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Comment by bradley13 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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).

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.

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