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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

Depends where you live. In the midwest you might legitimately need to mow 3x a week and you might have a huge lot. If you say screw it and let it go to knee high weeds, city might show up and cut your grass and fine you for it.

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3x/week is wild. I'd get a different type of grass at that point.

Just what happens with the rain load during the peak growing season. Later in the summer it will switch to a more drought condition though and there won't be so frequent mowing. But the peak parts, yeah, not much I don't think you can do via strain selection given the quantities of rainfall.

Fescue grasses mostly flop over rather than stand tall.

Most lawns in North America are Kentucky Blue or ryegrass which are what produce the eyesore.

But lawns in general are a pestilence.

Go ahead and try and mow that after its flopped over. Mower is going to choke with how much grass you are putting into it. You may need to weed wack it down and rake or blow it out before you can mow.

Verdant lawn pride is a scam. An avoidable waste of time, water and maintenance dollars that seduces even desert dwellers

The weeds are the hard part.

But as far as when I owned my own home, cutting the grass was just part of my routine and at least guaranteed some physical activity instead of working all day during covid.

“Mow & snow” will eat most of your life, if you let it.

I live in the midwest and there never has been a time where any lawn I owned, nor was owned by anyone that I know, needed mowing 3x a week. You might like to do it to keep a perfectly manicured lawn, but it definitely isn't needed.

How much rainfall you get in the summer months? That is probably why. I do not kid with the 3x a week. If you don't keep up the grass gets too long and chokes the mower.

Apparently robotic lawnmowers work pretty well these days, though it sounds like only one might not keep up if the lawn needs regular mowing that often.

You can never fully automate lawn work because a big time sink is actually stick pickup ahead of the mowing. Also, every property is loaded with edge cases.

This is true! But apparently the whatever percent that can be automated has crossed the line and become "worth it" for some.

It's also worth noting that owners have changed their behavior to favor their robot vacuums, though I have not read any similar examples for robot lawnmowers yet.

Buy a house without grass :)

How would you keep it from filling up with weeds in any reasonably grass-friendly climate?

I just pay someone $50/week to mow my lawn and I pay zero attention to it. If we have a mini-drought and the grass turns brown, oh well.

Kill your lawn and let the native plants take over.

I'd rather not get a bunch of ticks while walking to my door.

If you kill the lawn, won't the invasive plants take over?

Even if they were going to, you could just seed it with some native, low-growing "groundcover": clovers, fescues, whatever is in your area.

Actually illegal in a lot of the midwest I'm not even kidding.

And having a grass lawn is actually quite expensive (water) and borderline illegal/immoral (water) in the American Southwest. Having a grass lawn is only mandatory in a few gated communities with out-of-touch HOAs. We’ve gotten used to the xeriscaped look…blends well with the brown stucco/adobe exteriors. When you don’t have much green, it becomes a (cheap) accent color (e.g. shrubs, evergreen trees) rather an expensive-to-maintain background color (e.g. lawns).

Nah, I live in the midwest, even people that have lawn services have them come weekly or even every 10 days.

That would be fine in late summer but in growing season chances are you aren't noticing the increased mowing frequency. Most of it happens when you are probably working 9-5 after all.

I work from home, I'm well aware of when my neighbors get their lawns mowed, and mine perpetually looks unmowed since I mow on the weekends and they have lawn services that come on weekdays.

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