‘No mow’ movement could transform our lawns | Hacker News Reader

‘No mow’ movement could transform our lawns

washingtonpost.com

36 pointsbookofjoe47 comments

My grandfather was famously anti-lawn-mowing[0]. His un-mowed lawn eventually sprouted some rare bee orchids among a vast array of other wildflowers. It always looked beautiful when we pulled into the drive when we went to visit.

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-ga...

Consider replacing your grass with clover if your local jurisdiction will tolerate it.

https://germination.ca/need-a-bit-of-luck-turn-to-a-clover-l...

https://www.bobvila.com/articles/clover-lawn/

https://www.outsidepride.com/seed/clover-seed/Clover-Seed-Pl...

https://www.bhg.com/how-to-plant-a-clover-lawn-6750469

Your local Extension office is a valuable resource.

https://extension.org/search_gcse/

Where I live it's actually illegal for HOAs and local jurisdictions to forbid your from having natural/non-grass yards.

Tremendous, you love to see it.

And where is this slice of sensible?

It varies by region what you "should" plant and is worth checking with your local organizations.

University of Minnesota has developed a low maintenance bee mix that's pretty great - mix of fescue, creeping thyme, self-heal, and clover. https://turf.umn.edu/lawn-info/purchasing-seed/bee-lawn-seed

Ours should pretty much take over this year and choke out the rest of the bluegrass. Last year was dramatically better already and it was only half established.

This is going to vary by climate.

Here in south Florida, if you can see the grass growing in the rainy season. Its insane. If you don't mow your lawn for a month, it will turn into a knee deep bug and snake infested jungle... its literally a health hazard.

In some dry, hot places, it would actually be good for the grass itself. Everyone I knew in central Texas cut their grass too short, as it stays greener and needs less precious water when long.

Well you don’t ever want to cut your grass too short in one go. Always 1/3 of its blade length until its lowest recommended height. Otherwise you put the grass in shock when it’s already finding water hard to come by.

Central Texas grass and generally any warm season grass is more drought and sun tolerant.

Same here in Australia. I've had about six weeks not mowing due to a few weekend projects and now it's leech infested.

Speaking from experience, if you live in the united states you should be very cautious with this.

Many municipalities and hoa's have pretty draconian expectations for your landscaping. Municipalities in Florida and Ohio have litigated and fined homeowners for that which they perceive as nuisance plantings or general nonconformity.

My former residence, while not under a hoa, did have a township restriction that inundated me with calls and mail from the city demanding I remove my front lawn herb garden and tomato vines. I had to fight the city for nearly four months before they dropped the issue, but they even went so far as to send landscapers to my doorstep to "confirm" an appointment I never made.

> but they even went so far as to send landscapers to my doorstep to "confirm" an appointment I never made.

Do you know this for a fact? I wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising lawn engineer decided to use publicly available list of “ordinance violators” as a lead generation tool.

They don’t even need a list, they can just drive around and look for violations.

I can always tell when my weeds are getting unkempt because I start getting unsolicited landscapers coming to my door and leaving business cards.

True but with the list you know they are facing fines. So there is a call to action of sorts that the potential customer needs it done ASAP to avoid further penalties and fines…

My HOA once fined me $39 per dandelion on my lawn. They claimed there were 6 dandelions although I counted only 4. Lawns are serious business here and they must be kept in perfect condition.

Having an HOA is an open invitation for the most sociopathic neighbors or for-profit management company to tell you what you can and can't do with your property, even more so than city and county code enforcement.

"John Oliver on homeowners associations: ‘Glorified debt collectors with the power to upend your life’" https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/apr/10/john-ol...

> By manipulating lawn mowing frequency, we established that lawns with the three-week mowing treatment had significantly greater floral abundance than the one or two-week treatments, and that the two-week mowing regime supported the highest bee abundance yet the lowest bee richness and evenness (Fig. 2; Fig. 4b, c, d).

So mow every two weeks and you’ll support the bees.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...

I always seed my lawn with clover every spring and only cut every three weeks. Clover not just helps pollinators but also fixes nitrogen in the soil. My soil was a blasted waste land when I bought the house. Now it’s a rich soil with plenty of life in it.

Spending valuable gasoline and resources to have grass extra short and the soil dry is stupid in our current situation of climate emergency.

Cities should let the grass grow three times longer than now, save water, and use the scarce resources in neglected projects that are much more urgent.

Or just get rid of grass entirely.

Part way through a project to replace part of the yard with gravel and native plants, mostly because I hate mowing.

The worst part about mowing is that you can’t even listen to a podcast because the engine is too loud. Otherwise I wouldn’t mind the chore.

Getting a set of airpod pro was easily the best money I’ve spent for doing yard stuff. I use the Noise Cancellation for mowing/trimming and the Transparency mode for other stuff. With transparency mode I dont at all feel isolated from anything.

I just put on a few hours of podcasts/music and it makes the work so much more enjoyable.

I’ve bought a ton of gadgets and tools for vegetable gardening over the past couple years but the airpods have been the best investment yet.

And I know i’m repeating myself but the transparency mode really is fantastic… i always avoided earbuds in the past because I despised how they made me feel “isolated from the world” or whatever, but their transparency mode totally solved that.

I just got Airpod Pros at Costco at the start of the year, and when I turned on the noise cancellation it was like I had suddenly lost my hearing. It's so effective.

Haven't tried mowing with them yet.

Get ear protection muffs and put ear buds in.

Noise cancelling headphones work well enough for electric mowers.

If your lawn isn't too large you can use a manual reel mower instead. They produce very little noise so you can mow your lawn, listen to your podcasts, and not annoy your neighbors.

Even better is not doing it at all.

There's so many things I'd rather do than mow. Like getting drunk and listening to podcasts with my cats.

Yeah, no. Absolutely not. Some jerk in my historic district reported my home to the City of Phoenix because among battling various other renovation challenges and taking care of family, our grass had grown past city ordinance height.

You know what the punitive fine was? $1,000/day.

I don't even live in an HOA, thank heavens.

If you choose to live in a historic district, you know very well you're going to have to follow a lot of rules about appearance, including grass height. You knew that going into it, or should have.

I don't know why you're calling someone a jerk for reporting it. The whole point of historic districts is to maintain an incredibly strict appearance. If you don't want to follow the rules, don't live there.

City ordinances apply to the whole city, not just historic districts. You're thinking of HOAs. What you're describing doesn't actually apply to historic districts. They're historic for their architectural significance and variety compared to modern construction and design practices, not an attempt to keep up on street-side appearances.

I think it would have been nice to offer to help with lawn issues, because they happen to everyone. Our lawn mower was stolen at the time.

Threatening someone with a $1,000/day punitive fine isn't being a good neighbor.

Thinking it's OK to do that is morally deprived.

The city ordinances can have different rules for historic preservation districts. Many restrict fences just to ensure people don’t block off the view.

Given your statement confusing that with HOAs, I would recommend reading up on the Phoenix rules for historic preservation districts to make sure there aren’t any other lurking differences you assumed weren’t there.

Guidelines for the districts are specifically oriented towards architecture and preservation of the design of the structures.

Nothing to do with grass. It's just mean. That's all there is to it. It's uncivil.

How do you get overgrown lawn in sun-scorched Phoenix without using absurd quantities of water in a desert that's running out of water?

Depends on the time of year. For maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the year, most of winter and anywhere near monsoon season, your grass will grow regardless of if you water it or not.

Phoenix gets 1.50" or 38 mm of rain per year. Kuwait City gets double that.

It's Phoenix: it's hot as hell and the insolation is crazy such that it's optimal for solar deployments. If you don't water your grass daily when it's over 90 F / 32 C, then it will die. That's a shit ton of water for a decoration.

https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/104331~2460~8004~2228~170...

> If you don't water your grass daily when it's over 90 F / 32 C, then it will die.

This is just completely untrue. Many places water ~biweekly in the summer and the grass is green as hell. Also, in monsoon season it rains enough on its own that you don't have to bother.

I also made sure to specify that it's mostly the winter and monsoon season where it'll grow on its own. Winter it does _not_ get over 90.

If op is in Phoenix proper (which is implied by the historic district), the water comes from the salt river, which now has all 3 reservoirs full upstream of the city.

Additionally, the Sonoran desert is a monsoonal one, so it receives a deluge of water during particular times of the year.

There is a massive amount of water waste in Arizona, but it’s in agriculture, not lawns.

One crime doesn't justify another. It's a lot of water for nonproductive purposes in an area that is destined for permanent, intense desertification.

The southwest, like most of the south Iberian peninsula, is going the way of desert and will not be able to sustain open-air agriculture much longer. Climate change.

https://crt-climate-explorer.nemac.org/climate_maps/?county=...

It’s not a crime. Residents pay a real market rate for water and if they want to spray it on their lawn, go for it.

What’s a crime is people with water rights for agriculture that pay effectively nothing and flood a field to grow alfalfa.

This behavior is completely unsustainable and uses orders of magnitude more water than the residents who pay for it. If they paid the same rate, these dumb crops would be cut off immediately and the water crisis would be over in a month.

Anything calling attention to residential water use is agriculture propaganda to keep the focus on neighbors chastising each other rather than considering meaningful legislation that would end the gravy train for them.

I don't water my lawn. It still grows. We get rain and it's more than enough for the grasses that grow here to prevent lawns from turning into dirt yards. It's not like a cartoon out here where everyone lives on sand dunes.

They won't be healthy, but they absolutely will grow, and very tall.

I'm actively trying to kill it. It's difficult and takes weeks to turn it into a dirt yard. You still have to dethatch and do everything anyone else has to do across the country.

You're also encouraged to participate in water conservation as a Phoenician, or an Arizonan in general.

https://archive.ph/dQZOc

Interesting perspective how the article seems to recommend mowing less and to a taller height rather than not mowing at all. Fair enough. Not mowing ever at all Can be dangerous for fire risk, ticks, and fox tails for dogs/animals/livestock, etc.

Edit: grew up in a rural area where we would mow acres of fields so may have a different background than others.

USA is amusing with the whole lawn debacle :-D

Amazing what our priorities are. But it shouldn't be surprising to outsiders, either.

The idea of a massive field of blue-green Poa pratensis Kentucky blue grass lawn is passe and absurd. It was a leftover of the French demonstrating how rich they were replacing farmland with manicured meadows. In the era of climate change and megadroughts, having a lawn has jumped the shark.

I don't mind mowing my lawn. We compost the clippings, and it's a non-trivial amount every fortnight. I recommend this. Make sure you don't use herbicides on your lawn if you choose to do this.

I mulch my beds with my clippings. Composts and retains moisture

I recall having to mow fertilized, borderline over-watered (3:30-:45 am every day), Kentucky blue grass 2x/wk in the peak of summer. 2-3 ancient circular tin trash cans full of clippings, perhaps 100 lbs / 44 kg / 7 stone. The water content was high enough that it wouldn't self-ignite like hay, but it sure would get warm, mushy, and consolidate quickly.

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