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It's really low maintenance

I think that depends on your frame of reference. Sure in comparison with maintaining a forest the way you describe it's low (though note that there's always the option of not maintaining a forest at all, except for paths through it). But compared to maintaining a meadow (even mown piecewise to strive for max biodiversity) where you'd mow max 2 times a year, it's rather high.

It's a lot easier to maintain a uniform lawn

Depends. I don't consider mowing a piece of grass 2 times a year a lot harder than doing all of it every 2 weeks, on the contrary. You need the correct tool for the job though.

when the flowers all die

That doesn't have to be like that, e.g. in my Western-European climate that is only so in the middle of winter; for the rest my grassland has flowering species about 9 months a year. Does require some insight into ecology of grasslands to get such situation though. What you talk about is typically what one gets when not mowing 'correctly'. I.e. wrong time of year, or too much or too little, or not removing the vegetation after mowing it, etc.

that creates a weird erosion pattern

Can you explain that? I'm pretty sure I've seen studies where old grasslands are better for erosion than short lawns.

> I mean, how would you even spent 150 hours a year maintaining a tiny suburban lawn? Are you cutting it with a toenail clipper? Huh? That's almost 3 hours a week, dude.

A quarter acre of St Augustine grass in Georgia produces about 5-10 of those 30 gallon yard waste bags full of grass clippings each week at the height of the growing season. The clippings cannot remain on the grass or they will kill it. It takes approximately 5 hours a week to maintain such a yard.

Similarly in the fall, the trees will produce similar amounts of leaves each week that also cannot remain on the grass or they will kill it.

In Michigan we never removed grass clippings all year, the yard remained healthy. We also didn't use monoculture grass but a mix of 3 different types.

I really struggle to believe that people in Georgia with a lawn are spending 5 hours a week maintaining it. That's basically an entire weekend day. Why can't you mulch it, or use the clipping bag?

My grass grows quickly in Spring and Fall, but it takes about 20 minutes to mow it. I don't usually bother to pick up the clippings unless it's really long.

It's routine here to see people spending an hour every day maintaining their lawns. Over the course of a week they're pulling weeds, fertilizing, watering and patching their grass.

They have to or else it dies/gets overrun almost immediately. They get crispy after 2-3 days w/o water. Start dying in a week. Lawns here are a freaking nightmare to keep up.

Can't they use a robot mower? I'm in a northern climate, so lawns only grow from late April until late September, but around here more and more are getting robot mowers. They are completely silent and are continously cutting the grass. The clippings are so short that they can just stay on the lawn and functions as nutrient for the grass. So less fertilizer is needed, weeds will be cut constantly. So in theory you just need to water it if there's no rain.

Most people think of a lawn as rectangle of grass on a flat surface but most are not. In all but the southern parts of Georgia it's very hilly with most properties flowing down hill to a washout, creek, or pond. There's also a dense tree canopy over most properties older than 20 years which means lots of roots, acorns, pine cones, leaves, and pine needles.

Electric mowers and robots have fragile little blades designed to weight as little as possible because they're running on batteries. They'll be damaged or break entirely if they strike a root or rock.

I had to use a self propelled dual blade mulching power to handle the terrain and so I didn't have to spend an hour or more walking the property gathering all the pine codes and other crap that might stall out a lesser mower.

Robot mowers work on most lawns. If it's very bumpy or hilly you just need to go up in price. This summer I visited a farm with a huuuge lawn with trees, hills, rocks and what not. They had two Husquarna 4WD robot mowers and the lawn looked pretty nice.

In GA, with .25 acre of centipede, I'd say it's about 2 hrs/wk with heavy rain & sun (like recently). Less rain, 2 hrs / 3 wks. Push mower, slow & steady pace (it grows so thick, I can't just power walk it). Maybe St Augustine is very different from centipede.

Mulching seems to be fine if you cut along the rule of third (cut less than 1/3 of the thing at a time). Even side discharge seems ok, especially as you spiral over the discharge, re-mowing it.

I used to let it grow out, but thatch became an issue. Which is why raking them up makes sense (or dethatching).

Now I cut slightly on the short side, more often, which seems to naturally favor centipede over dandelions almost anywhere there's good sun & water & drainage. Nothing really beats mowed centipede, for me; letting it grow wild invites snakes et al, and paving it would be hot.

Anyone who would spend five hours clipping and dumping grass per week would spend hundreds of hours a year on a more challenging environment of the same size. You would have to move pretty slowly to accomplish that.

It's naive to think maintaining a yard is just walking your property once a week with a push mower.

If you have a tree canopy, as most older homes in Georgia do, then you have to contend with the debris from the trees (e.g. fallen limbs, leaves, pine needles, pine cones, acorns, etc). If you want the lawn to look nice you need to do edging, weeding, watering and fertilizer=. In Georgia most homes have "pine islands" that have some sort of ground covering like mulch or pine straw and contain plants ans shrubs you need to maintain.

I don’t think it’s naive. I don’t live in Georgia but I have mowed, trimmed and maintained yards of similar size and obstacle count many times. That list of additional chores doesn’t take long, especially if in the yard weekly so only incremental upkeep is required and no rarely done parts are difficult (large thorns, lots of sticks or walnuts, difficult edging etc.)

I don’t doubt a slow person or a meticulous lawnhead could fill the time, to be clear, but that same level of effort and speed should be applied to measuring the difficulty of maintaining a forested plot in order to make a useful comparison.

Doing a halfassed slap job in a half an hour each week while your property slowly deteriorates is not the same thing as maintenance. Also mowing a lawn at full sprint is going to quickly deteriorate your equipment.

I didn't downvote you but that's a bit silly. I assure you your lawn equipment can handle brisk walks for years.

Interesting, half my lawn is St. Augustine and with a simple mulching mower I have never had to collect clippings. (Coastal NC)

You don't typically plant St. Augustine that far north, maybe it's just not thriving?

Maybe I'm just used to the northern climate. Wild. It's nothing near that up here even when the growth is at its height.

Southern coastal soil holds zero nutrients. Nothing grows without heavy treatment and whatever you put in leaches away in weeks.

Of course it will if you cut and cart the future nutrients away each week while creating 'greenery' that is a monoculture entirely unattractive to animal life.

As long as you've got a water source, you can easily create a tiny patch of green that can survive for decades unattended - even in the midst of a desert.

Agreed, it's a struggle. We apply milorganite or similar biosolid product every third month to ensure the grass gets the nutrients it needs. Otherwise we get a spotty lawn, which in turn results in poor water retention and pooling.

> The clippings cannot remain on the grass or they will kill it.

I don't understand why clippings kill the grass. Can you explain?

There's a balance between how fast the grass grows and how often you cut it. If you want to cut your grass less often then you need to bag otherwise the large volume of clippings pile up on the grass and don't decompose.

In my case, my last lawn was St. Augustine which is a drought tolerant variety of grass typically planted in Florida or on golf courses because it requires less watering. In Georgia however there's no shortage of water so it thrived and during the peak growing season it would easily grow five or six inches a week.

So I could either mow twice a week, mow once week and bag, or rip up and re-sod the whole thing. None of which was really desirable.

I can understand if the grass is extremely long and it will cover it, so it will die. But it will rebound pretty quick anyway.

Otherwise, I always leave my clippings on my grass, even if decently long. The grass survive just fine.

>>Are you cutting it with a toenail clipper?

As someone who lives in the UK - yes, not me personally, but I have neighbours(very elderly) who I see every week literally on the knees, clipping the grass with what effectively looks like nail scissors. I mean, they are retired, they can do whatever they want with their time, but it is a little bit nuts.

Bizarre, but yes, I had a neighbour who used to that ...

Another benefit of regularly cut lawns is that they keep critters away. Having tall grass, shrubs, bushes, or other cover grow right up to your house means that mice, snakes, squirrels, and other wild animals will find their way into your home.

this is a really interesting take that I surprisingly have never seen anywhere, thank you for sharing. would love to learn more about this perspective and body of knowledge, thought not sure where or what to google or what resources might exist. for example, what mitigation can or should be done if one did want wild grass and flowers but wanted to prevent erosion, and what happens if you don't prevent that erosion. is this still a concern on a completely flat piece of land?

I really want/wanted to get rid of my lawn when I first bought my house, until I realized how easy to maintain it is, especially if you don't care if it's looks nice. Bushes need to be trimmed, garden beds need to be weeded, annuals need to be re-planted, etc. But mow your lawn once a week (20-30 minutes) and that's all you need to do.

Not here. Our lawns need to be watered daily and treated frequently with chemicals that pollute every waterway for miles.

Stop any of that and the grass starts dying immediately. It's common here to see folks resod every year if not multiple times.

Opposite here: buffalo takes a lot of abuse and has died and resurrected many times due to construction work/lack of water/trampoline shadow etc.

Same thing when I lived in the mid-Atlantic. We never watered or did anything to our grass but cut it.

I forgot to mention also guniea pigs unleashed on it too! With them Im not even needing to cut it!

I'm in Oregon, so it rains enough through most of the year that the lawn keeps itself going. It goes dormant from lack of water in the summer, but that's fine with me. Doesn't seem to need anything else so far, except mowing.

>trees really wanna kill you.

Trees don't care about you one iota. I guarantee, humans are much more deadly to trees than trees are to humans.

>This is one of the reasons why suburban developers don't go out of their way to plant forests

The main reason is that it is hard (read expensive) to route plumbing around roots and what not, so it's much easier to just tear them down and work from a flat area. It's typical WASP mentality to move into a space, kill off all of the original inhabitants, and then claim it as your own.

>The other reason why uniform lawns

Yes, grass lawns help keep the soil from erroding away from the foundation. Once the lawn is established, it defintely makes it more difficult for foreign grass to grow.

> That's almost 3 hours a week, dude.

Lawn care doesn't have to be a race. I enjoy my weekly lawncare routine. It's a nice moderate outdoor workout pushing a mower, raking, trimming, etc. When you get done, you get to sit on the patio, enjoy a tasty beverage, and feel good about what you accomplished. Then again, I grew up outdoors more than I was indoors back when kids did that kind of thing.

If you despise outdoors, heat, sweat, physical work, then of course you'll hate yard work.

>it's the trees that are dangerous

This reads like a lawncare shill quote

Speaking as someone who owns many acres of forest, I like it a lot, but beware that it's more work than it seems to keep it nice.

I love in the pacific northwest. We have untold square miles of forest here. The idea of having to keep a forest "nice" kind of blows my mind. The best forests we have are the ones that are completely untouched.

I could be wrong, but I think that "untouched" forest is not really going to be so nice unless you let natural wildfires come by every decade and clear out the undergrowth, or you have a lot of big animals naturally making trails, or you have forestry employees keeping up the forest.

So, if you have a few acres of forest yourself, none of the above things are going to be happening, you actually have to build trails through it and then maintain them. And, you will constantly have fallen branches and fallen trees that need to be cleared. It's a lot of work. I have a few acres of forest in the PNW.

I hear this a lot from a West Coast perspective, but I don't understand it.

Northern New England is almost entirely forested, and it isn't managed or maintained to anything like the same degree as West Coast forests, and yet we don't have the problems with giant segments going up in smoke every year. We don't even really have suburbs. We just have towns that are mostly forests, separated from each other by areas that are completely forests with one road going through.

I'm (obviously) no expert in this, but it seems that our largely untouched forests do a lot better than the ones that are so intensively managed. I have to imagine this has been studied and state maintenance of forests isn't just some giant government boondoggle that leads to massive fires and no one's noticed, but that's how it looks from several thousand miles away!

Part of it is just different climate. The west coast is mostly what is called Mediterranean, which means we have almost no rain during the summer months. By August everything is dry as a bone and ready to burn. Don't you guys get rain pretty much year round?

There's just so much moisture in the plants that fires don't do that much under most normal circumstances in New England. Storm damage is a bigger concern but that just makes trees ugly/dead or has them falling on power lines and houses. Rotted trees are just wet, gross, and full of bugs -- they're not necessarily fire hazards.

In the northeast we don't have wildfires like that. It's just too wet especially in the river valley in which I live. And 'winter' is basically 6 months long.

The undergrowth just uh, under-grows unless you expressly clear it out to make it more pleasant to walk around in.

Do you really think all forests are regularly cleaned? That just does not seem to be the case and only some of them have regular fires.

Not all forests, obviously. But the ones that people are generally hiking in, the trails are maintained. Not many people go off trail.

Speaking as someone who was nearly killed twice by trees (in a car and out walking), I'd say either trees just don't like me or they really are dangerous. Though a lot of people think I'm a bit of a jerk, my money is on the latter.

Logging is the most deadly occupation in North America, on a death per capita basis. (111 deaths per 100,000 workers)