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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

All the time.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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).

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

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

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.

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

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

Its all about you.

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