“No Mow May“ Won't Fix Our Biodiversity Problems | Hacker News Reader

“No Mow May“ Won't Fix Our Biodiversity Problems

motherjones.com

26 pointsstareatgoats60 comments

Reduce the amount of lawn you have. Replant with whatever is native to your area. At least half of our land is native meadow that we mow once in August and again just before Winter.

Haul off the mowings, and never fertilize. If you are starting from scratch, the land may take a few years to reach a balance.

Why not compost the mowings? Or use it as mulch to help reduce water evaporation?

You need to get it off the grass, as wildflowers do better and grass worse in less fertile ground. You can compost snd yse elsewhere.

Not if you live in an HOA. When I had a house, you couldn't change your lawn to anything but grass or let it die or go wild, and where I lived, during the summer two weeks of not mowing was almost beyond what a riding mower could tackle, the grass would be 6 inches high or more. At least my lawn was watered from an aquifer well that was still close to the surface after nearly 40 years.

Sold the house and now live in an apartment with barely any grass (but trees and plants).

I do this - I mow half and have given the rest to native plants.

Benefits:

- My lawn is prettier (native wildflowers are really nice)

- Deeper roots around my house has slowed/stopped the basement water that the previous owners had to deal with

- Biodiversity is nice, we get lots of animals that neighbors don’t get

Things I thought would be problems that aren’t:

- Kids don’t have as much space to run in the yard. We go to the park more and there are other kids there, so on the whole they’ve made more friends than if they just stayed in our yard.

- Biodiversity increases the number of critters trying to get into the house. The native plants are more attractive to the ecosystem than my house is, and now there’s enough predators of the bugs in the garden that there are less bugs to try and get into the house.

Problems:

- I have to clear brush 1x/2x a year to remove flammable material

I wish localities would issue the same kind of citations for invasive species as they do for an uncut, weedy lawn --- that might start to be a fix, but would require education, something we seem to be short on right now.

Admitting that I know a fair number of older women who take care of their yards... If you called 'em "Dandelion Laws", limited them to invasives that easily spread to neighbors' yards and were a PITA for those neighbors to keep under control, and cultivated a group of older ladies who were willing to show up and complain loudly at the occasional City Council meeting - then it might be surprisingly easy to do. At least in upscale and wanna-be-upscale areas.

I would note that dandelions are not considered invasive in most of the United States. They're non-invasive exotics instead. Considered beneficial actually.

I see native bumblebees feeding on a lot of what busybodies would label as weeds and try to regulate away. This approach would just be asking for heavy use of pesticides to maintain monoculture grass.

As an owner of and neighbor to many of the standard protagonist monoculture lawns being discussed here, I would also caution against this concept due to how it will be managed; copious amounts of pesticides more than is already being used is what will happen. I try to handle weeds by mowing frequently enough they never get to maturity and so my neighbors are sending dandelions into my yard, I don’t fight it, I just make sure they never get tall enough to bloom or cast seeds from my area. They’re so hard to keep away, I would have to put down full coverage pesticide if I was trying to fight their very existence on my property.

My neighbors aren’t even that neglectful. Yet you see it ever. If I had to guess the largest producer of dandelion diaspora are schools and parks and some of the medians in my city along with random patches of “low maintenance”/ vacant land. It’s also windy where I live so it just travels far.

I've managed to remove dandelions from of my yard by mechanically digging them up by the roots (also did the same to buckhorn --- next on the schedule is broadleaf plantain) after one year where I just tore off each plant at the surface and then put a piece of rock salt on the opening of the root.

My daughter was quite put out when there was a contest in her biology class for bringing in the longest dandelion stem.

I prefer to turn dandelions into salad & wine

When I was much younger and times were quite difficult for me, I just about lived on dandelion salad for the better part of a year (and only escaped getting poisoned by an herbicide because I had a habit of blanching the plants I was planning on eating by putting a rock on top of them the day before).

My family likes to pick a big bowl full of yellow dandelions and then make a dandelion-rhubarb pie. We make it a point to do it at least once a year as a kind of seasonal tradition.

What's wrong with dandelions? I like them and so do the pollinators.

Might be something regional. But where I live it’s just a prevalent weed that most homeowners want to kill off. I’ve never eaten it like some of the other comments. Never heard of anyone else around here eating it either.

The lack of laws around this right now are so damaging. A negligent homeowner can unknowingly be growing a nursery of invasive plants that are putting out tens of thousands of seeds to the surrounding area every year, not to mention direct spreading by tubers and creeping vines into neighboring properties. As a result, all neighbors of that property have to pay an endless recurring maintenance cost to prevent invasives taking hold in their yards.

Without some kind of enforcement, there's little hope of getting invasive species populations under control, because it only takes one incompetent and/or negligent property owner to make the issue way harder for everyone else.

One of the things I appreciate greatly about living in a Finnish "concrete suburb" (a decades old, concrete-walled apartment complex) is that actual nature is always a 5 minute walk away in every direction. I can walk from my living room to deep in the quiet of the forest faster than I can listen to the median Dream Theater song.

I have to say I like this much better than lawns, or frankly having a yard at all, although actually owning a patch of forest someday would be the ideal.

Building up instead of out preserves nature (and vital farmland).

This seems a bit like nuance trolling[0] to me. The upshot of articles like this is essentially "so we should stick with the status quo" whether it says that outright or not.

0: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-201-the-conservat...

> Lawns represent one of the largest, fastest growing landscapes in the US. These ecosystems—water-hungry, energy-intensive monocultures…

That’s the issue.

I recently planted a new lawn in the UK and last year seeded it with some small-leaved clover. This year I bought some vetch seeds, I might add some native daisy seed next year.

The result is a nice lawn that is still nice to sit on or play some games, but has attractive flowers.

I recently moved into a new home with a lawn that seems to have been semi-recently laid. I want to add some daisy's as I think they're pretty in a lawn. I didn't think of clover though, so wanted to ask, how prolific is it? The grass is taking some work to get thickened up, so I don't want to make it harder to keep some grass, but clover would probably help it get there.

> Still, the institute’s research has some potentially useful findings. Jackson’s research on seeding milkweed (the host plant for monarch caterpillars) in road ditches with existing vegetation showed abysmal results without applying herbicides, such as Roundup, prior to planting. “You get precisely no plants,” Jackson said. “You use Roundup once, you get a few more, and, if you round it up a couple of times, you get a few more.”

Yeah right. People are doing no dig gardening now by simply putting a layer of cardboard over grass or whatever below you want to get rid off, and placing a layer of compost on top and guess what it works fairly well.

But sure, we need Roundup for everything so spray it liberally for "nature". And it's "science" based. Horrific.

Note that she was talking about roadside plantings. As in along the ditches next to highways.

There’s a scale problem.

I’m not saying roundup is the way, but you can’t scale up cardboard to that level. For one thing, most at home gardeners are recycling their pile of Amazon boxes. For the highway system, you’d need to start manufacturing cardboard for that purpose, which would have its own consequences.

Personally, I’m a fan of using those roadsides to do grazing. Intensive grazing. It has its own downsides, but using an animal system to manage a plant system can be very effective. See also the bison on the plains.

Ed: fixed missing sentence break.

You could mow the roadside really low, then till it and immediately put down seeds. Machinery would let that scale up more.

That's like saying we can't build Empire State Building because techniques to build dog houses don't scale. Sure you need different methods to scale, but if something should be a future epitaph on societies worldwide it should be that we messed everything up because it was the easiest thing to do. I mentioned the cardboard method simply because it's the most primitive thing people do and it still works.

Sorry for the offtopicness, but please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40418629 regarding a flamewar that happened over a week ago. It's important that this not happen again.

You're right. I wondered at one point why we didn't get banned, or if we did but didn't notice. I don't know, I like to discuss things, and I'm not sure what's the exact point where I should've called it quits, although it's clear the discussion got derailed somewhere and became pointless. Maybe you should ban me, and I mean this in a completely non combative way - if I can't figure out when to stop, maybe I should spend my time somewhere else. Or spend my time on something else - that the whole thing didn't bring anything is at least one thing that's obvious.

> Over the course of the one-month study, unmowed plots of Kentucky bluegrass did not substantially support more flowers compared to plots mowed at two-and-a-half inches.

Who mows at 2.5 inches though?

Me. Set blade to highest & leave a few patches. Avoids dead grass in Summer even without watering lawn

Granted, I wouldn't mow if it wasn't for letters city sends me if weeds grow over 18cm tall (they wouldn't define what a weed was for me)

I grew up in Kentucky and our house had a lawn which we never fertilized, never seeded, and never watered. We cut it to about 4 inches high.

This is the recommended height for bluegrass.

What will fix our biodiversity problems are the 3 Ps: powerdown, permaculture, and population control. A much smaller human population living at preindustrial levels, with strong taboos against building too large or becoming too advanced.

And no, mass murder is not necessary for the needed population reduction. It's simply a matter of incentivizing not having children at a global scale. The best time to do this was a few generations ago; the second best time is now.

Hey man as someone who appreciates modern medicine this sucks. You can try to empty out the cities though!

People don't care about it. If they did we wouldn't have stuff like this:

>In November 2023, glyphosate received 10 year renewed authorization for use in the EU

...and that's the EU, which usually plays it safer than other regions

I think that’s because glyphosate is used agriculturally not because people were mad about weed control for their lawns.

Glyphosate is relatively safe.

https://youtu.be/ovKw6YjqSfM?si=VhpoejVpF-GIon0s

Not if you're a bee

It should be in November and be called “No Mowvember”.

maybe for the Southern hemisphere..

This is ridiculous. Even if it isn't useful, what is the harm? Is there some political thing going on?

Last thing I want in my yard is biodiversity.

I'm surprised that is even a thing.

You think "I feel a square of grass is boring" is an unusual opinion for people to have?

It’s probably atypical of at least suburban US homeowner opinion and perhaps town/HOA bylaws.

Personally I keep a fairly small lawn and let the fields grow though they need to be knocked down once a year or so by tractor so they’re not totally out of control. Things like wildflower lawns and meadows are certainly a thing even if they’re not common. Many highway departments have also started putting wildflowers in medians.

In fact, yes. Much in the same way that a house is "boring" in comparison to a mud hut.

Are these people also living in mud huts for increased biodiversity? I would be surprised that people are alright with deadly nature crawling, flying and nesting next to where they sleep.

That’s a whole new perspective for me, thank you for sharing your point of view. I am much more scared of people, cars, and buildings than anything in nature. Nature is where I go to recover, and I’d want as much of it as possible in my yard. Some of it will inevitably make it indoors too, and that might not be ideal, but ohwell, it’s a whole lot better for me to have a bee in my house than constantly feel stressed by traffic and the artificality of my daily life.

And mud huts sounds pretty cool, if I get to deck it out like a hobbit hole.

By all means, I like nature. I think it is important to preserve it.

But I also see it as an uncaring force. A swarm of wasps makes no moral judgment if they attack me. A feral wolf is not giving it much philosophical thought if it decides I am dinner. A water parasite is just following the cycle of life when it lodges itself in my body.

I live in the countryside because I prefer living somewhat closer to nature than in concrete hellscapes. But I still treat it as a potential danger. With respect and at distance.

And I definitely would not live in a mud hut, unless it was my last resort.

I love the biodiversity I manage to get in my city garden, and never felt any danger whatsoever. My kids and I do a game where we get points for pointing out insects we haven't seen before.

One year we had a hornet nest in a tree, but we left them alone and they us.

There are wolves in the region now, but not in cities and they avoid humans.

I never felt any danger whatsoever from wildlife.

Of course it may be somewhat different where you are.

How exactly do you go from dandelions and clover vs. a golf course lawn, to swarms of wasps, a feral (as in domesticated then reintroduced?) wolf, water parasites and living in a mud hut?

Why are we pretending that biodiversity in nature is just the nice part?

At what scale do you want it? Your neighborhood? Town? State? Continent? Planet?

My understanding is that it is the kind of thing that needs to be supported from the bottom up.

Nature preservation should come top to bottom in the form of regulation

Bottom up doesn't work and doesn't scale.

I probably prefer a clear separation of nature and non-nature, with my home/backyard being the latter one, but having actual nature within a walking distance - which requires the non-nature parts to be dense, not sprawling wide.

Your NIMBYism sounds like the typical response to diversity, bio or otherwise. Try replacing "nature" with some other terms; it's not a flattering statement.

Parent is down voted but mostly right. Thousands of plant species are invasive and even dangerous for house foundation: japanese knotweed, running bamboo, kudzu, mare's tail. They're almost impossible to get rid of. Even unchecked wisteria can lift foundations and crack a house's walls. Animals can be even worse: carpet beetles coming from disturbed bird nests can easily infest your wardrobe, same for the many species of clothes moths. It's very hard to get rid of them without ripping up your carpet and putting all your stuff into sealed bags for years. Wasps and bees are minor threats, but they can still be a nuisance if they decide to nest in your wall, or in your chimney, or in your loft. Biodiversity is good until you keep an eye on it. If left to itself, it almost always tends to do damage.

Your statement isn't really about biodiversity, unless your solution to all potentially problem species is "eliminate them". Everything you mention is solved by building appropriately, building well and maintenance. Water drainage, grading and envelope solves the vast majority of the problems you mention and the far more common & mundane ones, and the irony is that a bio-diverse yard handles the dynamic changes far better than a perfectly manicured lawn.

Japanese knotweed, to make an example, is not solved by drainage or building appropriately. If you get it, you have to call a specialist for a 4 year treatment and you have to wait 8 years to be free of it until you can legally avoid to disclose it when you sell, at least in UK. I'm not advocating for manicured lawn, I'm saying that biodiversity for the sake of biodiversity is dangerous.

It's also a rare problem, so not really a reason to screw over biodiversity in general.

We don't ban restaurants just because sometimes someone gets food poisoning. We just take action when a specific restaurant isn't able or willing to follow food safety rules.

Lawns are deserts, they support very little ecologically. Fewer insects means fewer pollinators, fewer birds, fewer frogs and lizards, fewer bats, which in turn means fewer raptors and other key predators.

They also take a heavy chemical, water, time, and fuel load to maintain. Especially in arid areas, where turf grasses need lots of support.

Who wants to live in a sterile landscape? I'd much rather see bumblebees, ladybugs, butterflies, mantises, flowers of all types, beetles, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and bats hanging out nearby.

The patch of lawn I maintain around the house partly for fire break reasons gets mowed every 2 weeks. That’s it. The bulk of my property is fields.

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