Many natural locations near me are not pleasant for humans. Too many bugs (including ticks) and the underbrush is impassable.
The areas that are more pleasant might be hard to replicate in a small space. You can't create a forest microclimate in a 1/4 acre yard.
In fact, an isolated 1/4 acre yard is an unnatural habitat in a lot of ways. The easiest thing to manage there other than a lawn is usually a crop of 8ft high weeds.
The article is not recommending people don't mow the lawn. It's not even saying to get rid of grass. Just to plant native plants, minimize herbicides/fertilizers and watering.
No one here is advocating untamed wilderness over a green sheet of lawn. You don't have to replicate impenetrable underbrush in your backyard. You could however focus on natural species and a broader variety
It takes some work upfront to convert a lawn to a miniforest but it can be done.
Just imagine how wonderful suburbia could be if this was the norm and not the exception.
Edit: here's that same yard in early spring, where the fact that it's a normal suburban yard is more visible: https://youtu.be/CdthuPbn2uo . It's incredible how lush it is in the summer, you'd think it was miles away from civilization.
That is a good number of trees in a backyard. But it's hardly a microclimate. I imagine that I get more cooling from the (considerably larger) trees in my backyard. And it's nothing like the several degrees of cooling you get in a forest.
Further, I don't see what those trees have to do with the article's advice about native plants.
Surburbia might well be wonderful if that sort of backyard were the norm -- if we ditched the whole 19th and 20th century flight from urban agriculture -- I wouldn't mind being able to have a pig or a goat in the backyard, myself. But this article doesn't seem to have anything to do with that topic.
What a terribly cynical thing to say. A yard whose flora aligns with the local ecosystem will be much more hardy and just as beautiful than a sterile lawn and some flowers that will die within the season.
For some pictures in California for example, see the California native plant society [0]. After visiting a native plant garden in SoCal I can't help but find the idea of a grass lawn absurd.
> After visiting a native plant garden in SoCal I can't help but find the idea of a grass lawn absurd.
Aesthetically, you may be right. But yards are owned by and large by people with families. They have an important function to fulfill which is ruined by filling the space with plants.
" But yards are owned by and large by people with families. They have an important function to fulfill which is ruined by filling the space with plants."
However I rarely see anybody actually on those beautiful, irrigated lawns in Southern CA. People are usually inside or in an area with tiles or concrete on the ground.
Don't know about Southern CA, but in the places I've lived, people usually play/relax in their back yards, not the front, and so are not easily visible.
What makes you think that kids/families dont like to play in a plant filled yard? My kids love areas filled with trees, plants, bees, butterflies, hummingbirds etc way more as it is lot more interactive
When I grew up, we had a few wild/forest areas, a few flower areas, and the rest we mowed and didn't spray.
There was grass in the mowed area, but also many, many other plants and insects. It was wonderful, as was the forest.
I find pure grass lawns very bland and unnatural, and in no way superior to a trimmed lawn with whatever plants happen to be growing. And you can have wilder areas too.
Perhaps you didn't mean 100% grass lawns, but that seems to be what a lot of American lawns aim for.
You can find examples of unmowed yards that are still beautiful and functional in many desirable urban-residential areas of cities. I'm thinking particularly of Hyde Park in Austin, Somerville in the Boston metro, Capitol Hill in Denver, Burlington VT, and much of Portland OR. It's not until you hit the suburbs where HOAs have dug in their claws and stand in the way of "cookie-cutter" ever becoming anything but.
In Colorado, check out the Colorado Native Plant Society or the Colorado Cactus & Succulent Society. Denver Botanic Gardens is also wonderful with outreach and education efforts, but they're not strictly focused on native plants (as far as I know).
To add to your list, the SeaTac area has a lot of amazingly gorgeous yards, and I'd say the majority of them are not your standard grassy yard.
Maybe it's because enough people have realized how nice their yard could be, maybe it's small spaces and hills, or maybe it's how difficult and irresponsible it would be to try to keep the grass green in the summer. Either way, I freaking love a lot of the landscaping around here, and have been extra-excited by yards massively overgrown with wildflowers, etc.
Good luck with this in your typical HOA, where they forbid you to do any kind of natural landscaping, and insist on things like green grass in the middle of the desert.
(Of course, the answer here is to make sure you don't buy a house with an HOA.)
Funny aside, a friend of mine lives in a neighborhood with a HOA. One of the people in it kept making so much trouble (annoying others to do this or that) that they voted to kick him out of the HOA. The guy actually threatened to sue the HOA to be let back in! LOL, "wait, you want to pay dues and be subject to HOA rules?"
What's strange? From his perspective, it's the same as if all of the neighbors quit the HOA and stopped following the rules that he believed in. Would you like to be freed from your national taxes and laws if it meant you had no protection against your neighbors violating those laws?
I would love to have this happen. Unfortunately, many HOAs have managed to get embedded in home titles, and they have the ability to put a lien on your house if they decide they're entitled to something.
I can't speak for all HOAs but was on the board of mine (specifically to work on getting out of a neighborhood media agreement). The only time we did the lien process was after they had went above an arbitrary $1500 deficit in HOA dues and there was no special circumstances in place that they had done so (there was one couple whose daughter was in and out of the hospital for a year, so we had the property manager work with them after the medical bills settled down on a reduced rate until they could get caught back up).
The HOA dues at the time were about $115 (the previously mentioned media agreement and neighborhood package was a major amount of it) so it wasn't because a month was missed (no one enjoyed invoking the lien process anyway as it incurs cost to the HOA as well). But as soon as the lien happens (after three letters saying the next step is lien), those who became delinquent started paying HOA dues (at least temporarily).
Now that we got out of the agreement and were able to get the HOA dues down to $25 (common area maintenance and insurance), I got off the board. I will say I've heard of some outright predatory HOAs that seemingly have it out for some homeowners, but liens as far as I'm aware are (second to) last resorts when you can't engage a homeowner to come into compliance. I hated paying for the media package too (internet and TV was garbage with them the last couple of years), but at the end of the day, the builder instituted that before any of us came into the neighborhood and all of those agreements were known to us before moving in so as trash as it is, we had to pay it.
My point was that there's typically no way to get out of an HOA. Yes, I'm sure that better-behaved HOAs take many steps to "engage a homeowner to come into compliance" before escalating further, but that doesn't in any way change the original point.
It's not uncommon for all the available homes within a broad area (e.g. all those within walking distance of an employer) to have an HOA, making "just don't get a house with an HOA" not a viable option.
The best way to get out of an HOA is through a property tax auction. The government usually gets property free and clear of all obligations, and sells it in that state.
It's difficult and risky to push your property into a tax auction just to clear the HOA though. :)
Oh man, the media agreement had us looking at every napalm earth option with things like "if we disbanded the HOA, then what?" (because the language says "Community Name and successors," it'd have been a net loss to disband as anything we did to attempt to get out was as a group vs as individuals including the liability protections that a LLC can provide vs various individuals). It's kind of crazy how ingrained it has become as a concept.
In our town, supposedly (second hand info so grain of salt), one of the neighborhoods that sprung up without a HOA was pretty bad from the onset with poor maintenance on various houses (to the point of cardboard over broken glass windows) and the town somehow passed a requirement that all new developments belong to a HOA. Not sure the veracity of that (though I can confirm the spottiness of the neighborhood in question because they're adjacent from ours), but unfortunately it seems things are going more towards everything HOA route (outside of maybe buy a bunch of land on the outskirts of town and build a house. Which good luck with high speed internet and the like unless you're willing to pay to get them to install in your area).
I see pros and cons to HOAs, though even while the one I'm in isn't bad, I still am not a fan of them generally.
> "wait, you want to pay dues and be subject to HOA rules?"
I live in a town with a bylaw which says if you have a shared driveway, you're required to have an HOA. So, my deed and my neighbors' deeds all have an HOA built into them. It doesn't do anything, it isn't funded, but it exists on paper. When we were discussing one year the snow plowing of the shared driveway, I suggested perhaps we could have the HOA buy a truck and a plow and we could share it. My neighbors just looked at me sideways and said, "You actually want to bring an HOA to life?" I said, "yeah, good point," and that was the end of that.
ymmv, but most HOAs I have ever been a part of restrict their authoritarian gaze to the front lawn only, I've always been free to do whatever to the (usually much larger) back yard.
And, when I lived in California, the HOA was pretty amenable to the xeriscaping required by town ordinance, but that is probably pretty variable by location.
My HOA has a weird rule where the lawn rules do apply to the front only, but also mandate a maximum 4ft fence height in back so you can't have privacy and so can't put anything your neighbors don't like in the back.
That would harm my neighbors' property values, in their estimation.
It's very hard to change major rules because they require majority votes but a quorum is usually impossible because most people don't care enough to change the status quo.
If you don't own a house there yet, you can't join the board. So you're proposing that I buy a house with HOA rules that I abhor, and then try to get the rules changed from within.
It doesn't have to, lots of people have hacked at the problem of living sustainably and comfortably in desert climes. HOAs tend to be a bit friendlier out west for that sort of thing, and building codes are getting more accommodating.
The busybodies on HOAs are going to make sure that their local governments never get any such laws passed. It's the same reason they can't build any housing in SanFran.
My (perhaps atypical) HOA's official answer, when I asked what I could not plant in my yard was, "nothing artificial". Nothing was expressly prohibited in the bylaws, which I found odd and was what prompted my question. Of course, there were some state and local regulations, but those are ubiquitous.
It's highly interesting to consider that none of your examples are actually originally native to the areas I suspect you're referring to. Dandilions, for example, come from Europe IIRC. Mesquite and cactus were moved in and became dominant with cattle trade. Thistles refer to many things, but almost certainly the weed you refer to is not native.
As the original commentator was pointing out 'grow wild' and 'native' are not synonyms. Part of the fun of this - and it is fun - is learning about the actual native floral of the region and trying to make an attractive garden using those plants that will help native wildlife establish.
My parents came from Europe to USA. They are not natives here, and maybe they don't fit in. I was native born here, I grew up in the local culture, I fit in.
Saying that only "original" species count as native, how many centuries or millennia back do you draw the line?
The discussion is about native species, not native individual humans. Native species developed over thousands of years to form each particular ecosystem.
I'm not sure of you have notice, but your parents are the same species as the rest of the people around them and fit in the same ecological niche. There is, of course no wholy correct answer about 'how many centuries back you draw the line', but broadly speaking, pragmatically, it is worth planting plants that help support the rich web of ecological connections that the locality supports. The longer established the plant in the ecology, the more likely it is that some species' caterpillar will live in it, or that there will be a pollinating insect that spends on its shape of flower, or there will be a bird that will like its fibres to build a nest etc.
We flirted with unquestionably native California grasses. There's a significant fire risk. Humans are all about overcoming natural cycles, which include burning us out of here periodically, killing any of us who can't run fast enough.
Our front yard is now weed cloth and chips. Inert, it looks great, and the town no longer cites us.
I tried no mow grass. Died too. Then I seeded with California poppy, red poppies, corn flowers, honey wort and Shasta daisies. They are reseeders and bloom in sequence in my Ca 8a/8b zone. Also mint. It will take over.
Be careful with the mint, but you already know that. I have a bunch of CA poppies in my yard, which I only discovered by letting everything grow after we bought the house. Imagine my surprise and delight when the "wild carrots" turned out to be beautiful poppies! They continue to spread and make the yard a wonderful place in the spring.
There are some great youtube channels[0] on rewilding the land where you live and developing a permaculture garden. I have always found the obsession with lawns to be so strange.
I avoid those full lawn chemical treatments and my lawn has stabilized with a nice mix of grass, several types of clover, violet, ground ivy, and dandelions, among patches of other wildflowers and sedges. The colors when they bloom is beautiful. The pests I don't like seem to be minimized, and I get an amazing light show with thousands of fireflies every evening. I have to spot treat the dandelions to make sure they don't take over but for the most part it's a rewarding and aesthetically pleasing situation with little effort and reduces the amount I have to mow, and I never have to water the lawn either!
Really? I've had the opposite experience. Two pests I can't stand are mosquitos and cockroaches, and they both seem to thrive in lush, natural lawns. Whenever I mow, I notice an immediate and significant reduction in their numbers.
In climates that get rain every day, it doesn't take a lot to have a suitable pool of standing water for mosquitoes. A dead leaf curled up that holds 1 mL of water (and shaded by the taller vegetation) is sufficient as a breeding ground.
I highly recommend the book "Redesigning the American Lawn" from Yale University Press [0] for people interested in this subject matter. It offers a deep dive into economic, cultural and environmental aspects of the standard manicured lawn, which they refer to as "industry lawn". They propose the concept of a "freedom lawn" as an alternative and solution to the problems presented by the infamous lawn.
I’m surprised by the negativity of this comment. For every case of conflict there are others that can be cited of cultural change.
Lawns have some legitimate uses, entertainment and play space come to mind, but for the most part are a cultural statement.
I recommend keeping an open mind that “changing aesthetics” is the right way to go. More local biodiversity, less water use, more bee forage, insect habitat, birds, etc.
Often (but not always), just “doing nothing” is a great step forwards.
Hi all, this is very timely. We are working on building a platform that encourages lush gardening. We have expert garderns who have been studying and working with lush native gardens for years. I am actually meeting two of them today. If anyone ever needs help building a garden like the one mentioned, we are more than happy to give free guidance and also guide you on where to find cheap resources and tricks we learnt over the years. The article is very much on point and give some handy tips already.
Also if someone is interested in what we are building: we are making a pass to access lush private backyard gardens for therapy, yoga, meditation etc. Some of our most interesting customers are VAs, elderly folks, stressed out engineers etc. The underlying goal is to help gardeners earn money that they put into building more lush gardens thus storing carbon into top soil.
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Really agree with the premise here. I came to a somewhat similar conclusion (concession?) this year after spending tons of time and energy "perfecting" a couple acre yard we moved into. The kicker this year was spotting a weed growing through a crack in the concrete floor of my detached garage--no sun, very little water, and this thing was still growing!
While not mowing is nonstarter in my and essentially every other neighborhood, I've completely come to terms with the clover and random broadleaf weeds we have, they're part of the yard. Trying to get that picturesque carpet led me down a path of using questionable chemicals and spending tons of unnecessary time killing native vegetation that _wanted_ to grow and has thrived here in western PA.
I'm now consigning certain sections to wildflowers and just overseeding the rest of the yard with native grasses in the fall to naturally work up the more desirable stuff and thicken it. No more chemicals, and mowing slightly more frequently has also helped keep the dandelions down. Slowly I'll mulch other areas, especially around the trees, and try to put in some more low-maintenance landscaping like this article suggests.
In particular, clover is good for the lawn as it is nitrogen-fixing. Some clover are much better at this than others, so you might even deliberately choose a clover for your lawn.
Clover used to be a standard part of the mix for lawns (maybe as long ago as Victorian times) for this reason, it helps make the lawn self-sustaining.
To me it looks weird to have a mono-culture lawn, like you're emulating a shag carpet.
My lawn is everything but grass. Then, it's greener than my neighbours and it costs me nothing to operate (no irrigation, mowing twice per month, and that's it).
It's actually prettier with the occasional dandelion, and poppy.
I cannot for the life of me remember where I read this, but I heard that marketing is what labeled clover as bad. Clover was supposedly a fine plant to have in your yard. Herbicides couldn't (or was too expensive to) be formulated to kill clover without also killing other desirable grasses. The fix was to market clover as an undesirable weed instead.
You came very close to my understanding - herbicides that left clover and desirable grass alone were not developed - the best performing weed killers also killed clover, so clover was defined by marketing as a weed to fix that particular bug of the herbicides.
I used to really dislike it specifically because of the white flowers and how they attracted bees, but have since made an almost 180 on it. As Isamu said, it has great nitrogen-fixing benefits and I'm now trying to encourage the bees.
As a kid clover was always part of a healthy lawn. I was always told it was there to fix nitrogen. This was before people soaked lawns in weed killer though. As a kid the lawn was just naturally healthy. I don't recall us doing much other than mowing and watering it. It did get stung by bees on my feet repeatedly as a kid which was the main downside to clover but the bees were probably healthier then as well.
Along with other commenters here, I've given up on trying to have a perfect lawn. As long as it's green, it's fine with me. I'm also trying to gradually reduce the amount of property given over to lawn by a little bit each year as I expand beds of native plants. In my experience here in the Mid-Atlantic region the upkeep in terms of time between a lawn and garden bed is pretty much a 1:1 tradeoff. Occasional weeding and a one-time day spent planting annuals in the Spring is about the same as having to mow every 1.5 weeks.
My lawn definitely has it's share of crabgrass which I don't mind. But Kentucky blue grass and clover (both native) seem to do better. Which unfortunately means mowing.
Crabgrass also gets tall (it grows faster than my bermudagrass) and will die back at the first frost. In comparison, Zoysia and Bermuda will go dormant but maintain a ground cover to prevent erosion.
A horrible trend over here in Germany and Austria are stone gardens. Not the artisan Japanese style, but the supposedly-no-maintenance-dead-as-can-be-heat-traps. It's so horrible that a few towns have started to outlaw them for new-builds.
OMG, the caged rocks that have shown up all over this place the last few years! There is no reason not to have a plant yard in Germany and Austria - even if you never water, there will be plants, and at most, running a lawnmower over them twice a month will keep the neighbors from getting too mad at you.
We have a sorry-looking conventional “Rasen” (grass lawn), but I’m looking into how to turn it over to clover for happier bees and less ongoing work.
Simply make the Rasen smaller: when you do add some bushes, berries or largeish plants on the borders, make the borders two meters deep and not just half a meter. You want to use many different sized plants to get achieve visual depth and colours. If you can squeeze in a little bench or chair hidden behind waist-high plants it's even better.
i dont spray chemicals on my lawn nor do i seed/fertilize it - i just mow it really short every 1-2 weeks so it is pleasant enough for kids to play on and not get pricked by prickly weeds.
And yes, I water just enough so not to kill off the grass during dry spell.
It occurred to me that flowers are like the virtue signaling of plants. If it flowers people are apt to think it's deliberate. If it's merely green, who knows... is it the product of deliberate effort or just laziness? (Is a natural forest the product of laziness?) The orange daylily (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemerocallis_fulva) is a way to cheat this system, you can be incredibly lazy but they do technically flower.
I read a survey somewhere that modern expectations now are that if you have 25% (some places 15%) of your yard as turf your neighbors will be happy. 0% indicates you aren't "doing" something, just letting things grow.
One option not really mentioned in the article is to just let things grow, and only weed out annoying things (small trees poorly placed, things with thorns or bristles, etc). Not mentioned of course because you'll get in trouble even outside of a HOA.
I'll admit, as much as I want to be (and I think I am) tolerant, I do have a dislike of weedy tree overgrowth. A neighbor is dedicated to doing no lawn maintenance, and the result is not particularly lush or interesting, just a ground layer that's relatively bare beneath small trees and bushes that are all competing. If they avoided that, and had primarily vascular plants, I think the result would be more lush, representing a better natural landscape.
There's a kind of design challenge here that I don't know quite how to solve. Lawns are genuinely usable in a way that I appreciate. A more trendy approach is to add a bunch of hardscape or deck and then plant the rest... is that really better? Or, for instance, composting yard waste on-site helps support all the organisms that make use of that organic matter. People complain that it's also a great place for mice to nest. Which it is... and is that bad? I tend to change my mind when they try to come into the house in the fall. Overgrowth can be a hiding place and a safety concern. Of course lots of wildlife would like to hide, and so that very problem is also a feature. There's a challenge between having control and letting nature take its course... and neither is really right, and I believe good design goes beyond simple compromise.
I don't know... something I'd love to work on in my retirement.
A place that sustained itself and produced useful materials/medicines etc. without anybody's "doing anything" would have been the ideal about 500 years ago in what is now the US. And it's a permaculture ideal more recently. There seems to be a streak of the Protestant work ethic running through this. Otherwise how could doing more work be a virtue?
Well actually I thought of an answer: Lots of things that take a lot of effort are done for not much more reason than to show how much effort they take. Which in turn reflects positively (supposedly) on the person who did it, testifying to their possession of ample extra resources to do the difficult thing. But I would think that would only be truly relevant for mating purposes. Like "This guy plays guitar, whose mastery takes an intellect, skill and devotion of time and resources that would potentially be available to you and your offspring if you were to mate with him" type logic. But what does it mean in the suburban lawn belonging to a complete family?
The green lawn comes from trying to pretend you're still in England. Literally you can play golf on a random piece of land provided you mow it--the rainfall is just right for covering everything with grass.
I've considered replacing parts of my lawn with creeping or wooly thyme. I'm not certain how it will do over the winter in Eastern Pennsylvania, so it might be something I test along paths or in flower beds first.
I've decided to avoid killing the clover and broadleaf "weeds" and want to plant as much as I can to encourage honeybees to live near me.
Our lawn was sickly, but chemicals are out due to both ethics and our rescue doggo. So we just cut it at max height to keep it happy. We also inherited lots of plantings from the previous homeowners. We keep those neat with a 1 ft house buffer, but not severely cut back. We now have fireflies. :-D
I took out my lawn and planted a ton of perennials and ornamental grasses. It’s way less work than a lawn (I weed it twice a year, in the spring and in the late fall). It’s full of hummingbirds all the time. And it’s pretty.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadCouldn't find an authoritative list, but googling for "permaculture [state or city name]" will probably get you what you need.
The areas that are more pleasant might be hard to replicate in a small space. You can't create a forest microclimate in a 1/4 acre yard.
In fact, an isolated 1/4 acre yard is an unnatural habitat in a lot of ways. The easiest thing to manage there other than a lawn is usually a crop of 8ft high weeds.
Yes you can! https://youtu.be/ng-VskDFPpM
It takes some work upfront to convert a lawn to a miniforest but it can be done.
Just imagine how wonderful suburbia could be if this was the norm and not the exception.
Edit: here's that same yard in early spring, where the fact that it's a normal suburban yard is more visible: https://youtu.be/CdthuPbn2uo . It's incredible how lush it is in the summer, you'd think it was miles away from civilization.
Further, I don't see what those trees have to do with the article's advice about native plants.
Surburbia might well be wonderful if that sort of backyard were the norm -- if we ditched the whole 19th and 20th century flight from urban agriculture -- I wouldn't mind being able to have a pig or a goat in the backyard, myself. But this article doesn't seem to have anything to do with that topic.
For some pictures in California for example, see the California native plant society [0]. After visiting a native plant garden in SoCal I can't help but find the idea of a grass lawn absurd.
[0] https://www.cnps.org/gardening
Aesthetically, you may be right. But yards are owned by and large by people with families. They have an important function to fulfill which is ruined by filling the space with plants.
However I rarely see anybody actually on those beautiful, irrigated lawns in Southern CA. People are usually inside or in an area with tiles or concrete on the ground.
There was grass in the mowed area, but also many, many other plants and insects. It was wonderful, as was the forest.
I find pure grass lawns very bland and unnatural, and in no way superior to a trimmed lawn with whatever plants happen to be growing. And you can have wilder areas too.
Perhaps you didn't mean 100% grass lawns, but that seems to be what a lot of American lawns aim for.
Beautiful No-Mow Yards: 50 Amazing Lawn Alternatives https://www.amazon.com/dp/1604692383/
Lawn Gone!: Low-Maintenance, Sustainable, Attractive Alternatives for Your Yard https://www.amazon.com/dp/1607743140/
In Colorado, check out the Colorado Native Plant Society or the Colorado Cactus & Succulent Society. Denver Botanic Gardens is also wonderful with outreach and education efforts, but they're not strictly focused on native plants (as far as I know).
Maybe it's because enough people have realized how nice their yard could be, maybe it's small spaces and hills, or maybe it's how difficult and irresponsible it would be to try to keep the grass green in the summer. Either way, I freaking love a lot of the landscaping around here, and have been extra-excited by yards massively overgrown with wildflowers, etc.
Convincing of what?
(Of course, the answer here is to make sure you don't buy a house with an HOA.)
Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction.
I would love to have this happen. Unfortunately, many HOAs have managed to get embedded in home titles, and they have the ability to put a lien on your house if they decide they're entitled to something.
The HOA dues at the time were about $115 (the previously mentioned media agreement and neighborhood package was a major amount of it) so it wasn't because a month was missed (no one enjoyed invoking the lien process anyway as it incurs cost to the HOA as well). But as soon as the lien happens (after three letters saying the next step is lien), those who became delinquent started paying HOA dues (at least temporarily).
Now that we got out of the agreement and were able to get the HOA dues down to $25 (common area maintenance and insurance), I got off the board. I will say I've heard of some outright predatory HOAs that seemingly have it out for some homeowners, but liens as far as I'm aware are (second to) last resorts when you can't engage a homeowner to come into compliance. I hated paying for the media package too (internet and TV was garbage with them the last couple of years), but at the end of the day, the builder instituted that before any of us came into the neighborhood and all of those agreements were known to us before moving in so as trash as it is, we had to pay it.
It's not uncommon for all the available homes within a broad area (e.g. all those within walking distance of an employer) to have an HOA, making "just don't get a house with an HOA" not a viable option.
I'd love to have a "buyout" option.
It's difficult and risky to push your property into a tax auction just to clear the HOA though. :)
In our town, supposedly (second hand info so grain of salt), one of the neighborhoods that sprung up without a HOA was pretty bad from the onset with poor maintenance on various houses (to the point of cardboard over broken glass windows) and the town somehow passed a requirement that all new developments belong to a HOA. Not sure the veracity of that (though I can confirm the spottiness of the neighborhood in question because they're adjacent from ours), but unfortunately it seems things are going more towards everything HOA route (outside of maybe buy a bunch of land on the outskirts of town and build a house. Which good luck with high speed internet and the like unless you're willing to pay to get them to install in your area).
I see pros and cons to HOAs, though even while the one I'm in isn't bad, I still am not a fan of them generally.
I live in a town with a bylaw which says if you have a shared driveway, you're required to have an HOA. So, my deed and my neighbors' deeds all have an HOA built into them. It doesn't do anything, it isn't funded, but it exists on paper. When we were discussing one year the snow plowing of the shared driveway, I suggested perhaps we could have the HOA buy a truck and a plow and we could share it. My neighbors just looked at me sideways and said, "You actually want to bring an HOA to life?" I said, "yeah, good point," and that was the end of that.
And, when I lived in California, the HOA was pretty amenable to the xeriscaping required by town ordinance, but that is probably pretty variable by location.
My suggestion: next year plant rows of sunflowers or corn just behind the fence line. They'll grow as tall as an elephant's eye.
It's very hard to change major rules because they require majority votes but a quorum is usually impossible because most people don't care enough to change the status quo.
This is not a smart strategy.
It requires an absurd amount of resources to keep you living comfortably when you could just choose a more reasonable climate.
Or possibly introduce local laws that specifically prohibit HOAs from introducing rules that are detrimental to the environment.
Thistle, mesquite, dandelion, and cactus don't really sit well with home-owners associations.
Saying that only "original" species count as native, how many centuries or millennia back do you draw the line?
These are things worth nurturing.
Our front yard is now weed cloth and chips. Inert, it looks great, and the town no longer cites us.
[0] e.g. https://www.youtube.com/user/BealtaineCottage
Really? I've had the opposite experience. Two pests I can't stand are mosquitos and cockroaches, and they both seem to thrive in lush, natural lawns. Whenever I mow, I notice an immediate and significant reduction in their numbers.
[0] https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300086942/redesigning-am...
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-07-11/single-mothe...
Contrast with Europe, where even in capitals you can have lawns so over-grown that you can't see the house behind them anymore. Nobody gives a fuck.
Lawns have some legitimate uses, entertainment and play space come to mind, but for the most part are a cultural statement.
I recommend keeping an open mind that “changing aesthetics” is the right way to go. More local biodiversity, less water use, more bee forage, insect habitat, birds, etc.
Often (but not always), just “doing nothing” is a great step forwards.
https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/why-mow-the-case-...
Also if someone is interested in what we are building: we are making a pass to access lush private backyard gardens for therapy, yoga, meditation etc. Some of our most interesting customers are VAs, elderly folks, stressed out engineers etc. The underlying goal is to help gardeners earn money that they put into building more lush gardens thus storing carbon into top soil.
While not mowing is nonstarter in my and essentially every other neighborhood, I've completely come to terms with the clover and random broadleaf weeds we have, they're part of the yard. Trying to get that picturesque carpet led me down a path of using questionable chemicals and spending tons of unnecessary time killing native vegetation that _wanted_ to grow and has thrived here in western PA.
I'm now consigning certain sections to wildflowers and just overseeding the rest of the yard with native grasses in the fall to naturally work up the more desirable stuff and thicken it. No more chemicals, and mowing slightly more frequently has also helped keep the dandelions down. Slowly I'll mulch other areas, especially around the trees, and try to put in some more low-maintenance landscaping like this article suggests.
In particular, clover is good for the lawn as it is nitrogen-fixing. Some clover are much better at this than others, so you might even deliberately choose a clover for your lawn.
Clover used to be a standard part of the mix for lawns (maybe as long ago as Victorian times) for this reason, it helps make the lawn self-sustaining.
To me it looks weird to have a mono-culture lawn, like you're emulating a shag carpet.
It's actually prettier with the occasional dandelion, and poppy.
Bonafides: 20 year homeowner with neighbors who have come to accept I'm not going to waste every weekend on yard care
Done poorly and it will look like a ghetto trash pile. Done well (it's non-trivial), it could look great!
Show us some actual examples of these yards!
Here's an instagram of someone who collects photos of that type of garden https://www.instagram.com/gaerten_des_grauens/
We have a sorry-looking conventional “Rasen” (grass lawn), but I’m looking into how to turn it over to clover for happier bees and less ongoing work.
Simply make the Rasen smaller: when you do add some bushes, berries or largeish plants on the borders, make the borders two meters deep and not just half a meter. You want to use many different sized plants to get achieve visual depth and colours. If you can squeeze in a little bench or chair hidden behind waist-high plants it's even better.
And yes, I water just enough so not to kill off the grass during dry spell.
I read a survey somewhere that modern expectations now are that if you have 25% (some places 15%) of your yard as turf your neighbors will be happy. 0% indicates you aren't "doing" something, just letting things grow.
One option not really mentioned in the article is to just let things grow, and only weed out annoying things (small trees poorly placed, things with thorns or bristles, etc). Not mentioned of course because you'll get in trouble even outside of a HOA.
I'll admit, as much as I want to be (and I think I am) tolerant, I do have a dislike of weedy tree overgrowth. A neighbor is dedicated to doing no lawn maintenance, and the result is not particularly lush or interesting, just a ground layer that's relatively bare beneath small trees and bushes that are all competing. If they avoided that, and had primarily vascular plants, I think the result would be more lush, representing a better natural landscape.
There's a kind of design challenge here that I don't know quite how to solve. Lawns are genuinely usable in a way that I appreciate. A more trendy approach is to add a bunch of hardscape or deck and then plant the rest... is that really better? Or, for instance, composting yard waste on-site helps support all the organisms that make use of that organic matter. People complain that it's also a great place for mice to nest. Which it is... and is that bad? I tend to change my mind when they try to come into the house in the fall. Overgrowth can be a hiding place and a safety concern. Of course lots of wildlife would like to hide, and so that very problem is also a feature. There's a challenge between having control and letting nature take its course... and neither is really right, and I believe good design goes beyond simple compromise.
I don't know... something I'd love to work on in my retirement.
Well actually I thought of an answer: Lots of things that take a lot of effort are done for not much more reason than to show how much effort they take. Which in turn reflects positively (supposedly) on the person who did it, testifying to their possession of ample extra resources to do the difficult thing. But I would think that would only be truly relevant for mating purposes. Like "This guy plays guitar, whose mastery takes an intellect, skill and devotion of time and resources that would potentially be available to you and your offspring if you were to mate with him" type logic. But what does it mean in the suburban lawn belonging to a complete family?
I've decided to avoid killing the clover and broadleaf "weeds" and want to plant as much as I can to encourage honeybees to live near me.