed-barrier.

Do you know that the children do (for most of the time) when lock themselves in their rooms?. Exploring digital landscapes.

Maybe we should tempt them to go out offering real landscapes to explore instead. Most children love hide, lurk and watch animals and would find it extremely pleasant. It has also has more to offer to both, boys and girls.

This is the kind of garden that we are talking about and is 100% top of his game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQsOoePD08

Is suitable or not for you?. Well, that depends on your location, presence/absence of dangerous animals, different personalities and ages of the children, etc.

a native meadow will behave just like grass, if you cut it short. It will just have a much higher diversity of plants and bugs

I also have kids, but where I live we have plenty of pine & maple trees and traditional grass doesn't grow well in the shade. But we are lucky and native moss filled in. Moss is great for balls, they bounce & roll better, especially for games like bocce & croquet. The kids love it and I rarely have to mow or water. Sometimes there is a native alternative to grass, sometimes not.

similar situation with sporty kids. my next lawn will be a mix of grass and clover:

https://www.scotts.com/en-us/library/lawn-care-basics/benefi...

They are not mutually exclusive. You can mix a lot of different plants in with your lawn to break up the monotony while still functioning perfectly well as a lawn. Clover, buttercups, dandelions, daisies, etc.

Basically find out what lawn weeds are native where you are (that aren't spiny of course) and plant those in your lawn.

I totally agree on having a balance and doing what makes sense.

If you want running around and sporty activities, lawns are great (no accident pitches, and sportsfields are grass). If you want low maintenance, go with native vegetation or boring gravel.

Never the less, you have to know the effects of native vegetation. It attracts things you may not want, so you may want to design your flora for the fauna you are willing to accommodate.

The amount of natural curiosity that exploring around the diversity of native species inspired in me was far and away more valuable than running around on a lawn. I spent countless hours as a kid turning over rocks, rooting through leaf clutter and turning over leaves on a property that was mostly natively maintained. I learned about pest species, insect biology/morphology(helps that my neighbor was an entomologist!), the food chain, water cycles, amongst many other things as a young child growing up, simply because I was curious about the things I saw and had intelligent adults who could answer my questions and any follow-ups.

As adult, I still love doing many of these things, and find your observation that “you can’t do anything with native plants” bizarre, you get to enjoy the native life that they bring with them.

You speak of "running around on a lawn" like the kids are running laps or something, and not developing social skills by playing games, staying healthy through exercise and developing physical coordination for the rest of their lives. And just having fun.

I'm all for curiosity about life and exploration, but for a lot of games a flat field is simply better, and those games have tons of value. How well you work/interact with other people has a huge impact on life, and active play directly develops those capabilities.

My physical education classes were just that: Games with rules and things that were physical. You can set a good example by taking regular walks and inviting the children, explaining that you do it for exercise, and it is more fun with others sometimes. Besides, you can learn to work and interact with people by playing games, either online or not.

And how often did you do that in your yard as a kid? For me the answer is pretty much never and not because we didn't have a big one full of grass.

> how often did you do that in your yard as a kid?

All the time.

Every day. Growning up, friends and I would play games in our yards all the time. "Back in the day" we'd play neighborhood wide games of hide and seek, running across neighbors yards (who didn't have kids, but didn't mind) and everything. We routinely played baseball, football and soccer too.

Everyone's desire for a big yard means such gatherings can be pretty rare because there aren't many kids to gather with. Not clear to me why somebody's house is going to be better than a park anyway.

I grew up in a house with a double lot, and the neighborhood kids would come around. It was the baby boom, so even in a suburb there were lots of kids. We would play tag, hide-and-go-seek, kickball, whiffle ball, touch football, mother-may-I, and who knows what else I've forgotten.

Wait, you don’t develop coordination picking up tiny bugs, jumping rock to rock, climbing trees or moving over uneven terrain? The irony is particularly deep here because I’ve come to appreciate how much more agile I am as an adult due to my outdoorsy upbringing in a mountainous area.

You don’t develop valuable social skills asking adults about things you want to learn more about? Learning how and when to ask questions is extremely valuable. And that’s not to say you can’t play plenty of social games in a woods –– many that don’t work on grass, tag is way more fun, any sort of fantasy/imagination type game is much more vivid, hide and seek is actually a fun game.

> I'm all for curiosity about life and exploration, but for a lot of games a flat field is simply better, and those games have tons of value. How well you work/interact with other people has a huge impact on life, and active play directly develops those capabilities.

This is... reductive. I didn't play any organized sports as a kid, but I don't have trouble working with others. On the other hand I've met plenty of people that played sports all through primary school and they're utter assholes as adults. This narrative is also often used to justify why schools often cut funding for science/arts before cutting sports. To my ear it sounds like someone justifying why their preferred childhood activities were better than someone else's preferred childhood activities.

or in the US why lessons that actually bring in money are preferable to those that don't

To keep a law clean, you generally have to dump neurotoxins all over it, too. Do you really want your kids playing in that?

Your kids will run wherever there is space to run. A lawn is the most useless and least functional way that a property can be maintained. It is a parking lot that no one can even park on. It is a desert enforced not by weather but by an authoritarian lord. It contains no life, it is not visually pleasing, it requires constant maintenance. It provides no shade, no privacy, no food, no wood, you can’t keep animals on it, and it requires more water than natural habitats since the sun is constantly bearing down directly on the ground. A nicely kept lawn is only useful as a monument to the selfishness of the owner.

I’ve definitely parked cars on a lawn, played games on a lawn, rolled around on a lawn, setup tables and awnings for gatherings, and had animals all over them. A lawn keeps the dust down, provides a nice canvas for a variety of activities and is a great place to throw a slip n slide. Sure, you can construct ways to do all of those things without a lawn, but a lawn works too.

Assuming that the backyard is for playing and the front is ornamental, you can keep the backyard as grass and transition the front to plants.

There are grass alternatives which don't require as much water or maintenance. Moss, thyme, mint, clover, mazus, sedum, wildflowers. Or a low-maintenance grass like fescue.

Alternately, to reduce on mowing, you could get a goat! It's like a Lawn Roomba.

tends to east the other plants as well as the lawn though

Maybe add a transparent glass brick roof to a native garden? That way one has a nice ornamental garden and a sport are surface?

Its all about you.

In addition to that, there's some unwarranted anti-grass sentiment in the article with sentences such as "Good things happen when you remove the choking thatch of grass and let the earth breathe.". Non-grass landscaping can be done just as badly with chemical fertilizers and pesticides and unnecessary amounts of water just as much as with grass. Well-done turf grass with good quality soil can be organically fertilized and when fully-established, requires less water and essentially no pesticides as the healthy grass crowds out weeds. It also handles foot traffic, resists erosion from rain, produces oxygen, and promotes a healthy soil ecosystem with earthworms, etc. The problem is not grass, it's badly-done grass.

That turf is still a monoculture which must be mowed often with resulting noise pollution. And if you maintain it organic as you write, such a good soil is liable to attract moles. With native plants meadow, moles are not such a big concern.

There is a little bit of an in-between space in lawn blends that are designed to be a bit more friendly to pollinators.

https://www.westcoastseeds.com/products/bee-turf

Living in the UK, and not taking particular care of my yard, grass is no longer the major species in my yard. There are plenty of native species in my garden such as daisies, dandelions and a lot of moss in the wetter places. The local bees and birds seem to be very happen with the garden and my kids can still play in it. I only mow the grass when it gets really too long (more than a few inches) to prevent any nasty native species taking hold (nettles and thistles).

Just because something is a native species doesn't mean it can be a traditional lawn.

https://content.yardmap.org/learn/native-grasses-for-your-na...

But its true that a lot of the ecological benefit would be forgone by a traditional lawn even with native grasses. But it does have the advantage of limiting the spread of non-native species that can (but no always) have harmful affects on local ecologies.

This is something I read about years ago, and have slowly done.

I've let native clover (and some transplanted from nearby) take over a bit of the lawn. In my back yard, I've been even less meticulous, letting whatever grow do so as long as it's not unsightly.

Clover (and others), in addition to the different yet nice flowers, are also beneficial to the local environment. Bees love them. As such, I have to be careful to keep it back from walkways.

Dandelion leaves picked right can be used in salads.

I've started using the Plant.net app to identify some of the better looking "weeds", and this summer will make it a goal to learn how to get them to propagate more. Some of these are actually part of the rose family, yet considered "bad weeds."

One thing the article doesn't mention, as maybe it's not an issue where the author lives:

Unfortunately some municipalities, (like my town in New Jersey) can be a pain. If you don't have a good looking lawn, you'll have Code Enforcement knocking on your door. I've had the guy stop in front of my house while I was working and tell me my grass looked a little long (in fact the mower at top deck height couldn't cut it).

Especially if you have what they consider excessive weeds (clover, goldenrod and others ,while native and nice looking IMO are considered "weeds"). So the native thing can only be taken but so far.

The chosen ground cover may not cover as much as grass either, which may be a turn off.

If this is an appealing idea, before you really get into it, check with your town/municipalty/homeowners association.

The main thing against specific weeds is that they spread easily and infest other areas. If your neighbors don't want flowers in their grass, but restricted to flower beds, then they will respond by using more weed killer on their lawns.

I wonder if the code enforcement has a requirement about how much of your yard can be garden vs lawn. That is if you specifically designate a section to be flowers and other plants (and make it look like a garden), if that ends up covering 70% of the yard with grass borders ribboned throughout, if that still accomplishes the natural environment goal but also pleases the city or HOA?

As a European, I find it crazy that a municipality (or worse, an HOA), can order you to cut your lawn.

That's because here in America we are free and love our freedom! You Europeans wouldn't understand. /s

Another stereotype.

hence the /s, presumably

HOAs are part of having freedom over your land. Why shouldn't I be able to team up with my neighbors to set standards for our community? The crazy part is choosing to buy a home that's part of an HOA. That's always been an instant dq for me and I would never consider entering into such a restricting arrangement.

Just like you should have the freedom to be a part of one, you should have the freedom to not be a part of one. But right now HOA works over full neighborhoods, there is no opt-out. If I move into a neighborhood like that, suddenly neighbors have control over how my house look.

I think that's the crazy part. It's like a marriage you cannot leave without moving away from it.

And yes I agree, don't move into such a neighborhood then. But it's still strange that a whole community can unite against one house within the gates (or whatever) and decide how things should be. Not what I would expect in a country that prides itself on its freedoms.

What would be the point if you could opt out? The rules are so you don't have the one neighbor with trash everywhere, rusted out cars, and so on. Why bother if that guy can opt out?

> Just like you should have the freedom to be a part of one, you should have the freedom to not be a part of one. But right now HOA works over full neighborhoods, there is no opt-out.

You're looking at it too much from your personal perspective. If you buy a house in the sticks, you have the freedom to start an HOA with your neighbors and bind your house to the HOA. You then have the freedom to sell your house, and buyers have the freedom to buy the house or walk away because it has an HOA. Just like you have the freedom to permanently tear down your house and rebuild it, and future buyers aren't entitled to retroactively restrict what you can do with your property today.

> But it's still strange that a whole community can unite against one house within the gates (or whatever) and decide how things should be. Not what I would expect in a country that prides itself on its freedoms.

Again, you're looking at things too much from an individual perspective. Freedoms in the US include freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech. Freedom means the freedom to start a club of like-minded people and kick them out. If you don't like club A, house A, or HOA A, you have the freedom to start a new club/HOA the way you want it, and so on in perpetuity. Not allowing HOAs would be suppressing community and thereby suppressing freedom. Not allowing houses to be sold with an HOA would be suppressing personal freedom in contracts. There's a difference between something being unpalatable (again, I wouldn't even consider an HOA house) and something being anti-freedom.

I wouldn't consider a HOA house either, just for the record.

So since I can create an HOA with my neighbors, can I move into a house that is connected to an HOA and collude with my neighbors to start an competing HOA or it's locked up to the same one forever?

> So since I can create an HOA with my neighbors, can I move into a house that is connected to an HOA and collude with my neighbors to start an competing HOA or it's locked up to the same one forever?

Exiting an HOA typically requires either dissolving the HOA (by whatever rules allow for that in State law, typically a majority vote of members), following whatever deannexation procedures the HOA rules provide, or suing and winning a lawsuit against the HOA for failure to uphold its end of the deal and being given termination of the relationship as part of the remedy.

Once you are out of the HOA, you can certainly form a new one. Actually, I think you can probably do it without leaving, but then the pbligations would be cumulative.

You don't need to do any of that. If you have enough neighbors who want to collude with you, you just take over the existing HOA and amend the rules (and/or take a lax enforcement attitude). The most benign way to do it is to make one tiny change to the HOA rules, an explicit provision that failure to enforce a known "violation" for more than 30 days renders the rule unenforceable forever more.

HOAs are usually tiny little micro governments for a specific neighborhood, so you wouldn't even need to start a new one, you could simply get involved with the existing HOA and change it.

But can some with a house in a hoa decide to sell their house without it so the next person can opt in?

> Why shouldn't I be able to team up with my neighbors to set standards for our community?

Because that's freedom to overspill your freedom of deciding what others should do with their own, self-contained, freedom?

I don't understand the dq part can you please expand on that?

dq = disqualification. Common abbreviation (in the US) particularly from sports/athletics.

GP would consider an HOA to be a disqualifier for a home they were considering purchasing.

correct, thank you

the other commenter explained correctly. sorry for the acronomy, I usually try to avoid them without at least using the full version first

Yeah HOAs claim to increase property values but I'm convinced any benefit they provide is undone by the multitudes of people who refuse to buy property compromised by one.

Depending on where you want to buy it can be impossible

We have the right to property, not the right to property in a specific place like LA or NYC, and so on. Tough luck, look somewhere else or reconsider your priorities. Making things impossible is part of freedom. Finding a KKK-friendly community is impossible in most of the country, but that doesn't indicate a lack of freedom, nor is it something most people would have a problem with.

Uh yeah of course but hardly confined to huge cities like that.

The principle is the same. It's like complaining that it's hard to travel by horse and buggy. Nobody's obligated to keep houses HOA-free and nobody's entitled to HOA-free houses. If it's really that big a deal, start an anti-HOA movement in a community where the opportunity exists, just like pro-HOA people started HOA communities where the opportunity exists.

Small cities have plenty of land you can build on.

Even when that's true, they'll object to a new development without an HOA because they don't want the city on the hook for common infrastructure just for that new development.

Can you give me a list? I actually do know of a few master planned communities like that but they number in the dozens nationwide and most are special purpose retirement communities. I've yet to see a person claim that it is impossible to buy a non-HOA home anywhere in commuting distance of their job actually name such a place. I'm pretty confident they don't actually exist and this is a way of people who want to have their cake and eat it too to throw a tantrum that they can't move into a neighborhood where everyone but them are bound by an HOA. I don't know where you live but if it is in the US and you're not retired, I'm fairly confident that I could find a non-HOA property that exists in your area. I've issued this challenge hundreds of times and have had zero people successfully name such a place. What usually happens is they come up with other disqualifiers like "That's a bad school district", "That's a high crime area" or "I don't like the style of houses there", which are reasonable criteria but is not the same thing as it being impossible to find a house not in an HOA.

And of course there are the other options: buy land and build on it, or move somewhere else. But people feel entitled to force themselves on others without their consent. Every owner in an HOA consented to being in the HOA. Prohibiting them from forming an HOA of consenting owners is you taking away their ability to consent.

Because I'm going to be working in the area later this year, I've been looking at Irvine, where it seems to be true. I don't make it a habit of looking into real estate in places I don't live, but a rule of thumb is if it's a new development or not on a main road it's in an HOA (and of course multifamily housing probably has one). The house I live in now is on a main road and not in an HOA.

Seems that service can be used without the app at https://identify.plantnet.org/ (I only found a placeholder at plant.net). This will be useful to me, thanks.

I had to double check my tablet, as I didn't have it handy. That is the exact same service as the app. You are correct in that there is no dot, nor in the app name, either. My error, sorry.

There are some tricks with this too.

If it looks cultivated, then neighbors generally think it is supposed to be there. If parts of it is set aside to let it grow out with borders, it's amazing how people think that it is somehow contained.

I have seen people put signs out on the front declaring the space to be a wildlife habitat. I have no idea if there are anything official like a registry that protects that.

> I have seen people put signs out on the front declaring the space to be a wildlife habitat. I have no idea if there are anything official like a registry that protects that.

The National Wildlife Federation [0][1] will certify a space to be a wildlife habitat [2] in the United States.

[0] https://www.nwf.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Wildlife_Federation

[2] https://www.nwf.org/CertifiedWildlifeHabitat

One aspect I didn’t see mentioned was that a lawn can be practical for a family. As kids we used to run around and play games, the dog liked to run a lot etc. and it’s easiest on a flat short and even surface. Plus you don’t have to worry about kids encountering critters, insect bites/stings, etc.

If your yard is more to LOOK at than to use, then this makes more sense to me

Kids will enjoy anything. Playing hide and seek in a backyard jungle is just as fun as running around on grass, and for most people there is invariably a park nearby. And kids encountering critters and stinging insects is a part of growing up! If anything, children are too isolated from nature these days.

Agree, but ticks are no fun.

Indeed. We've brought this on ourselves, though, by pushing out predator species that eat the mice that carry the ticks and expanding their range with climate change.

Also agree. While insects stings are part of growing up, I think I only had a tick on me once as a child. Now the "tick check" is part of the bath routine for my kids... even when they stay in the mowed area of our lawn (out of the adjoining woods). I'm in Central PA, for reference.

That said, I chipped a big portion of the lawn for a berry patch/orchard and maintain the wild black raspberry and wineberry outside the wire. Current status: strawberry overload!

Nice!! I think I'm ~2 weeks out from strawberry time.

Depending on your zone, growing bamboo or letting the grassland to grow tall enough will attract them back.

Or, have something that will eat the ticks, like chickens. They come with their own problems, but they will also pay their way with pasture-raised eggs that are better than the cage-free stuff you get from stores.

You get them in the mowed areas as well.

Backyard chickens will love to eat tasty ticks.

You can achieve a usable lawn that isn't just grass by mixing in clover, dandelions, violets, etc and then mowing occasionally. And not every part of it needs to be "usable" either, so you can have a variety of spaces. I have a main area where my dogs play. I've started changing the corners and edges into vegetable gardens, fruit bushes, and I plan to turn the front yard into a prairie type landscape.

As far as critters, why not just let your kids experience it? If you live someplace with venomous critters, teach them how to notice and give a safe distance. In your home is sterile enough, so let the kids have something a little more wild outdoors.

Just watch out for the bees in the clover flowers, as we here all learned the hard way as kids.

(No grass without clover and daisies, they're honorably lawn here as well.)

I live in a neighborhood full of families and the number that actually use their yards for anything other than mowing is minimal. As for my own kids they seemed to have much more fun in the nearby woods than the yards.

As others have mentioned, clover can be a great substitute for grass that still allows your kids to play. You can mix in wildflowers along the edges or certain areas of the yard, and flowering shrubs that attract pollinators. Berry bushes can also be a great addition.

If you really wanna provide an educational experience for the kids, add butterfly host plants for butterfly/moth species that live in your area. I planted milkweed for Monarchs last year and it was a very rewarding experience to raise the caterpillars through the lifecycle with my preschool aged kids. This year I've planted a lot more milkweed, as well as dill (for Black Swallowtails).

I hope the people commenting about how great this is have really tried it for a few years. In my experience, living in the dry western U.S., it's not that great. You go from a cheery bright green lawn that only needs a quick mowing once a week to a bunch of drab desert plants and the need to do some back breaking hauling and spreading of wood chips every spring to keep the weeds (you know, also "native" plants) from growing. And as others have said, it's not usable for anything other than looking at or for doing more yard work. No soccer or frisbee among the shrubs. People pointing out that you can still mow your "prairie grass" down to a usable lawn must not live in the western US. The "native" "grass" here is all sagebrush and a variety of thorny things.

> living in the dry western U.S., it's not that great

Over the last four or five years, my wife & I have killed 75% of our 1 acre Eastern US lawn and replaced it with native trees and plants. I have lovely grasses and flowers (asters, Susans, coneflowers and phlox) in the front, native trees and undergrowth towards the back, and a quarter acre or so of plain old lawn which we're planning to introduce clover into.

We've got trees coming in nicely and starting to give shade, butterflies fluttering around the flowers, a vegetable garden in the corner, and 75% less lawn to worry about mowing. I wouldn't give it up for anything.

It's not all roses. We are on year 2 after hardscaping/xeriscaping our central Oregon yard. We took out all grass and put in about 40 native plants and grasses, mostly on our easement. Our main lawn is mostly mulch. We ran into a few issues. 1 - one time a freak wind storm with 40+mph gusts blew some of the mulch away and we had to get about 1/2 yard more to replace it. 2 - our yard is on a slope and we did not account for proper drainage. During a huge storm, part of the yard washed out. We have since put in a drain/sink and it's fine now. We still have to weed and touch up the mulch. So just know it's not a maintenance free thing. I'd still do it again though for the the following reasons: 1 - much lower water usage. 2 - one less asshole on our street running lawn equipment. I absolutely hated maintaining/cutting grass. 3 - Really nice curb appeal. It actually looks great and we've had neighbors ask about it.

If you want lawn that is easy to walk/run around on, there are still things you can do to reduce impact. Overseed with clover(there's microclover that doesn't get as big as typical kinds). Never spray herbicides or pesticides. Don't fertilize(the clover will fix nitrogen on its own). Try to mow just enough that it isn't super short, but that you can mulch every time instead of bagging. In the fall, mulch as many of the leaves as you can into the lawn(start early before all the trees drop), the goal being to keep the leaf matter around, but to not have it start matting and killing the lawn.

Isn't mulching counter-productive, then? I don't fertilise but also always bag for the same reason, to keep the grass lean in favour of the weeds.

The mulching keeps the organic matter in the lawn, so it becomes part of the topsoil, helping it be more nutrient rich and better at retaining water. It's part of developing an ecosystem. If you're spraying chemicals and fertilizing, then you also have to throw in extra work like dethatching because all the decomposition cycles get messed up and you might kill the grass.

Honestly, the number one thing to do is change your definition of what is a weed. Clover used to be part of grass mixes, but was re-marketed as a weed because broad-leaf herbicides were profitable. There's lots of other broad-leaf plants that can blend in with grass just fine(some are even edible!) and they both help fertilize naturally, as well as fill in the gaps where things like annoying thistles or hyper-aggressive plants might try to edge in.

But the whole reason why I'm not fertilising is because I want it to to be nutrient poor. Why would I then want to make it nutrient rich again by mulching?

Nutrient rich is what you want for those completely uniform boomer tier lawns with only one species of grass. Whereas nutrient poor forces the grass to take a step back and leave more space for all those broad leaf plants.

I don't think you really have to worry that the soil being too rich is going to prevent hearty species from growing. It'll happen unless you go out of your way to prevent it.

They'll make their way in. This is my fourth summer in my house. The previous owners sprayed, but I haven't once. I bagged a bit the first summer but stopped. I've got lots of flowering plants in the grass now, without any extra effort on my part. I did overseed with clover this year, but I think naturally occurring clover had already started to take hold last year too.

I don't think it's as simple as feeling peer pressure to have a yard look the same. My backyard got out of control one year, and it quickly became a haven for mice, rabbits, snakes, turtles, crickets, mosquitoes, etc. All of that affects your neighbors as well. Since I've gotten better about keeping the grass cut, I haven't had to deal with any of those pests. I still don't fertilize or bother to keep weeds out, but keeping it short enough that it doesn't become a vermin sanctuary is part of being a good neighbor, IMO.

Your "vermin" is someone else's healthy native ecosystem. I am letting my yard overgrow right now because it is providing homes for wild rabbits. Is that being a bad neighbor?

If we wanted native ecosystems we wouldn't live in tightly sealed homes in engineered neighborhoods, we'd have lean-tos in the woods.

Yes, it has to be one or the other. No other types of housing exist.

If the rabbits aren't just staying in your yard, then I'd say you're being a bad neighbor. In my experience, the rabbits dig a bunch of holes, and leave piles of poop everywhere, even on porches and sidewalks. If you want to have a wild animals living in your yard, you should move to a rural area.

It's also a nice home for mice. Unfortunately the mice population tends to grow large enough that they look for new homes. Your home and your neighbor's homes start to look very enticing and pretty soon you're hearing chewing the walls and power sockets stop working randomly.

One of my neighbors let their backyard run wild like that and a couple of years later exterminator trucks were a common sight in the driveways.

If your neighbor wants to reduce their dependency on the industrial food system by growing a edible garden in their backyard, yes, rabbits are vermin to them. Each time your rabbits eat your neighbor's lettuce, a head of lettuce from somewhere else in the world (hopefully a local farm but probably not) has to be trucked in to the food market to be purchased by the neighbor.

Those are the displaced natives of our cities and suburbs. I get that no one wants mice around, but if that is the price for giving all the other species a home, I think it's worth it. I think it's fair to argue that this aspect of "being a good neighbour" is an attitude incompatible with living sustainably.

I can empathize with NIMBYism if someone is trying to build a coal mine upstream of you, but for native plants and animals? Frankly these are the sentiments that take away my faith in the future of our species.

We are in the midst of a global ecological collapse driven by human activity. You could consider being a better neighbor to all the other complex life on the planet.

The mosquito issue mentioned in the parent is valid in many areas. After all, they kill more humans than any other animal. The good news is that there are biological controls like BTI that are effective.

Part of the reason mosquitos get so out of control is because we've killed off all the bats, birds, and predatory insects that keep them in check.

What explains the pervasive malaria that used to be in this country then?

Malaria isn't in the country because in the late 40s the US Public Health Service sprayed the interiors of five million southern homes with DDT, drained wetlands, and carpet bombed counties with pesticides. They did that until the mosquito population dropped enough that the transmission cycle was broken.

There are still tons of mosquitoes able to carry malaria in the US. They haven't been killed off - heck, my cat caught one in the laundry room a few days ago! But humans are the only relevant reservoir for malaria, so as long as we use good public health techniques like screening individuals from endemic areas, it's possible to let the US remain malaria free.

But we don't really screen travellers. It seems Zika and chikenguya are on the verge of becoming established in areas of FL and TX. Those have animal hosts too. Seems like it won't be long until it's all over (thanks again global travel).

Changing the species of plants growing in a yard has no impact on mosquitoes. I don't know why these things are being conflated. Mosquitoes need standing water to breed. Usually they come from old containers people leave out that fill up with rain, or gutters not being cleaned. Mosquitoes are the result of the lack of property maintenance, not the presence of native plants.

This hasn't been my experience. Once I let my lawn get quite tall (grass that was maybe 4-5 inches), and I had crazy mosquitoes. When I finally mowed that grass, they came up in swarms. I then learned, and have kept it short since then and voila, no mosquitoes.

They were talking about their yard getting out of control one year. The height of the vegetation can create an environment for mosquitoes and ticks to thrive.

It’s far more likely that the plants and animals moving in are invasive, not native. In my garden in California anything native is the exception.

Imagining a backyard infested with turtles made my day :)

But I totally agree with you.

They’re animals. Not “pests”.

This state of mind is why we’ve killed off 60% of animal populations since 1970.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity...

This applies to native plants (AKA weeds) as well. Dandelions and clovers are basically harmless native species good for the soil and/or pollinators but are treated like hostile invaders by some homeowners.

My grass is native. Its densely-matted roots stabilize against erosion and make walking on wet ground possible.

I let it go to seed once. It grew several feet tall and fell over, which led to thinning out, which left the yard muddy and slippery. Do not recommend. Bare spots quickly fill with saplings or poison ivy that have to be removed, anyway.

My electric mower and weed eater do just fine without direct pollution, and my fern flowerbed is still muddy.

We achieve a similar effect by benign neglect: I never mow more than once a week and often it happens in 2-week intervals or when I'm bored. 2+ acres gets to be a pain, even on a riding mower.

When we moved in, the lawn was whatever grass the previous owner had maintained. Now it's grass, various forms of clover, daisies and black-eyed susans in the areas where I only mow every couple weeks or so and a bunch of plants I can't identify.

I like it, but the dandelions are spreading more than I want them to, so I may have to do something about that.

> and a bunch of plants I can't identify.

Check out Planet.net as I mentioned above, it works pretty well.

> but the dandelions are spreading more than I want them to, so I may have to do something about that.

Like bitter greens, perhaps in a salad? Just pick the small leaves, and although I haven't noticed, supposedly they're no good too late in the season.

Also search for dandelion coffee. Delicious stuff, though time-consuming to prepare.

Personally, I like the plant. Nice flowers, doesn't need watering.

To reply to foobiter's dead comment:

>some grass is indeed native, that’s not what this article is advising against… many many lawns have grass in places where it would otherwise not grow

No, they advising against suburban grass maintenance in general. This without considering downsides of clean flower beds without the dense root structure homeowners are used to, or snake-friendly hiding places near your front door.

Thick, muddy, pest-filled brush is native, but I have enough of it without it around my house and walkways.

This is one of those issues where individual choices end up having compounding effects.

Sure, on an individual level, it's totally reasonable to shape the patch of private property around your house into a grass lawn or a garden with a selection of species. Driveways are common as everyone needs a parking spot for their car, right?

Compound that over regions with millions of people and that's quite big percentage of land that gets devoid of it's natural biodiversity. Which has all kinds of secondary consequences.

Where I live, 75 years of fiscal policies have promoted home ownership. And so, houses with a front and back garden, terraces and hardened driveways are the norm. I also live in a one of the most densely populated regions of the world, which used to have a rather wet climate. And so, combined, this region has been optimized for drainage of excess water.

It used to have a rather wet climate but that's clearly changing. This region has seen an increase in heat waves during summer times and over the past decade. Low water tables and increased temperatures in micro climates are causing concern with policy makers regarding water shortages and public health issues (heat strokes and such). Academic research and engineers are modelling that the problem will only be exacerbated by how land has been shaped through human activity.

As a response, in a general public policy shift, public awareness campaigns and citizen research projects are now targeting home owners to re-think the way they shape their lawns and gardens.

One of the biggest projects currently ongoing:

https://curieuzeneuzen.be/home-en/

Of course, the big issue is that this involves private property, and it's extremely hard convincing people that a harmless decision to have a nice or functionally cultivated property with your house on, does have end up having an environmental impact. This wasn't an issue for decades on end, but as external circumstances are changing, this is gradually becoming part of a complex issue.

> ...the big issue is that this involves private property, and it's extremely hard convincing people...

Money helps.

Some locales in drier areas of the U.S. provide incentives for making changes to your property to reduce it's environmental impact. E.g. replacing a grass lawn with native desert plants, adding solar panels to the roof, capturing rainwater from driveways and roofs and using it to water plants and flush toilets, etc.

> “I was just reading how running a lawn mower for one hour creates the same amount of pollution as driving the average car for 350 miles,” Merda said.

It’s a quote but the author should have fact checked this since it’s the type of thing people will love to repeat. New lawnmowers are all 4 stroke and based on the quantity of gasoline consumed alone cannot produce as much emissions in terms of CO2 as a car driving 350 miles (unless it’s a Tesla). In terms of NOx and CO, the EPA added regulations in 2011 to reduce these emissions by 35%, and with those regulations followed followed it should be much lower than a car driving for 350 miles. And finally - electric lawnmowers are now very common.

Also, if your lawn is not too huge, you can try out a spindle (mechanical) mower. They are much easier to push than I imagined and give a very clean cut since they work like scissors and don't just chop the grass off.

Do you mean reel mower? Those are pretty great, but they do need to be kept in good repair, clean, lubricated, and blades sharp. And you have to cut often enough so the grass doesn't get too tall. But for a small city lot they're pretty neat.

We had one when I was growing up, but it was none of those things so it was mostly a great big PITA ;).

Yeah that's the right English term, thanks. I now have a modern, new one and it works much better than I remember them from my childhood. But you're right about the downsides, I occasionally have to use the electric mower when the grass becomes too tall.

Is any amount of combustion worth making your lawn pretty?

A video on this topic from my favourite botanist: Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oz9I2YwmV8M

this guy is the best.

Awesome!

I don't understand the advocacy and politics around home landscaping.

If you want a lawn, get a lawn. If you want something else do that.

It's great to present and talk about options. But when people feel the need to justify and defend their choice it's gone beyond landscaping and become something unsavory.

There are actually consequences to what you choose to do with/to the land. Its not just about personal preference.

There are consequences to every decision people make. This type of policing is the wrong path to take.

Diet, transportation, having a pet, having children, flying, the list is endless.

Who is policing? Providing and spreading the best available knowledge and trying to activate others’ conscience is not policing. Yes there are consequences, namely the collapse of ecosystems. Decide what’s more important, and know why its more important.

What is the alternative to thinking about how you live?

Not everyone is going to agree on the best available knowledge because not everyone has the same goals.

I am in the process of doing this. I would highly recommend starting with your backyard... because it's surprisingly difficult and it's better to make your mistakes out of view of the street. I've already noticed an increase in bees and other insects though!

Another tip for helping out your local insect (and thus bird) population... leave your yard "waste" where it is! It's a whole ecosystem that most people pack into bags and take to the dump every year.

> leave your yard "waste" where it is! It's a whole ecosystem that most people pack into bags and take to the dump every year.

Every year? During peak summer in Georgia, my 1/4 acre lawn was producing 8-12 30 gallon yard waste bags of grass clippings.

We used a mulching lawn mower. no "waste", and never the need to fertilize the lawn as nutriments never leave the area

I use a regular blow out the side mower. Even when the grass is thick it decomposes fast. The windrows will make the grass turn brown if I let the grass grow tall (like 30cm tall), but two weeks latter it all decomposes and you can't tell.

> Even when the grass is thick it decomposes fast.

I don't know what region you're in but that was not my experience in Georgia. During the summers there isn't enough rain and the grass clippings just dry into hay.

It doesn't matter if you vary your cut pattern and go over the windrows of cut grass from the previous week to scatter them about. It builds up and quickly kills the grass. It's next to impossible to maintain a healthy looking lawn without picking up the clippings.

You can try composting but, unless you're diligent about watering and turning your piles, it's too slow and you eventually run out of space due to the amount of grass clippings that amass.

I used a mulching lawnmower as well but it doesn't matter. The volume of grass clippings dry out into hay that sits on top of the lawn and kills it. If left in place it will kill the yard in a few weeks time.

It will decompose! Grass clippings are a bit different, I was referring to leaves and other debris. But grass clippings are amazing for compost.

Not if left on the yard. It dries out into hay and clumps up. The clumps kill the grass they're laying on and eventually kill the yard.

No they don't. They decompose in a couple weeks and then the grass - which went dormant but is still alive) comes back.

I maintained lawns in Georgia for almost 20 years. During that time I went through a couple bouts of depression where I couldn't be bothered to bag the clippings and was just mowing to appease the HOA.

I can tell you with 100% certainty that in Georgia in summer, Bermuda and St. Augustine grass clippings do not decompose "in a couple weeks" time and do in fact kill the grass underneath.

Must be a region-specific thing. I've been a homeowner in MN for 20+ years and have never bagged grass clippings.

HOA won’t let me, but I use electric lawn tools now and I don’t water it beyond what the rain gives it. That means it goes a bit brown and dormant during the heat of the summer but the HOA rules don’t say anything about that and it recovers just fine with rain.

https://reddit.com/r/NoLawns

There are examples of how such lawns may look like and an attached post with wiki that contains a lot of resources for beginners and the curious.

I grew up in Tucson, AZ. A grass yard was a foreign concept to me. Everyone had rock landscaping in their front yards and either dirt or rock in the backyard.

The National Wildlife Federation says that a native plant "...has occurred naturally in a particular region, ecosystem, or habitat without human introduction."

Given that, the article may have problems because some of that stuff is not native. For my region (my property abuts a wildlife refuge, a national forest, and an Indian reservation), many 'native' plant species are illegal or are disallowed by insurance policies within 5m to 50m of a building.

Climates have changed and appear to be rapidly changing. So the affected ecosystems will change. And does the re-introduction of a plant species that is no longer found at large, constitute a non-native species introduction? Is the synthetic preservation and cultivation of a native plant species that is no longer suitable for a changing ecosystem constitute an unnatural and thus non-native species?

And what about plants that pop up from germinated seed (probably transported by birds and wind) that are not native to this area but thrive because I have altered the habitat? [additions and changes from pond and drainage control and fencing projects]

A useful search term for more info on this is "re wilding." You can just lay down cardboard over your Kentucky bluegrass for half a year to kill it off. It also makes a big difference in water consumption if you live somewhere where that's a concern.

I used to live in the oldest home in a subdivision; it was completely xeriscaped. Over the years as the city grew more and more people moved into this subdivision building much larger homes with traditional yards.

I got a lot of grief from the new neighbors. The didn’t like my modest home—it was wooden not masonry, they didn’t like the fence, they didn’t like the garage, but most of all they didn’t like the native plants in front of my house.

I eventually moved to a new neighborhood, but I did keep the unoccupied xeriscaped house for a few years, out of spite I suppose.

I think a lot of HOA are not going to allow this in the front yard. And the number and size of HOA have been growing rapidly in the last 30 years

We built a simple WordPress website for a local environmental organization to help people find native plants. I hope it's replicated!

That’s a great idea, because I have no idea what’s actually native to my area.

Not ours, but this website was our inspiration: https://mainenativeplants.org/

I like my grass. If I wanted to have more "natural" parts I'd move somewhere with more land where that would make sense.

The key question is whether people like you will support changing HOA requirements, ordinances, etc to allow your neighbors to be good stewards of their land.

It's a tragedy that so much residential land is effectively forced to be used exclusively for non-native grasses, often requiring herbicides, pesticides, and outsided water consumption to keep propped up. If people want to damage their land so be it, but they have a habit of forcing others to do the same.

To "keep property values high." In today's market, at least, I seriously doubt the quality of a neighbour's lawn will have any significant impact on property values.

Or even the home's lawn. Next door neighbor's home is being sold (they're renters) and the lawn is in awful shape (not just weeds but large dead sections). It's still being sold over asking and way over what the owner paid 10 years ago. The price is in line with better maintained homes on the street that have been sold. The yard doesn't seem to matter at all.

A yard takes 1-2 years to fixup into shape. Less if you go with the quick and easy 'rye' way, but that is only good for 1 year. If you can afford it hire someone who does it for a living and it will be amazing. But if you want DIY just buy plants that fit the area. Aeration and proper grooming will be the top items on the list.

I would go house shopping with friends and family. I would walk into houses that were basically amazing. But they would hate the backyard had not been mowed this week and nope out.

When buying a house keep an eye on structural, shape, layout, and location. Everything else is mostly decorative. For example I had to kind of move recently fairly quickly. So the apt I ended up in is very 70s. There is no fixing that structural. The owners have tried with paint and colors. But it still has a very closed in 70s build to it. No amount of paint will fix the walls that are in the way.

Or keep the lawn, and plant some vines. If you combine two or more you can get some stunning results. A climbing rose with clematis for example. Maybe some sort of native vine. Best of both worlds.

That can backfire. I allowed some confederate jasmine to grow and now its strong-as-wire vines are destroying building and equipment. I have to use those plastic blades on my weed eater to make a dent in it, and they don't last the hour because it's all on fence and the edge of concrete.

After not mowing for a couple of weeks I see vines popping up a few inches above the grass, and I know it will bind the blades if I let it go further.

In case you don't know about them, they also make plastic blades with steel teeth embedded in them. I use them to get rid of thistles for when I don't want to deal with the extra weight of my brushcutter.

A back yard lawn provides a nice flat, private space.

A front yard lawn is far more public, and typically smaller (so not useful for activities).

Plant a garden in front to actually make use of that space.

> Americans also spend way more water and fertilizer on their lawns than farmers use to grow corn, soybeans and other crops, according to the study.

I have no idea where that study's data came from. Corn needs about 250 pounds of nitrogen per acre per year. Soybeans are higher at 300-325 pounds/acre/crop.

Grass needs (on the high side) around 45# of nitrogen per acre per month only while actively growing. For a 6 month growing season (longer than mine is), that's only equal to corn, not "way more". Any homeowner who is using "way more" than that is going to get terrible (and self-correcting) results.

This is highly misinformed. Corn doesn't 'need' any supplemental fertilizer (and was grown without much for centuries), we choose to do it because it's more profitable. Soybeans, being a legume, make their own nitrogen. So you comment is wildly misleading making people believe people are putting 300 pounds of nitrogen per acre

"Needs" might be slightly too strong a word in terms of supplemental nitrogen for corn, but note that the corn is going to take nitrogen either way, whether naturally provided or supplemented. (Corn is a grass with very tasty seeds.)

However, when the article makes comparisons to what farmers are actually doing, I think it's fair game to bring in data around what farmers are actually doing.

No farmer is applying nitrogen to soybeans. They fix their own nitrogen, and generally add nitrogen to the system. Any plant is going to take nutrients (native or otherwise) from the system. Just because ornamental species don't have a commercial value doesn't mean they aren't extracting nutrients

I am very familiar with corn being a grass. Although its seed are very much not tasty unless they happen to have a well known sucrose mutation.

> No farmer is applying nitrogen to soybeans.

Incorrect. https://nutrien-ekonomics.com/news/do-high-yielding-soybeans...

What farmers apply is generally closer to what is actually needed for the crops - often guided by soil samples. Not doing that means throwing away a lot of money. Homeowners often put down way more chemical than is needed. Its economics, a single homeowner putting in twice the fertilizer as needed is still spending less than $100 so they don't really care - but over a farm putting twice what is needed down costs thousands of dollars that could be spent on something else the farmer wants.

Farmers are also a lot more concerned about their fertilizer getting into the plants and no running off. Sure a lot does run off anyway, but that is wasted money so they are interested in anything that will keep it on their fields.

https://archive.is/8NH13

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