it's doubly stupid because you can eat dandelions which are one of the many "weeds" people kill with this shit to protect their useless-at-best lawns.
kill your lawn. plant native shit.
kill your lawn. plant native shit.
you might be thinking of dicamba or 2,4d which are much worse for the environment (and probably for you) and target broadleaf plants only (e.g. dandelions)
glyphosate is most used for cash crop farming, large quantities sprayed on "roundup ready" corn and soy that has been engineered to be immune to it
Definitely "mini" or "new" potatoes is where this happens a lot. Kill the plant before full maturity so that the tuber stops growing and accumulates starches, then harvest. The potato farms near me do it, it's kinda gross.
It would be nice if clover was just kind of the de facto standard.
It tolerates moderate treading (i.e. a family walking on it on occassion or kids playing but not vehicles or wheeled stuff), it uses practically no water, it grows slowly so it rarely needs to be cut, and it only grows a few inches in height at most so often it doesn't need to be mowed at all, and blooms in the spring with tons of tiny little flowers spotted all over your lawn.
It comes in a handful of varieties that all grow between 2-6 inches in height and have a variety of textures or flower colors.
There's nothing wrong with having a lawn if you don't live in a drought-prone area. It's a lot less work than anything else people suggest. Just run a mower over it every couple weeks. And just plant with grass seeds adapted for your area, mix with clover, and ignore your stupid neighbours.
It’s sad that some people don’t.
Crab grass and creeping charlie is the problem here. Chokes out everything else.
Maybe it's climate/region dependent, but clover is probably one of the most innocuous things growing here. Fixes nitrogen, is kind of pretty if left to flower, and attracts pollinators.
I remember how I grew up. I want better for my kids, while recognizing that plenty of things were fine enough and that scrapes heal.
Also, grass is native in a lot of places.
I gave up on having a beautiful weed-free lawn a long time ago. The cost and time it takes to keep one is just not a good value for me. So whatever grows, grows. I mow it every couple of weeks.
My favourite is this creeping Charlie vine. It’s so satisfying to get an end up and just gently pull like eight feet of it off mine and my neighbour’s lawn.
If you believe glyphosate is relatively harmless (as compared to a series of 6-10 applications of selective herbicides to achieve not quite as good as the same end result), it's easy to understand why people are inclined to declare bankruptcy on their mess of a lawn and start fresh. Applying it in August, you could have a high-quality uniform lawn by October. (If it's far from harmless, then the series of selective treatments might be better.)
Rototilling to start over just surfaces a bunch of latent weed seeds that are in the top few inches of soil always. To start over, you want to kill everything growing without disturbing the soil and surfacing the weed seeds.
This is true but I get the impression that most urban lots are just using rolls of sod anyways.
Or a little round up and plant grass seed over the top. Much less CO2, and the soil and organic matter stay in place.
I have a growers pesticide applicators license and a big jug of glyphosate in the barn. But I don't use it for that kind of thing because it drifts and damages the perennial plants I care about, and I just feel ... ehh.... about it. And if I grow stuff for market, it's good for pricing and marketing to be able to say it wasn't sprayed.
I have a rototiller for the tractor and I use it sparingly to break ground and then amend with manure and other organic matter, then cover in straw or wood chip. I get a lot of weeds (mostly crab grass and goosefoot), but that's just kind of how it is.
I have another herbicide which targets only grasses, and I use that here and there to try to control crab grass, but not for food plots.