They’re saying people don’t follow their political labels when it comes to building codes. Progressive environmentalists might advocate grass over density. There was a recent article about conservatives freaking out about a proposal to repeal a regulation prohibiting duplexes. It got framed as an attack on single family homes and our lifestyle.
But, we’re all stuck with this until we unlock Intellectual Integrity off the SMAC tech tree.
Setback laws are usually about not building a structure too close to a lot line. On the front, a minimal setback keeps the street from becoming a canyon. Larger setbacks are more of a look and feel thing for a neighborhood. Front setbacks may also be governed by adjacent houses to encourage all the fronts to line up. It’s tidier that way.
setbacks are about reducing FAR so people need to buy a lot more land than they need to build a home to live in. It helps keep property values high and land as a scarce resource.
Don't you have to seek municipality approval for structures? At least where I'm from we have to seek approval from the municipality to build anything bigger than a certain size on our own land. Anything that is close to a public street or neighbor also have to be approved.
When you say seek approval, in the US at least there is 'by right' zoning. Meaning that anything can be built by right as long as it follows certain rules. The approval is generally not an approval so much as a check to make sure it is following the rules. Anything not in the rules usually has to go through a special approval of a planning commission and neighbors may need to ok it.
Is a street canyon a bad thing? I don't think so. Perhaps if the street is only for cars,
but many of the most treasured streets are 'street canyons'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shambles for an example
Old towns in southern Europe (Spain, Italy) were deliberately built so that streets become "canyons" - they are very narrow, and buildings are tightly packed. It helps make 100+ degrees temperatures in summer bearable.
Some bay area cities encourage replacing with native or drought tolerant plants. They give a small rebate if you convert from grass to any of the above. They also offer free courses to learn about this topic.
Here in Australia, the local council expects you to keep the nature strip, or verge, between the road and the pavement looking presentable but anything behind the front fence is your own creation.
And so the 'front lawn' is my vegie patch. Potatoes are dead easy to grow from eyes and pumpkins (winter squash) self-germinate from compost. This summer I'm experimenting with Jerusalem artichokes, which sprouted from 70¢ worth of store-bought tubers.
All you need is water and a spade - and no lawn police, I guess.
Are scientists often in a position to provide advice with holistic value? I'm usually quite skeptical of advice like this when it comes from someone who is laser focused on a specific domain.
Yeah. I'm not debating the specific case here. I generally think this is good advice. My back yard is 100 foot maples and artificial grass because normal ground cover will not grow under that canopy.
But broadly speaking, I'm skeptical of taking advice from a domain expert rather than some form of generalist who synthesizes understanding across the board.
I want to know what the civil engineer has to say. I want to hear from the urban planner, the child psychologist, the sports medicine expert, etc. My yard is used in a lot of ways.
Well, you say you're skeptical of taking advice from a domain expert, but then you list a lot of, apparently, domain experts you want to hear from.
I agree with the latter sentence - I want to hear from a lot of people with narrow expertise and different perspectives on anything important, but I probably don't care what a generalist thinks, because why should they be better at synthesizing the experts than me?
If you want to take on the cognitive load of being the generalist for everything, all the power to you!
For me I pick and choose. I pretty much leave my car and rooftop to the experts but I dabble in electrical, plumming, carpentry, landscaping, etc. Etc.
My point is, the comment saying "I pick and choose" doesn't make any sense in context, because it's referring to choosing whether to use an expert, not delegating the choice of experts to someone, i.e. a generalist. You can choose between experts all you want, and since none of them are generalists, you are still the generalist.
I think my comment was misinterpreted, but it's not clear how.
Every drought-tolerant landscape I’ve seen looks passable for about two months and becomes an overgrown mess after that. I know we need to change, but if we can’t come up with a yard people will maintain, lawns and giant driveways with a soul patch will keep winning.
I mean, lawns are obviously a dumb idea unless you're using the lawn for something like relaxing or playing games. If you're just in a conformity contest with your neighbors then you might as well have something zero-maintenance or agriculturally productive there.
It has been widely observed that humans, having adapted to life in the African savannah, have a tendency to turn everything into an idealised version of their natural habitat.
Regents Park, or your local golf course, is like a superstimulus version of the nicer parts of prehistoric Kenya. Lots of nice green grass; not too long, indicating grazing animals nearby. Trees scattered around for shade, but not too many. A bunch of clearly visible landmarks for easy navigation. Flowers, indicating... fruit maybe? I’m not sure. Either way, it’s exactly the sort of environment that an omnivorous savannah ape ought to prefer over any other.
Anyway, I like lawns because my genes tell me to like lawns.
Presumably you also live in a cave and hunt animals for your dinner. Meanwhile the rest of us have realised we can actually ignore our primal instincts that serve no beneficial purpose and use our brains to figure out something better.
Pretty much everything you find aesthetically pleasing is a primal instinct. The high-and-mighty-ness of this comment really beggars belief. I hope that somebody like yourself could confidently say you’ve never wasted your time on something frivolous like companionship or sexual needs.
Saying we like lawns because our cave-dwelling ancestors saw them as good hunting ground is fine, but to extend that to saying that's a reason why we should have them is not. We can ignore that particular primal urge if giving up lawns is good for the environment. The same goes for every other "primal instinct" - we've evolved to the point where we can make a conscious decision about what we do regardless of what our cave-dwelling ancestors might have thought.
We can, and do, rise above our evolutionary biology if it suits us. It's a good thing too, or violence and rape would be far more prevalent.
> Saying we like lawns because our cave-dwelling ancestors saw them as good hunting ground is fine, but to extend that to saying that's a reason why we should have them is not.
I don't see this claim in the comment you originally replied to. The poster gave a theory as to why people like lawns, they did not say that this means we should have them.
I don't either. That claim was made by AmericanChopper when he stated "I hope that somebody like yourself could confidently say you’ve never wasted your time on something frivolous like companionship or sexual needs." when we were talking about lawns. The "something frivolous" bit was sarcasm. He was effectively saying we need lawns in the same way we need sex - because our primitive cave brains tell us they're like the a perfect savannah. I was saying that even if that's true (which is a dubious claim) we can ignore that urge if we want to.
No, but you can consciously decide whether or not to act on finding something appealing. That's the point here - our ancient evolutionary instincts are real, but we have also evolved the ability to think rationally so we can ignore those urges if we want to. Consequently whenever someone argues "we do that because we evolved from cave people" the correct response is "but we're not cave people any more, and why are you ignoring the thousands of years of evolution that have happens since we left the caves?"
Well the simple explanation of “because I like it” is a good enough reason to have something. If you look at it analytically enough, a lot of the things we end up liking can be traced back to some primitive leftovers of our evolution as a species, and may otherwise appear to be quite irrational. You obviously can’t act on every impulse you have, so the list of irrational resource allocation decisions any particular person makes will reflect their own personal priorities. But pretending you’re somehow above this is just downright absurd. Perhaps the aesthetic pleasures of keeping a nice green lawn don’t matter very much to you personally, but your life is most certainly full of your own personal collection of frivolous and irrational decisions that you made purely for your own satisfaction.
Genghis Khan raped thousands of women because he decided that “because I like it” was good enough reason to have it. When our desires cause harm to others we must restrain them.
Hmm. Average golf course is green monoculture that is a blight on landscape and eyesight, as are most lawns. It's the close cutting and grass only. Parks on the other hand have rougher grass in sensible combination with large expanses of trees, maybe a river or lake, flowers, paths, benches. A little oasis of beauty and calm in the ugly, angular city.
To reset my mind I take trees (that often come with some wild meadow and grass), or forest every time. A neatly trimmed lawn is for sports pitches.
Citation needed. My anecdotal experience doesn't agree.
> It has been widely observed...
Really? By who?
> ...that humans, having adapted to life in the African savannah,
Citation, again, needed. As far as I know, practically no ancient hominid artifacts have been found in the 'African savannah'.
> ...have a tendency to turn everything into an idealised version of their natural habitat.
Except that lawns are absolutely nothing at all like an 'African savannah'. And the fact that the largest part of humanity (India, China) live in habitats that resemble ant hills more than they do a savanna.
When Jan Smuts coined the term [1], he was unfortunately at a too immature scientific stage to pave the way for a careful and thorough academic field of study. Moreover, due to his political full time occupation he never got to the stage of forming a precise idea of what he wanted his book to be about. I personally think that his book should have been a fine ecological assessment rather that a somewhat philosophical treatise.
But to answer your question, I think absolutely they are able to provide such advice, with the limitation that it would be holistic in a small and specific context. For example, recently a scientist commented to me that wildebeests being replaced by cattle (wildebeests are not endangered) does actually not negatively affect the microbial biodiversity. But the comment was about specific biomes in a specific area. When you move from grasslands to bushveld, then cattle have a side effect of stimulating the growth of sekelbos [2].
The way I take it, Holism and Evolution was Smuts's response to Darwin's work and in a more ideal world, Smuts's work could have been a nice addition to On the Origin of Species. Smuts's main observation was that the whole is often "greater than the sums of parts". I lament the lost opportunity, but this kind of idea even occurs in pure mathematics. That is why you take transitive closure when you take the union of two or more equivalence relations.
In the ecological context, what he essentially meant is that two species in isolation from each other, as a whole, has a smaller ecological impact than those same two species living interactively.
I have not read his book, but I understand it to be (in the scientific formulation sense) unfinished.
Who can provide holistic advice then? Maybe a management consultant, or a frequent reddit user? Plenty of scientists know about things outside their laser-narrow domain.
Why would you consider there to be a need for experts to provide holistic advice at all? It’s pretty obvious when somebody is trying to give you advice outside of their (often narrow) domain of expertise. Scientists do it all the time. So do software engineers. I’m sure we’ve all been in, or party to, a situation where an engineer is frustrated that the business is not taking their very sound technical advice, somehow oblivious to the possibility that the problem they’re concerned with may not matter to the business at all.
I take care of about two acres of lawns across a few properties for a few decades. I’ve never put pesticides on the lawns. Herbicides, sure, sometimes lots of herbicides, but all very much plant specific. I suppose some places must use pesticides, but here in the middle of the US grass just sort of uses sun, water, nitrogen, and some other stuff and grows.
Also the sentence attributing Illinois prairie loss to global warming is hogwash. Global warming didn’t turn the prairies into giant farms.
So, grumpy stuff said, I do keep lots of varied native plants too. Grass is just for the area that want to survive occasional foot traffic and be open to show something else.
My family never put anything on the, eh, 3 acres of grass I regularly had to mow as a kid.
It wasn't perfect, nobody cared. There were dandelions, there was some clover.
If you can bear to tolerate the fact that your lawn isn't going to look like a putting green, you can do literally nothing but cut it and perhaps water it if your climate requires and be done with it. If there are plants you don't want in your lawn, take them out with your hands or a hoe. If you can't be bothered, then be happy with what you have. If your lawn really can't grow without intense chemical assistance, then maybe don't have a lawn.
What's sad is dandelions are neither ugly nor bad for your lawn. They feed bees and the tap roots draw nutrients from deep in the soil, which also benefits the grass.
Your neighbours may not appreciate this as much as you do. I have my toddler gather me the flowers pre-puffball as bouquets for Mummy which helps prevent them from getting a chance to go to seed.
I'm guessing your toddler enjoys this but this comment reads as if trick your toddler into doing work so your neighbors don't have to deal with a few extra dandelions.
as lawn owner, i like the flowers, and abhor the dense wad of ugly they leave behind after seeding, which in my experience actively displaces the grass that was trying to grow there.
Dandelions are definitely ugly. The problem is that they're weeds: they will grow with abandon and fill up every single possible spot on your lawn, crowding each other out in their rabid attempts to get some delicious sun. Mow them down and you're just acting as an evolutionary selection filter for short, creeping dandelions instead. It only takes a month or two of mowing to end up with a totally different, fully adapted short dandelion population. Leave your lawn fallow for a few months and you'll instead get 6ft tall monsters.
The infection needs to be removed and defended. Entire neighbourhoods need to work together on this; one lazy house is enough to poison the block.
This gets tricky. A weed is merely a plant in the wrong place.
We have a corner of garden that we left to nature to get a little wildlife oasis. The nettles and brambles nature added need regular effort to keep controlled, the dandelions are mostly benign in amongst the 6"-foot long grass, they don't dominate like they do on a cricket pitch length lawn.
Nah. A weed is an undesired plant, primarily, but also typically one that grows and spreads aggressively and doesn't play nice with the sort of plants one actually wants to cultivate in an area.
Man,fuck that. Dandelions flower pretty much all year, which means I always have food for local pollinators and so my garden always has pollinators nearby ready to fertilize my crops. On top of that they are decent eating. I have zero use for normal lawn grass other than to help prevent erosion
Dandelions are food. Try picking all the yellow flowers and steep them for 10-20 minutes in a French press.
This is the easiest way to prevent them from multiplying while not wasting them.
Dandelions are pioneer species, they out complete grass but they have a really long tap root and are pulling up minerals from deep and bring them to the surface. They are very short and cannot complete with the shrub layer, the vining layer, and tree layer, and the canopy layer.
Heck they cannot even complete with normal prairie plants which grow 4 to 8 feet tall at my house.
A lot of dandelions taking over an area is a hint that that area is lacking a lot of basic needs of other plants. The dandelion fills a void to make the place more suitable for other life, not the other way around.
Steam the leaves to reduce the bitter taste. Wash the white latex from leaf stems which is also bitter.
Don't forget you can eat them! Pick the heads and batter them to make a fascinating yellow tempura, just remember to cook them quickly because otherwise the flowers will close up. (You can also use the roots to make drinks but I find them rather bitter)
My lawn (not large) was devastated this year by red thread. By the middle of the summer, the entire thing was turning brown. It was really disappointing.
Some homeowner associations have rules about what can be grown on a property. Some (many? I'm not in a HOA) require it be a traditional lawn. Some people try to do alternative lawns like native bushes, or even raised bed gardens, and then have legal push back to turn it back into a lawn. I think it sucks.
My father constantly battled the HOA where I grew up. It was strictly written up in the HOA agreement the requirements around lawn care and changes to landscaping and I personally hated it as I was stuck doing the work (my father hated it for different reasons).
We have a renowned entomologist [1] here in South Africa too and I think that he has learnt too much from his insect friends. In fact, I think he models his behaviour according to insects of the blood sucking kind. I also think that he has learnt a lot from ants (ants carry things away)... He is an intelligent fellow, though, and his less philosophical contributions are useful.
> I’ve never put pesticides on the lawns. Herbicides, sure, sometimes lots of herbicides, but all very much plant specific.
Herbicides—like insecticides, fungicides, and rodenticides—are a subset of pesticides. So it is impossible for you to never have put pesticides on the lawns if you have put herbicides on them.
Yeah, an herbicide like triclopyr breaks down quickly, but still can bioaccumulate in wildlife and humans need proper protection during application [1].
Also, glyphosate (RoundUp) is debated as far as safety... and unfortunately for Monsanto, they got too cozy with the EPA and trying to ghostwrite positive scientific studies that no matter the scientific evidence one way or another, a jury found them responsible for causing cancer in civil trials. [2]
Some people live where the lawn will take over given half a chance. Not everyone lives in Phoenix or whatever. Nor is pesticide use required to have a lawn.
I grew up in Siberia. When I came here as a kid in the early 90s I was dumbfounded by lawns. Why was everyone cutting all this normal grass all the time??
City ordinances require it. My local ordinances specify that it is to minimize health hazards adjacent to public property. Tall grass allows insect and rodent populations to grow, but they are carriers of diseases that can spread to humans.
Title 24 Chapter 1 Section 101: Nuisances affecting health.
Subsection B6 states that "The following are hereby declared to be health nuisances affecting public health ... rank growths of vegetation upon private property [which] ... harbors rodents or vermin". This is one of the first 3 reasons listed.
Getting rid of our lawn and growing other stuff has been amazingly fulfilling. I have fresh produce most of the year, I've got honeybees and bumblebees and mason bees coming around. I have to do a lot less maintenance, and when I do it's more varied and interesting.
Everything from fruit trees to berries, flowers to vegetables, herbs to herbal teas like chamomile.
Strongly recommend looking at what will grow in your area and start replacing your lawn. Chunk out a four by four foot section and grow some sugar peas and tell me it wasn't a thousand times more rewarding than a lawn.
Since having kids I’ve been realising that a lot of the things in life that other people do, that have never made sense to me, suddenly make a whole lot more sense in the context of kids.
With a kid, I’m suddenly super grateful for my little lawn.
I have a kid and I'm grateful we gave up our lawn. She plants in the spring, harvests, cooks, and preserves with us. She's excited to make pickles, jam, squash, pumpkins, corn, etc from things she's grown and tended to. She even got to pick out some of the flowers and make her own little square.
Watching her step out to grab some blueberries, raspberries, or strawberries is one of the best feelings in the world.
We read seed catalogs together in the winters and plan what we could grow (Ooh, what if we grew purple cauliflower? Or rhubarb for pie!)
Paddling pools and wrestling don't take a 1/5 acre lawn (not atypical suburban plot size). In my previous house, the back yard was heavily landscaped/hardscaped - patio, retaining wall, rocks and shrubs on the hill, etc. The front was lawn. Still plenty of room for my son to run around. And if he wanted more space, he went to the park around the corner.
There's also a substantial difference between a "natural" lawn, where clover and other plants are allowed vs the stereotypical "perfect" lawn (in the US) with a single grass species (and heavy application of herbicides and fertilizers).
Ball games are at the park. It's a short bike ride or moderate walk away. We have a small gravel area we set up the paddling pool in, and no reason one can't wrestle in between beds (or indoors on the carpet).
Great for you, our house is small (for the UK), there's a shoulder width of space around the beds; a park with grass is too far for the little ones to walk and there's been a couple of stabbings locally which makes us a little reluctant to let them out.
It's almost like sweeping statements such as "no one should have a lawn" need modifiers. ;o)
I'd guess grass is still better environmentally than gravel; so long as you don't over tend it (and our mower was rescued from the dump).
I know this may sound callous; but if they're too young to go to the park unsupervised, are they actually in your yard unsupervised; especially if you're concerned about local crime? I'm not pushing one way or another honestly, it just seems like an odd qualifier unless your yard is extremely private and maintained in a way that there are 0 hazards as well.
Our youngest lamented the lack of a front lawn to lay on. But I honestly don't believe that between the damp and the dog walkers she would have actually done the activities she had in her head.
You have to mow it. You have to mow it every week. You have to mow it every week even if you're tired, or sick, or it's hot, or it's cold, or it's rainy, or your friends are playing a game, or you had a sleepover. No excuses, no exceptions. You can't mow it too early in the morning, or too late in the evening. You can't stop halfway through and do the rest later (back yard/front yard perhaps, but not half of the front yard). The grass does not care what your reasons are. It just cares that you didn't mow it. If you don't, it punishes you. Sometimes the neighbors do, too.
In theory they understand this, in practice there are plenty of other activities that result in a litany of renegotiations. Grass. Doesn't. Care.
Many of our raised beds have a piece of flat wood on one side that serves as a bench. In the summer we'll host garden parties and people will socialize among the flowers and veggies. The delight people have picking tomatoes, peas, berries, beans, corn, and other things for their meal is real.
What's the difference between a meadow and a lawn? In relation to the article that is, obviously I could tell the difference between a meadow and a lawn.
Edit: To add a bit of context here a lot of people are talking about pesticides and fertilizer and stuff like that but we don't do anything like that, we just mow it when it gets a bit long. Does that mean our lawn is technically a meadow?
I'm not aware of specific definitions, but in the context of the US, a lawn often has regular applications of fertilizer and herbicides to promote the growth of a small number (often a single) species of grass. This also requires more regular watering, as the grasses tend to be less drought resistant.
A meadow, or natural lawn, or whatever you want to call it would be a mix of grass, clover, and other "weeds". It wouldn't require anywhere near as much chemical treatment (if any) and could be mowed and watered far less often. To me, it would also be allowed to grow long enough to flower, to promote pollinating insects.
Huh, no way am I fertilising or spraying weeds out on my lawn, as far as I can tell it's your basic tall fescue grass with some clover and self seeded violets thrown in the mix, and its main function is being trampled by kids. It's lucky if I put a sprinkler on it.
I tend not to let the clover or dandelions flower though, as it attracts bees to the lawn, and barefoot children (very common in my country, and not looked down on like in the US) and bees on a lawn aren't a happy mix.
My garden is filled with heaps of flowering annuals and perennials though.
A friend once explained that boys are like dogs. They need exercising twice a day. A back yard and a ball are sufficient for that. A paved area is more likely than lawn to provide yet more trips to ER.
It might be, but that's not the anecdote they were sharing?
In my limited experience (ex cub leader [mixed sex groups], church kids helper, worked with children for 15 years; kids and nieces/nephews of my own) most boys behaviour declines rapidly if you don't "run them", but most girls aren't affected in the same way.
On our scout camps (mixed sex, mixed age, for the last 20 years at least) in free time the girls _tend_ to retreat to their tents and chat and the boys _tend_ to hit the field and run around like idiots. There's obviously a lot of selection bias in these groups too, they do outdoor pursuits, rough camping, etc. -- these girls are fit and hardy and as capable at kayaking/hiking/climbing/backwoodsmanship as the boys (indeed at the top end, 14yo, the girls are often fitter and stronger as they tend to grow a little earlier than the boys do). There's probably some observer bias too, of course, and this is anecdotal (but longitudinal).
My observations of toddlers at "mums & toddlers" groups suggests the ones who run around with a pram are usually boys (though that's far from exclusive; and the mothers [it's about 1:30 men] have very strong gender bias, which might be the origin of that effect).
YMMV.
Interested in other observations, FWIW I'm in the UK.
Just wanted to highlight that I like it a lot whenever people provide context and limitations to their comments. Very measured and thus easy to take at face value. Thanks a lot!
Ehhhhh. I disagree. That's too much of a generalisation. Different people, different interests. Many kids do like to exercise. Many prefer staying indoor.
Reading this, the 2 hours of physical exercise per week in school make a lot more sense now from an physiological point of view.
I always just took them as fun time and some kids took them as annoying burden that should be avoided. I not once thought about that they are necessary to develop my body and motor skills.
I always took Judo training as a near perfect way to improve my movement skills though.
What kids prefer and what they need are not one and the same. A lot of parenting is about teaching kids to go outside their immediate preferences for long-term gain, and to learn new preferences.
I wish I could get my son to exercise twice a day. He hates going outside. He prefers his exercise running around in Minecraft, and if he does get it in real life, it's jumping around the living room.
Be a parent. Set rules and consequences. Outside time or no Minecraft seems like a no brainer. Interact and get him to join you in things you like doing outside. He’ll probably hate it for 1 month or 1 year, but it’s your responsibility.
If you're involved as a parent, sure. Just for the love of god do not just throw your kid outside saying "play outside", because that sucks. I'm speaking from experience.
Things I like doing outside? I'm afraid that's a very short list. I totally understand where he's coming from.
We do set rules, it's just that we don't always maintain them very strictly, and he loves to bend them. And when he does play outside to get more Minecraft time, he thinks 15 minutes outside it enough.
It seems he just has no idea what to do outside. As a kid, I regularly played outside, probably because I had to, and so did the other kids in the neighbourhood, so we played outside. But none of his friends plays outside, so there's nothing to do for him outside.
What doesn't help is that we live in a city: no backyard, no fields or forests behind the house, and watch when you cross the street. Plenty of playgrounds fortunately, but the youngest, who loves to play outside, is just 5, which is a bit young to be outside on his own, so he's learning to adapt to indoor play. Maybe playing outside is getting trained out of kids because of the environment we live in.
Ah yes, your city environment will make it more difficult. That said, if he's old enough to bike (and the city you live in has some bike safe areas) then that's a great hobby to push. Taking 30 minute walks around the neighborhood is another. Regularly going outdoors (taking a walk together, visiting parks, any local state parks) as a family helps. But yea, if you're not doing it it's not going to transfer well to your kids.
Regarding setting rules: Kids are very bright when it comes to getting their way. If there's any loopholes they'll exploit them. If they detect weakness in resolve then they'll push and push using negotiation, guilt, deception, etc... The question they're trying to figure out is, is my parent in charge or can I be? The hardest but best thing you can do as a parent to instill disciple is to be clear, consistent, and follow-through. It's really hard. I'm in the midst of it too!
When I was a kid, our (huge) back yard was more orchard than yard. It had at least 30 fruit trees, including cherry, apple, pear, peach and plum. There were hazelnuts, brambles and raspberries. Next to that was a patch of land with all kinds of produce.
I loved playing in that yard. It had great places to hide. Ample trees to climb. Wildlife to look for and learn about. A variety of fun tasks to perform, from picking fruit and berries to making jam and juice.
When my younger brother turned 10, our parents decided that he had to play football. Almost all of the trees were felled. Everything I loved about that place was destroyed, and replaced by one, big, boring, lifeless lawn.
Instead of fun tasks, I was thenceforth assigned the task of mowing the lawn. Which I resented and continue to detest to this day.
It took me many years to realize that nearly everything in my grandmother's back yard (except the lawn and porch) was food. There were orange trees, a cherry tree, an avocado tree, garlic, and a raspberry bramble. I loved picking raspberries. There was a pomegranate tree in the front.
A garden is always going to be better than a lawn. A garden of plants that grow faster than trees may be higher-maintenance, though.
Wow, crazy. I grew up with a modest lawn (with two trees, one smack in the middle of each side of the lawn) and my best friend had a really big yard on a slope with a bunch of apple trees.
You made me think back over my childhood which was pretty idyllic in terms of outside time and non-supervision.
You know, lawns were simply not a major factor in that, outside of perhaps once-in-a-year water gun fights with some neighbor kids, the wilderness held far more appeal. Back-lot tracks, untilled fields, marginal scrubland running along stream beds. That was where the majority of my 'green time' took place.
I do remember a few families around the village that had completely unkept, wilderness yards. They provided far more entertainment than any with manicured lawns.
We had a front lawn, a back lawn, and a dog. The back lawn may as well have been a concrete slab for playing purposes due to the statistical likelihood of dog. The front lawn was exposed to all the neighbors and thus similarly unusable for a social anxiety kid. Would have given up that lawn in a heartbeat for wilderness, which I spent years hiking and exploring.
This. In what lawn-owners treat as mowing season, more than half of the year here, they spend several hours a month with motorized devices keeping the grass trimmed. Meaning they also pay for the device and the energy to keep it running. And the trimmings are usually wasted. So all in all: pretty expensive thing, that lawn. And to stay on topic: pretty much dead as far as nature is considered as well. Almost like a local farmer once put it: you might just as well have concrete and paint it green. Same looks but cheaper and no maintainance.
We on the other hand make hay. Meaning depending on the year, we spend several hours once or twice a year to cut the meadow (by scythe, but that's just because I like that). And then some more time to turn the hay and bale it to produce something which is then worth some money. And yields vivid fauna&flora (we also never cut everything every year, some random parts can stay till the next year). Still I get neighbours telling me 'wow that's a lot of work you put in there'. At first I thought they were joking but theye are not: I really have to do the math for them to make them realize several hours every month is way more work than what I do (and that's not even talking about the money spent). I'm not sure why that is. Maybe they perceive running behind a mower or sitting on one not as work. Or not as lost time. Or they see a scythe and think it's extremely hard work.
I agree it's probably better and more fun and maybe less "work" to have a garden or wild plants than a lawn, but:
> you might just as well have concrete and paint it green
No, you would miss out on the feel of soft grass under your bare feet, and your kids and dogs would be having a whole lot less fun playing in the yard.
> Maybe they perceive running behind a mower or sitting on one not as work. Or not as lost time.
A lot of people find lawn-mowing relaxing. It's light physical labor, it has an immediate payoff, it involves motors and/or engines and/or tools depending on your preference, and the smell of fresh-cut grass is amazing.
No, you would miss out on the feel of soft grass under your bare feet
Should have made this more clear perhaps, but I only put in that farmer's concrete quote (which I don't agree with for the reasons you mention) for the biodiversity aspect not everything else grass-related :)
A lot of people find lawn-mowing relaxing.
Yes but that is true for me as well so doesn't really explain why more than one neighbour made a similar comment about me spending more time mowing than they do while in reality it's the opposite, by far. Maybe it's just coincidence (N=3) and/or maybe they were just making conversation or so.
probably better
Considering the biological side, it's way beyond 'probably'. For example [1] gives a rather high-level overview and [2] goes into (one of) the more specific aspects. [3] also talks about the history/future bits.
Agreed, apart from mowing it fairly regularly from April - October I've never done any of those things to the area of grass we have. Mind you we are in Scotland so water supply isn't really a problem.
It was interesting watching people complain about the grass not growing on The Walking Dead. Little do they know, that's normal. Especially when it never seems to rain on the show. It can jump after rain, but it stays short and brown for months in an especially dry year.
Let's say we have a super well maintained lawn here in Denmark. You would have to do the following once every season:
* Aerate/seed (realistically not necessary to do every year).
* Fertilize.
* Pull weeds (mostly dandelions).
For a normal house that amounts to at most one weekends work.
Compared to a well established bed of flowers, which every season at the very least needs:
* Fertilize
* Trim plants that begin taking over.
For a garden with flower beds the size of the typical lawn I'd say there is at least the same amount of work required. And you need to have quite a bit more knowledge for it to be easy, compared to a lawn anyway.
For a vegetable garden there is significantly more work involved.
* Germinate
* Ready the soil
* Work in manure
* Plant / transplant
* Keep weeds down.
* Some plants need a trellis.
* Mulch.
* Keep weeds down where the mulch failed.
* Continuously maintain the vegetables health to ensure good harvest.
* Harvest
* Clean up the beds
* Plant green manure
* Plan next year, rotate crops ect.
There is realistically something to do every single week.
If you live a place where it rains enough for the grass to make it on it's own, it's the path of least resistance only bested by a concrete slab, or perhaps tiled that you spray to kill weeds.
The traditional vegetable garden is slightly more human work than a lawn, but the perennial food garden is significantly less work than a lawn (for example apple trees with mulch, requires only harvest in the fall and pruning during winter)
A woodchip mulched strawberry patch uses requires zero human labor except from harvest and the occasional propagation of runner plants which 4x each year. All you have to do is cover with leaves, straw, or evergreen branches to help the crowns over winter and they will be back each year.
Raspberry canes will literally walk all over your property and only need to be mulched (with leaves, grass clippings, or woodchips) to keep them looking tidy)
The gas used to power mowers is a huge subsidy. A vegetable garden bed uses a lot less energy and time. Remember to cover vegetable garden beds in fall and winter.
All of the bullets on your list are optional in a veg garden and perennial garden. I don't rotate my crops unless I have a compelling reason to do so (like a pest eating all my potatoes)
Having greenhouses, vegetable garden, perennial food, and a lawn - the lawn is what requires the least amount of work for me, and I don't even have a robotic lawn mower.
For perennial crops, you still need to do more work. Manure (and you have to source it too), mulch and pruning is a bare minimum. If you care about the harvest, you have to continuously keep an eye on it and treat various problems. For apples in particular it's imperative to remove monilia infected fruit continuously, and especially after harvest. You also have to prune the crop to ensure a larger harvest.
A garden is as much or as little work as you make it, but a lawn is probably the lowest bar of minimum work if you get enough rain to water it. It didn't become popular because it's more useful that everything else, but because you really don't have to do much work to keep it.
I am amazed I've only seen one of these ever. First saw it maybe 15 years ago, and would pass it on my way to school.
When Roomba came out everyone flipped like it was an amazing invention that nobody had thought of. All I could think of was that little yellow lawn mower diligently mowing its grass. Cute little guy is still running today.
Why don't more people have these? I'm gonna buy one when I have a yard.
edit: I see they are decently expensive. If they work still totally worth it.
It is simpler in the sense that there is not really any thought required. I have to mow my small lawn every three weeks or so, true, but I know how to do that, because it's the same thing everybody does and you grow up watching your parents mow the lawn. It requires no judgement skills, and no gardening skills -- just run the mower over all the grass, and you're done. I would actually potentially be interested in having something less dull than just a lawn, but I wouldn't know where to start (what would work in my climate/levels of sun/shade/etc, what do I need to do, when does it need planting, does it need watering, all that). Keeping grass is simpler than that.
Just mowing less isn't perhaps simpler by the definition of it but is way better for biodiversity. You could try it in just a small piece of your current lawn and see what happens. Mow once near the end of spring and again once 3 to 4 months later. Shouldn't take long before native flowering plants will pop up.
I guess maybe that's a regional thing. In the southeast US, lawn care is a year round battle against weeds and invasive species. Without weeding and chemicals, grass can easily be choked out in one growing season. Mowing the actual lawn is a very small part of the regiment.
It's particularly difficult with the mild Winters we have had of late because it's almost as if spring goes from December to May now. Sods like Bermuda or St Augustine still go dormant in fall but the weeds don't stop growing.
Might have to do with the grass type? One thing that shocked me when I went to Florida was how coarse (larger strands and way stiffer) the grass was compared to where I live (Canada). I eventually learned it's simply a different type to deal with climate differences. I'm admittedly not very knowledgeable with everything plant, but it wouldn't sound odd to me if I learned that it could also mean different care. Up here it's mostly weeding, adding soil where needed and reseeding every spring, mowing it every couple of weeks, and watering once in a while. Maybe 2-3 rounds of chemicals a year if you want that healthy deep green lawn look.
> Might have to do with the grass type? One thing that shocked me when I went to Florida was how coarse (larger strands and way stiffer) the grass was compared to where I live (Canada).
Grass types are a reflection of the climate and vary dramatically due to factors such as sun, growing season, and soil composition. In Florida the soil composition is mostly sand, and they receive a lot of year round sun so the predominant grass is St. Augustine because it thrives and produces thick turf that chokes out weeds.
St. Augustine is also very similar to Crab Grass, which is considered a weed in many places, like Georgia. And it is easily killed by all but a few herbicides (e.g. MSM). So while St. Augustine is great in Florida, doesn't work well in Georgia where the soil composition promotes more aggressive weeds, and the tree canopy inhibits St. Augustine's growth.
In other words, Florida grass is Georgia weeds.
> Up here it's mostly weeding, adding soil where needed and reseeding every spring, mowing it every couple of weeks, and watering once in a while. Maybe 2-3 rounds of chemicals a year if you want that healthy deep green lawn look.
In the south your yard can grow 4-6 inches a week and during the growing season you sometimes have to mow as frequently as every 5 days. The mowing season in Georgia is from March to November for grasses that go dormant, it's year round for those that don't.
Weeding is a year-round chore and many people opt for year round weed services that spray for weeds on a monthly basis if not more frequently. Pre-emergent weed control is put down in February or March, and other herbicides are used through out the spring and summer.
Fertilizer is only done a couple times a year and varies depending on the type of grass.
Installing a native lawn does require a startup cost, but it's not too bad. You kill your grass, lay down mulch, and plant the native species. After a few months of watering, your lawn is self sufficient and you don't have to do anything to it ever again. Picking out the native species might seem daunting, but there are many resources online these days to help you pick out a handful of native species that will work for your lawn.
Do native lawns attracts more ticks in areas with high tick populations? Seems like a possibly significant health risk considering that Lyme disease seems to be increasingly common.
I'm personally a huge fan of native lawns, but this is always in the back of my mind and I haven't seen it addressed.
Depending on where you live, you could start with introducing clover into your yard. It grows well in most of the US, tends to be more drought tolerant than many grasses, is easier on the soil (requires less soil treatment), and flowers nicely part of the season, which is great for bees and other pollinators. It will co-exist with grasses, so you don't need to do anything beyond tossing seed in the early spring and letting it germinate, just as you would do with grass seed.
Weekly maintenance is similar - just mow it (though let it grow long when it's flowering - cut off the flowers and you lose the pollinators).
I'm in the UK. My lawn is about 1/3 clover already, as it happens, just by natural process of it being stuff that grows better in the conditions on that part of the lawn. I don't consider that to be not-a-lawn, it's fairly normal I think, and the management is no different to the grass. (My 'lawn' overall is about 1/3 grass, 1/3 mostly-clover, 1/3 mostly-moss: the grass grows well on the sunny side, the moss beats out everything else on the side that's almost perpetually in shade by the south-side fence, and the clover wins in the middle-zone between them.)
I only half-joke about cultivating crab grass; it's green, grows flat so never needs mowing and is drought-resistent. I never walk on the lawn in our front yard and could really care less about what the neighbours think. Resists inconsiderate dog-walkers as well...
Not really, but I hate the stuff. I finally managed to get most of it plucked out of my front yard. Hopefully the additional clover will displace it fully next season.
I have both a lawn, and a perimeter where I grow flowers, edibles, and trees. I am happy that you find your conversion satisfying, but there is no conceivable way I am going to believe the careful weeding, deadheading, variable watering, pruning, shading, trellising, etc. is less maintenance than simply running the mower and edger once a week at MOST, and relying on an automated sprinkler system. (Maybe a 2x/year weed and feed application too.)
Depends on how nice you want your yard to look (and how productive you want or need it to be). I am a big fan of the set and forget with a sprinkler system. Some stuff lives, some dies. I have had waves of different plants across the yard over the years. It's not tidy, but it's easy.
If you're going for a perfectly maintained look to wild plantings, then yeah, that's a a lot of work.
We've replaced our lawn with wild savanna, and it's zero work. We just let it go. It looks totally wild, and I'm happy with that. (Getting it in place - removing the invasives, improving the soil, planting trees, and spreading native wildflower and grass seeds was a lot of work - but since its established its very little work. Just occasionally walking through it and pulling out the invasives that are trying to move back in.)
Part of the change that needs to happen is a change in our aesthetics.
Oh- so you're that neighbor. It's not just a change in your aesthetics that's needed. If you live in a community then it's prudent to get community buy-in. Especially if you have kids.
Community reputation means a lot more than some people realize. Source: I've been on both sides of this one.
Yeah, at the root of this all is a cultural issue more than anything else. Funny enough my mom has let her garden grow wild for years and neighbors have been telling her they love how lush it is from the start, yet somehow don't quite dare to let their own garden free (and before anyone asks, I'm pretty sure it's not a backhanded compliment).
Do you think it is unreasonable to want to surround oneself with like-minded individuals? I am not trying to imply the opposite isn't _also_ reasonable.
Yes. It is particularly unreasonable to want to surround yourself with individuals who think grass lawns, kept cut to a uniform length between 4" and 8", are a good idea, and a worthy goal for landscaping.
That's a 1946 ideal. In the same way that it was a 1946 ideal to build a residential-only neighborhood away from the big city, with racist covenants and redlines to keep the black people out. It was designed to evoke the manicured lawns of English and French castles, especially the "green carpet" at Versailles. Mount Vernon and Monticello and the White House featured grass lawns. And the mechanical lawnmower opened that aristocratic status symbol up to those without herds of grazing animals or scything slaves to keep it close-cropped. That, and lawn bowling and golf courses, made everyone crazy for grass lawns.
Abraham Levitt (of Levittown) and Frederick Law Olmstead then installed a whole complex of unreasonability into generations of Americans.
It is reasonable to surround yourself with people, each of whom arranges their affairs such that they need not have similar opinions on the disposition and upkeep of each other's properties. It is reasonable to mind your own business when someone else rips out their useless bermudagrass and replaces it with edible flowering herbs. It is very unreasonable to march up to their door to wave HOA covenants and city landscaping ordinances in their face in an effort to make them replant the grass. Yet that is what neighborhood busybodies do on a regular basis. We can't get rid of them, because they have the 1946 racists on their side, and they got there first, and they built entrenchments--legally, of course, as actual entrenchments would ruin the neighborhood aesthetic.
If you want a lawn, buy yourself a nice, square mile of property in the country, build a castle on it, and cut down everything that could hide approaching infantry. Rotate your herds around so that the grazing fodder is kept short. Then you can also have the formal gardens in the back, and maybe also a hedge maze. If you want a lawn in the suburbs, fine, but keep it on your own property and don't try to grow it over your neighbors' properties with some sick legal scheme.
Nobody is being forced to purchase property governed by an HOA. If you want the freedom to choose how you maintain your property, just... live somewhere else. To be clear, I'm not advocating for these schemes (and would personally never live in such a place), but the idea that it's _unreasonable_ to have a preference is silly. People are allowed to have opinions.
The irony here is that your response violates the very same principals for which you seem to be advocating. "If you want _____, follow my instructions exactly". Hmmm....
- I am fully aware that the kinds of rules, in particular, that spurned this conversation have been (and likely continue to be) abused as a facade to hide bigoted motivations. I absolutely DO NOT condone the tactic of using "personal freedom" as a means to promote these kinds of views. That IS NOT the point I was trying to make, rather, that people often _do want_ to surround themselves with like-minded people. The social science on this is crystal clear.
I am strongly against land covenants, and support the Jeffersonian maxim that the Earth should belong in usufruct to the living. If you want to control how a property is used in perpetuity, the proper way (in my opinion) to do so is to never sell it, not to carve away slices of ownership rights at every sale.
The fact that land covenants were overwhelmingly used for racist purposes is just the largest strike against them, not the only one.
Nobody is forced to purchase HOA property, but everybody has to live somewhere, and pay for that out of their income. If you pin a map wherever some member of the household has to be at some time every weekday, and draw 30-minute isochronic lines for the commute time from each pin, and then sum all the household incomes and multiply by 25%, you can find the intersection of the isochronics, filter out housing that exceeds the rent/mortgage budget, and possibly find that everything that remains is HOA controlled, or that there is nothing left. You can draw new isochronics for longer commute times, or you can choose a property that is not perfect, by virtue of being encumbered by covenants. That "live somewhere else" mantra favors the rich over the poor, simply by virtue of having options available that are more expensive than some people can afford.
I don't believe that community standards should be codified and given the force of law. The standards should be voluntarily upheld by the community. And that requires actually building a community first. Of real people. And that is not a profitable activity for suburban cookie-cutter subdivision home-builders. So the HOA is set up beforehand by the developer, to resemble the sort of community that they imagine people with plenty of house-buying cash might like. Oh la, this vision somehow always includes grass monoculture lawns. And a few of those people can move in during phase I and set themselves up as the HOA overlords. The developer continues to advertise and sell, and then automatically bails when the lots sold cross the percentage threshold, leaving everyone to the mercy of the busybodies, whom they have invested with contractual authority.
Some of us just want to live at a location, and generally be left to our own devices, without being subjected to intrusive assholes all the time.
It's easy to say "just live somewhere else". It's not so easy to live anywhere that isn't spoiled in some way by a negative externality in one form or another. Don't like coal plant exhaust? Live somewhere else! Don't like noise pollution? Live somewhere else! Don't like the smell of rancid livestock manure? Live somewhere else! Don't like a jerk threatening you with foreclosure because you didn't pay the HOA tax and your grass is 10" high? Live somewhere else! Don't like it when people erect TV or radio antennas and paint their front doors purple against the standards of the architectural committee? Live somewhere else!
It is better (in my opinion) to prevent those negative externalities from spoiling people's enjoyment of their own property. Barring some legislated community standard that does so, the only truly effective way to keep your neighbors from screwing up your lifestyle is by effectively not having any. Move to the center of your own square mile.
What a diatribe! Unfortunately (and I mentioned this irony in my previous comment), your last paragraph undermines all of the previous.
> Barring some legislated community standard that does so, the only truly effective way to keep your neighbors from screwing up your lifestyle is by effectively not having any. Move to the center of your own square mile.
Can you not see that the above is essentially saying, "Either create community standards where you live, or (wait for it...) live somewhere else!"? Your argument boils down to "YOU live somewhere else!"
Living on the square mile is the hyperbole non-option. Most people can't live on their own square mile with effectively no neighbors, so they have to find some way to get along with the neighbors they will always have. They either can't afford it in money, or they can't afford it in travel time.
Should I have said "go live on the Moon", or "go live on a libertarian seastead", instead? It's supposed to be an unreasonable alternative to being reasonable to all your diverse neighbors.
Conversely, if you don’t want to adhere to agreed community standards then don’t move into an area with a home owner’s association who meet, agree and try to enforce those standards.
Go grow your wildflowers on your nice, square mile of property in the country instead.
There’s nothing admirable about petty rebels who’ll cry “racism” at the first sign of something they disagree with.
Ah so you're that neighbor that's concerned about what everybody else is doing rather than minding your own business.
There's nothing wrong with a yard full of native plants. You should stop trying to keep up with the neighbors and start letting people live their lives without your input.
I don't disagree with the sentiment of your post, but I don't think that is the point the previous poster was making. It's naive to think other people won't make judgments about your choices. Even more so if you think that those judgments can't affect you. I assume you maintain decent personal hygiene/comb your hair/wear appropriate clothing? Why?
The reality is that the community around you can and _does_ produce effects material to your life, even if you aren't aware of them. Maybe you weren't invited to that BBQ? Maybe you then missed the opportunity to connect with someone in your field of work? Who knows...
Assuming you can, you should live around the type of community you want. You sound like you want to live in the HOA controlled landscaping suburb, which is great! OP clearly chose to live somewhere where they wouldn't have neighbors saying these sorts of things. They have put thought into a cool experiment that has apparently paid off for them.
Personally, I've never experienced a neighborhood with a strict HOA that I could stand to stick around in. There always seems to be a minority with too much time on their hands playing neighborhood CIA operative and acting like they've just received power for the first time in their lives. I know that might be a little harsh but there always seems to be some variant of this around.
I live in a condo now where those people still exist, but it is so much better. They have much less power and visibility.
As it happens, my neighbors are of varying opinions on the matter. The ones I hear from, love it. I'm sure there are those who hate it, but I don't hear from them. But this is how you make change. You need the pathfinders to show how it can be done and start the discussion.
You're telling people that they "need" to change their subjective appreciation of what constitutes beauty and aesthetic pleasure? I mean this as sincere constructive criticism, you will not win support for sustainability with such a demand. People don't enjoy being told how they "need" to feel about something as personal as aesthetic experience.
Focus on how sustainability is good for people and how it will improve their lives. If they prefer orderly, manicured lawns, don't look down at them saying they need to change their aesthetics.
They also need to recognize that asthetics is not the only factor. You can't kick a soccer ball on a lawn covered with shrubbery. While a natural landscape can be fun for kids to play in, it's not very versatile when you just want space to roll around and have fun with kids. But sure, if you never go outside and never set foot on your lawn, then a maintenance free lawn is fine. All the rednecks in trailer homes where I come from think so too. You could even store your older vehicles that no longer run on the lawn in case you need parts later.
In New England letting grasses flourish would also provide a home for ticks and Lyme disease. I try to be friendly to pollinators but unfriendly to ticks.
Encourage possums to move in. Indiana has its share of ticks, but we also have plenty of possums.
Chickens are another option.
This is about learning how to fit ourselves comfortably in to nature - because pretending we can be above, outside, or removed from it is sending us careening towards disaster.
I think about the generation that first started having lawns and how they came from farm country and knew all about having native/weed "lawns". The hay fever, the bugs and parasites, the snakes, all this drove them to appreciate a nice fresh lawn your kids could roll around on and enjoy.
It's gonna be a hard sell to get people to enjoy something their grandparents overwhelmingly knew to be inferior.
I agree with this to an extent because I love yards, but you're talking about the generation that smoked indoors and drove without seat belts. Moving forward a bit, my mother grew up thinking margarine and canned goods were better than fresh food (convenient, cheap, and doesn't go bad!).
We have the benefit of better science and a bit of hindsight and can see how the move to lawns has caused pollution on a massive scale and reduced native insect populations. I think at the very least stopping the use of fertilizers and adding wildflower gardens at the borders of your yard is a good plan.
Very good point. I have a friend who start putting some of his fields into native grass rather than Bermuda and has seen much more efficient production. Plus the fields are prettier for most of the year.
We do have bugs and snakes. And we love that. The big old black rat snake that shows up every spring has become a marker of time for us. She's pretty docile and friendly, she ignores us and we ignore her. The possums, groundhogs, and racoon are much the same. My niece and nephew love watching the frogs and gold fish in our pond, and exploring the many bugs that have taken up residence in our wild savannah.
The mosquites were here before the transformation - they come from the scrapyard up the road - and the changes we've made have actually reduced them in the local area. We've increased the number of frogs, bats, and dragonflies to keep them under control. We don't have ticks to speak of, the possums take care of them.
As for hay fever, you get that in suburbia just as bad or worse. You realize that the Yew bushes that everyone loves planting are among the worst producers of allergenic pollen, right?
Again, this is part of the aesthetic change we need to make. Realizing that we are a part of and depend upon the natural environment. And figuring out how to fit ourselves into it comfortably, instead of trying to remove ourselves from it or pretend we are somehow above it or separate from it.
We have over 2000 sq ft of perennial gardens on our property. I don't think it's more work than mowing our lawn. Outside of mulching every few years, and getting the garden ready in spring and deadheading in the fall, there isn't much to do the rest of the summer. Yes there's some maintenance, but it's much less than the hour and a half every week I spend mowing my lawn.
Our apartment building has a butterfly garden with a small-ish stone patio in the middle. It was a major reason why we picked the place. Friends' buildings have standard-issue grassy lawns. Our backyard is the preferred place to congregate in the summer.
I'm sure the landlord went with it because it drops their groundskeeping costs to something approaching zero. But it's been great for everyone else involved, too.
Yeah that's the big issue there - HOAs are oppressive organizations run by OCD types who want conformity at any cost. I'll never live under the thumb of an HOA is I can possibly avoid it.
Maybe, but not necessarily. I live in a neighborhood with an HOA, have a four-by-four with no complaints, and have neighbors who've replaced their entire lawns with complicated gardens and maintained them for years. The HOA even hosted a seminar on butterfly-friendly gardens.
People have ways and you can google that. It won't be perfect. We don't have a lot of rabbits but we have groundhogs, chipmunks, squirrels, deer, and lots of birds. Our strategy is basically:
1) grow things like wildflowers that don't get eaten (but do get pollinated)
2) grow things that produce more than you need (tomatoes in our case, but summer squash is another good example)
3) grow things that produce more than can be eaten by the critters (pumpkins)
4) grow things that most critters don't want (chili peppers, basil)
5) enjoy the fact that some critters got something to eat, instead of treating it like a problem. We don't try to keep anybody out of anything.
#5 is easier for us than it is for a lot of people, I'm sure, but it's easier if you get #1-4 right. If I were growing things that took lots of effort I might be annoyed but where we live (southeastern Pennsylvania), most things just grow.
One bio-ethical route (at least for many of us in the Mid/Mountain-West US) is to use a deer or pigs blood dilute. It isn't harmful for edible plants (you should be at least rinsing your produce anyway) and it keeps most foragers off the goods - minus birds, but netting part of the trees or shrubs is a good way to deal with birds over foraging produce.
If there's a local butcher they're a ready supply of the stuff, and it helps your local markets so win-win. Or if you already hunt for meat (or have friends that do), it's just making sure you're using even more of the animal, so again, win-win. If you don't think that locally sourced meats are ethically/environmentally sustainable then... ummm... /shrug; there's other methods, but none that have been as effective for our plot size.
We are lucky in that we have a five foot rat snake that lives in the rocks in front of our house. I think I've seen it twice in 10 years. We have no rodents on our property.
I live on the edge of the woods. Tons of deer, rabbits, etc. The only thing that 1) works reliably for me and 2) is safe and ethical (so not poison or the like) has been an enclosed wire mesh fence. I resisted this solution for a long time even though my neighbors warned me that a fence was the only workable solution, but it's the only thing I've found that really works in my situation and I wish I had done it sooner.
Other things I tried that did not work:
Repellents, both natural and synthetic including but not limited to deer blood, other animal blood, predator urines (tried multiple types and brands), soaps and bitter and/or spicy repent sprays and gels.
Fake snakes, fake predator models and even real predators (not uncommon for foxes and coyotes are to be seen in our neighborhood).
Noisemakers and motion activated lights.
Lots more.
I wasted a ton of time and money trying the above, not to mention all the time spent gardening only to have it eaten by our woodland friends. A fence just works and does not harm animals. It can look very attractive too and can be relatively inexpensive if you keep an open mind w/r/t materials and look out for good deals/craigslist.
I've seen at least one person claim to solve the deer problem by building a covered chicken run around the outside of the property. Deer get discouraged by the depth of the fence moreso than the height. Presumably the cover saves them from raptors.
Probably works better in a square lot than a rectangular one.
I love vegetable gardening however I have it constrained to a plot in the back yard. When your entire yard (front and back) is productive is it visually appealing?
In the PNW, mowing your lawn is a serious logistics problem because mowing wet grass is a titanic pain in the ass, and the grass is pretty much wet for half of the year. I'm kinda surprised there's as much grass as we have.
Most other yardwork activities can be done in the damp, or even in the rain (hello REI/Patagonia). Gardeners will tell you never to dig in wet soil, but the clay content in coastal soils is so low in many areas that it's a non-issue.
I haven't gone as far as you in my homesteading, but I do follow one of the suggestions Dr. Berenbaum made in the article: I don't rake the leaves in my yard in the fall, I let them naturally decompose. I've found this makes the grass grow much more naturally and results in a diverse insect and spider population.
Why do lawns even factor into the equation when the reality is that industry, farms, etc. own the majority of all water usage? I live in a desert area and hate seeing lawns watered in the middle of the summer but its impact seems trivial.
Agriculture is a major user of ground and surface water in the United States, accounting for approximately 80 percent of the Nation's consumptive water use and over 90 percent in many Western States.[0]
Households only make up a small percentage of the total water consumption worldwide[1].
Recommendations to cut foods that require an inordinate amount of water per calorie are probably better served(if you care about freshwater consumption) and it appears the simplest way to reduce this would be to cut out bovine meat.[2]
Figure all the land used to grow lawns plus all the land used to grow grass seed plus all the land to grow sod... It's absolutely staggering amount of land, whole integer multiples of the land we use for corn or any other irrigated crop.
Paper cited suggests 164K km^2 (about 40 million acres) of total turfgrass.
USDA estimate for corn crop in the US is almost 92 million acres.
Note that the paper claims that turfgrass is 3x larger than the largest irrigated crop, not that it's larger than all crops. Only about 20% of US corn is irrigated (~80% is rain watered only).
It doesn’t sound like the suggestion was made on the basis of water usage. Full quote FTA:
> “Get rid of your lawns,” she said. “Lawns are total biological deserts. It’s just grass with pesticides. The way it’s grown does not support a lot of biodiversity.”
Culture matters. You don't exist in a void. You, anyone you live with, anyone who sees your yard, and anyone who hears your views on it all carry a personal culture.
You are responsible for yours and who it infects. Is yours a sustainable one? If not, you're likely programming the world to die off.
It's not only about you. It's about the ripple effects of you and a greater understanding of responsibility in the face of culture as a force to reckon with.
The sum of everyone's yard is still insignificant to the issue. Bugs in yards aren't the bugs that might theoretically matter. You might note the perfect symmetry between the claims "you need a robust population of random bugs in front of your house" and "you need a robust population of random bugs inside of your house". Nobody needs either of those things.
Most of the world is in neither one of those places.
The somewhat ludicrous figure provided at that link - of 15,415 litres of water per kilogram of meat - is oft' cited by vegetarians and vegans, but doesn't bear scrutiny.
CAFOs are undeniably bad for everyone (the land, the animals, and the consumers) and while they doubtless skew the stats, those grossly artificial environments are clearly not locking up 15 tonnes of water per kilogram of meat.
Something closer to natural - say pastured raised cattle - are using much more reasonable volumes of water, especially at low stocking rates. But the whole 'using water' claim is muddied. The water the animal drinks passes through it and into the ground. Irrigation of the pasture, if performed, can't be thought of as 'lost' water either, as some will go underground, some will be lost as transpiration / evaporation, and some will be stored in the plant to then be consumed by the animal (qv).
> Why do lawns even factor into the equation when the reality is ...
Because lawns are, for most people, for most of the time, pointless wastes of land, water, pesticides, and energy. There are myriad (good) reasons to surrender some lawn and instead grow some of your own food -- TFA just pointed out one of the less obvious ones.
> But the whole 'using water' claim is muddied. The water the animal drinks passes through it and into the ground.
Yes, it's not like the water is destroyed. It may be diverted from directly flowing into a river, sure, and perhaps goes straight back to the atmosphere rather than into the sea via evaporation, exhalation, and transpiration... but it's not gone.
What the cow returns trashes streams as it’s high in nitrates. It’s incredibly damaging. New Zealand is a great example of this and the huge expansion of our dairy industry has done huge harm.
Only when the cow is allowed to go in the stream. Have the cow go even a few meters away from the stream and it is great fertilizer for the grass the cow eats.
Exactly. Water is used, but not lost. Except for cases where more is drawn from an aquifer than replaces it (a very real problem, but not one that quantity of water used in beef touches in a useful way), the water is just passed on down the line. Thus the whole argument doesn't make sense. It is a big number that vegetarians like though because they can make it sound bad while the more complex truth is too complex to understand (and doesn't support their bias as well).
I find understanding this sort of thing is much easier to look at from an energy perspective than a materials perspective. Water is "used" when entropy is dumped into it that makes it less suitable for usage. It takes energy to turn it back into useful pure water. Nature provides a lot of energy that turns it back into pure water, but it may not do it as quickly as we use it, or where we want it, or when we want it. And sometimes the problem is that it dumps fresh water on us far in excess of our desires.
It's still not a perfect perspective, because the exact nature of what's in the water can be an issue (i.e., urine is "bad" for most uses, but may fertilize well, etc.). But it's at least closer to the truth than the mindset that water is poured into a cow and disappears from the universe entirely. If goodness and pureness was a one-time consumable item that way, the way some people seem to conceive of it, the ecosystem would have run out of it billions of years ago. It is a renewable resource.
That still very much fits the 'it's not gone' definition.
Evaporated water will come down again as precipitation.
Your example (cotton) is a truly horrendous crop / textile, but that story sounds like a combination of very poor crop choices for the environment and spectacularly poor resource management.
Also, if you apply water at or beneath the ground/mulch layer, overnight, then your loss to evaporation is very low. Similarly, even suspended drip irrigation (think grapes or other trellis grown plants) versus mist or sprinkler systems.
Lawns, coming back to TFA, are almost exclusively irrigated by sprinklers, and because they're primarily residential (ie. no automated irrigation systems) they're often watered by hand during the day -- so incur a high evaporation loss.
I agree, most of our water is technically "reused". However, one minor caveat is that if it goes down the drain then it most likely gets mixed-in with sewage and thus needs to be treated before being released. Which can definitely be some sort of resource burden.
It takes a lot of crops to feed animals, and those crops depend on enormous amounts of irrigation. The vast majority of agriculture exists for animal feed. I don’t know the exact source of that number, but I’d guess it included the water involved in growing those feed crops, not just what a cow drinks.
CAFOs are objectively horrendous things. Feeding grain to ruminants is also horrendous.
Using lots of fresh water, pesticides, herbicides, and fossil fuels to grow grain on high quality land -- rather than allowing grazing animals to graze on marginal lands -- is a highly dubious practice.
Nothing about that cycle is good for any of us, any of the animals involved, or the soil or water resource management.
I would like to point out that getting rid of your lawn, using it to plant your own vegetables and eating them is a way to cut down on eating bovine meat.
Sure, if you save water they'll just build a new golf course and someone else will use the water. But at least you don't have to pay for the water. You also get a more interesting yard that supports wildlife.
Regarding why lawns even factor, bear in mind TFA is from a media station and the advice to get rid of one’s lawn is likely targeted to people as a small tactical contribution to make.
When you get people to make small changes like this, they’re more likely to support big changes in polls and at the ballot box. That’s the lever by which one moves government and industry.
Lawns use far more fertilizer than agriculture per unit area. Many small suburban laws get as much chemicals as a farmer will put on many acres. The farmer is a businessman, excess fertilizer is wasted money off the bottom line, thus the farmer tries to apply only what is needed, and keep it on the field not run off into a stream (this is a very hard problem, I'm not claiming farmers are fully successful, but they make an effort and research shows they are doing okay). The suburban lawn gets excess chemical with no thought about will it run off.
Note that the suburban lawn does not need chemicals. If you want green colored lawn you need them. If you want green as in good for the environment a lawn without chemical input does fairly well, but it won't look as nice.
We have replaced large parts of our lawn with Carpobrotus edulis or sour fig which is drought resistant. It's great for insect life as well. Planting indigenous replacement lawns helps indigenous life
Lots of native yards need protection from invasives. Preemergent herbicides are a great help. Initial clearing with something like Roundup is also not always discouraged because it keeps the soil from being disturbed and resowing invasive seeds. Having problematic invasives is actually more reason to have a native yard where you can take responsibility for supporting native wildlife.
Native-only plants people are somewhere between DIY garum makers and homebrewers in terms of the fierceness of their ideological warfare online, but in person they are a fun group to socialize with.
When I was in China there were certain places where they made jokes about how Americans are so rich they use their lawns just to make their home look pretty (they were growing stuff).
That is in fact the purpose of lawns: to show you are rich enough to not surround your house with food gardens. The poor had to plant food anyplace they had legal rights to soil, the rich can plant non-food to show off.
The original purpose of lawns was to provide sight lines for castle defense. The forest was cut down, and native ground cover dominated the cleared regions. It was kept short by grazing animals.
It was our old pal Louis and his Versailles palace that introduced the close-cropped grass lawn. It was kept short by grazers and gardeners. The poor used their near-house property to grow vegetables and culinary herbs. The rich used it to feed cows or sheep.
It wasn't until the mechanical lawnmower that the grass lawns became entirely useless. Grass is ruminant food, and ruminants are meat.
But we don't keep herds of sheep and cows in the grass-friendly suburbs now, because we don't like stepping in or smelling ruminant poop. And all the pesticides and herbicides would be dangerous for the animals and anyone who ate them.
> It wasn't until the mechanical lawnmower that the grass lawns became entirely useless. Grass is ruminant food, and ruminants are meat.
But ruminants were never a part of the American suburban lawn the way they were in old world villages and wealthy estates. American lawns are almost completely post lawn-mower.
The American suburban lawn is an explicitly visual copy by the post-war working class of the luxuries previously available only to the upper classes of both American and European societies, minus the undesirable aspects like manure.
The new resistance to lawns is occurring in places where the post-war fantasy of pseudo aristocratic life for the working class is breaking down, for either economic or environmental reasons.
The mechanical lawn mower was invented in 1830-something, if I'm not mistaken. It would have taken a generation or so to become cheaper, at about 1850-ish for the earliest widely-available, manure-free, close-cropped grass lawns. So I'd put that as the advent of tennis and dedicated golf courses, among other lawn games.
Checking Internet... mechanical lawnmower 1830 exactly, tennis invented between 1859 and 1865, and Oakhurst Links is the oldest 9-hole golf course in America since 1884. Croquet apparently became popular in the 1860s. So that all checks out.
The lawnmower made the lawn. The lawn games and status-associations made them desirable to have.
So the lawn is essentially a long-enduring symbol of upper-class lifestyle. Resistance to grass lawn mono-culture is a symbolic rejection of aspirational wealth. People who live in personal fantasy-lands love their symbology; undermining their symbols can reveal the lies behind them. Those folks that reject the lawn are essentially admitting that they will never get rich. Maybe America will finally stop being a land of temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and start being one that eats home-grown dandelion salads when not eating the rich.
> So the lawn is essentially a long-enduring symbol of upper-class lifestyle.
Of course, when everyone has a perfect lawn is it doesn't serve that symbolic purpose nearly as well (other things take it's place, like exotic travel photos), and it increasingly just becomes a maintenance hassle.
I think there is a lot to be said for the health of people who grow their own. I generally don't see such individuals in poor health - rather fit.
Some of the healthiest old wise ladies I've ever known have had the most vibrant gardens in the neighborhood, whereas the clean/white picket fence guys all seem to be grouc
Californians, please plant natives. See laspilitas.com or the Theodore Payne foundation for more info. You can have a beautiful yard that requires zero water(and watering it can often cause harm) in summer yet feeds insects and smells amazing.
Natives are also great because when you go out into the woods you can recognize plants from your garden!
Sadly, garden souls are often in much worse shape than what natives need (usually very compacted and lacking in organic matter). Some native plants are native to moist soils and would require more water than a (non-invasive) plant from the Mediterranean, for example. But native plants are tremendous fun and there are ton of resources available to help you find the right plant for the right spot.
Over the years my lawn has shrunk to nothing as my flowerbeds and shrubs expanded. Now my garden is full of hummingbirds most of the year. It makes me so happy to see the little critters buzzing around. I also get a lot of other birds too, funny little migrating things that stay for a few days while passing through. Once they’re established, most perennials and shrubs require almost no attention, just some water if it hasn’t rained in over a week in the summer. When your plants are happy they crowd out the weeds. I weed once a year at the end of winter and a little here and there during the year.
If you’re not sure what to plant, walk around your neighborhood and see what plants are thriving. If you see something growing well in a lot of gardens it will probably do well in yours too.
In Germany we have "Kleingärten / Schrebergärten" in most cities that mostly belong to non-profit associations. They give people the chance to lease a small garden - 400 m² on average - and grow their own fruit and vegetables, and of course spend time there in the summer (most gardens have small houses where people can stay overnight as well). More than 5 million people use such gardens. The statutes of most associations require people to grow fruit or vegetables on a given percentage - usually 30 % - of the lot, and to have a certain number of trees on the lot as well.
>Also, don’t use bug zappers, which Berenbaum said do not work in killing mosquitoes but do kill hundreds of beneficial species.
This summer I stopped at a petrol station located in some remote forest area. There were literally heaps of dead bugs inside and under the neon panels. Since then I have been wondering how much of the insects are killed simply by the lights that we keep on in the outdoors.
> “Get rid of your lawns,” she said. “Lawns are total biological deserts. It’s just grass with pesticides. The way it’s grown does not support a lot of biodiversity.”
> Instead, plant native flowers that provide nectar and pollen for pollinators, Berenbaum said.
I see this a lot recently where I live in Germany, but at the same time I see the opposite as well. Lawn replaced by gravel, often pitch black one. I don't mean that people replace their lawn with parking lots, I mean nice green front gardens turn into minimalist charcoal stone gardens. It has its appeal but not if it is overdone. Is it good for insects? I don't know, certainly not for the flying ones.
I see similiar things in Austria. I'm pretty shure it's a mainstream trend that plays into people's urge to take control over nature and remove all rogue elements from their lawns and will be replaced by whatever trend the industry comes up when the market is saturated.
My wife and I feel like we are being looked down on by some of our neighbors because we only maw our lawn twice a year and don't use store bought fertilizer or any pesticides. Before our neighbors gave up on us they would tell us a lot about having to get rid of all stinging nettles (especially after getting children!) and the need for yearly scarifying the grass area (which we are actually trying to turn into a rough pasture) and cutting every bush down to a single twig every year so it wouldn't get out of control.
The good news is, if you talk to those people about your own rationale, they sometimes tend to soften their position or even change it completely and relax themselves a bit. Personally I can't wait the day I can sit outside during spring or summer and not be surrounded by the constant buzz of lawnmowers.
Trends like this are essentially like fashion, but applied to gardens (well, the area around your house, I guess at one point it stops being qualified as 'garden'). I.e. pushed by industry/magazines/..., copied by people seeing other people doing it etc. Usually goes in cycles so in a couple of years it might be different again. Hopefully not lawns again, but actually I don't see it impossible that just like in fashion, what is now sort of subculture becomes mainstream and gets adopted by the masses and we'll get a ton of wild gardens.
I think that is more about water usage in their original context but the kind of people who do it for fashion cargo-cult it as I don't believe Germany has desert biomes and are more likely in a "keep sonething green there for drainage" territory.
I'm not against native flowers, but I would point out that my mother's lawn in Northern California has not even smelled a pesticide since at least 1975, and while I'm sure it could be more bug-friendly it's hardly a desert. Plenty of things creep and crawl in the lawn.
Maybe there's more diversity in types of lawns than the anti-lawn crowd like to consider?
Are there environmentally friendly alternatives to the traditional grass lawn if one uses their lawn for sports, BBQ, and play? Maybe just allowing grass to grow more naturally rather than using pesticides and removing weeds?
For several years, I fed my lawn an organic diet (corn gluten meal in the spring, which serves as a mild pre-emergent, then mixes of cracked corn, alfalfa, soybean meal, often in the form of horse and rabbit feed).
Healthy grass, cut somewhat higher than typical will outcompete most weeds. The only weed I wasn't able to control effectively enough this way were grassy weeds (poa trivialis and poa annua). Triv patches had to be mechanically removed and annua needed late summer chemical pre-emergent (CGM isn't effective enough there). Once those were dramatically reduced (from the "yard" I inherited when we bought the place), the organic system was effective in keeping a >95th percentile lawn. That lawn was more resilient and beautiful than any of the chemically fertilized lawns (whether high or low input) I've maintained. In addition, we had more wild rabbits than I've ever seen, providing additional entertainment for the kids.
The big issue with the organic lawn feeding is that it's quite bulky. No more 15 pound bag of sulfur coated urea that would do two fertilizer applications on my small city lawn. Instead, it was 30-50# bags of organic material that had to bought at Agway or Tractor Supply (necessitating a car trip) and couldn't reasonably be stored for a long time due to bulk and being organic (subject to rotting and rodent infestation). It's also more expensive than the chemical feeding, but still not prohibitive.
PC asked for environmentally friendly alternatives to a grass lawn. Your suggestion is neither an alternative to a grass lawn, nor environmentally friendly. (An order of magnitude more pesticides, fertilizer and water are used to grow the animal feed that you are using as fertilizer than you need to would put on your lawn.
At an industrial scale, the land used to grow that "fertilizer" could be put to better use growing actual food!
(Quibble: unless the animal feed is itself certified organic, it is not an "organic diet" for your lawn in the recognised sense of the word.)
Do you use 100% of that lawn? You could mow only part of it. E.g. simple things like instead of using square corners, leave the coreners as-is with a radius of a couple of meter and only mow those twice a year or so. Makes it also interesting to see the difference in what will grow. On the other hand if you keep on using pesticides it might simply not work. Why exactly do you use the pesticides? As other commenters mention, it's not normally a prerequisite to get a nice lawn.
Just cut the grass with a manual reel lawn mower. No added chemicals - including water.
Note, if you lawn has a wetland or stream do not cut closer than 1 meter to the wetland, the uncut lawn will filter runoff for the wetland/stream and keep everything healthier.
Or if you want to be a bit of a rebel, make seed bombs: seeds mixed in with spheres of fertilizer, dried, and then lobbed onto the sides of roads (safely, at a low speed, and not to be destructive to personal property); you can litter with native species to help bee populations.
Please do not encourage to trespassing and littering. While the reasoning is in good faith, most people will just see a trespasser on their property and may take action against you.
I have sued someone for ruining some very expensive landscaping in a similar manner for the costs to remediate. It was over 60k. Sucks for them. Disrespect property at your own peril.
Came here to say this. The one thing I am getting from the bulk of the comments is, not a lot of people with an active HOA that is fully committed to not just yards, but a very specific "look and feel".
If you're curious about it: we have a nicely sloped back yard but one small part is 1)shrouded by the fence and 2)a tad lower/steeper than the rest, and so it's a mudhole where nothing will grow.
Our HOA is constantly angry about it, as our back yard now doesn't have the required square feet of grass coverage.
Similarly, others have problems getting grass growing in front yards because of house position, slope, and other factors. Constant harassment from the HOA that amounts to "why aren't you spending hundreds of dollars a year constantly re-sodding your tiny patch of townhouse front yard".
My experience is common around here, FWIW. I have friends in different nearby neighborhoods with the same kind of snooping, nitpicking "fix it or we'll put a lien on your house" stuff.
It's not so much HOAs that are the problem as the priorities of those who actively participate in framing and enforcing their aesthetic conformity rules.
The perfectly manicured lawn, in many places in the US, is a strong signal associated with middle to upper middle class status. It's a signal that you have the expendable income and time to spend on something non-essential.
Many HOAs are used to enforce that signaling, rather than limiting themselves to ensuring physical safety through proper maintenance of homes. You can see this in HOAs that disallow front yard vegetable gardens (though that was recently banned in FL[1]).
HOAs are actually necessary when homes occupy a shared parcel of land, like with townhouses or condominiums. In those arrangements, the landscaping is commonly owned.
The aesthetic enforcement of things like lawns vs native grasses happens more in HOAs that govern large areas of suburban tract housing, where the HOA enforces rules on property that isn't actually held in common.
> Another tip: Leave leaf litter in place. The dead plant material is an important part of healthy soil and offers protection for insects during the winter, Berenbaum said.
It feels like I picked the worst of both worlds. I don't use pesticides and remove weeds by hand. I will admit that I like quiet appeal of the lawn despite the amount of work I have to put into it.
Personally, I think people don't appreciate how little manual labor can help you focus and keep things in perspective.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadBut, we’re all stuck with this until we unlock Intellectual Integrity off the SMAC tech tree.
I don’t see how you can avoid street canyons otherwise.
Are you claiming that you're not allowed to plant trees or a native ground cover?
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/7/28/grassy-lawns-e...
And so the 'front lawn' is my vegie patch. Potatoes are dead easy to grow from eyes and pumpkins (winter squash) self-germinate from compost. This summer I'm experimenting with Jerusalem artichokes, which sprouted from 70¢ worth of store-bought tubers.
All you need is water and a spade - and no lawn police, I guess.
I for one would like drought tolerant (in CA anyway) native plant species to fill our lawn spaces...especially the ones that get rarely used.
But broadly speaking, I'm skeptical of taking advice from a domain expert rather than some form of generalist who synthesizes understanding across the board.
I want to know what the civil engineer has to say. I want to hear from the urban planner, the child psychologist, the sports medicine expert, etc. My yard is used in a lot of ways.
I agree with the latter sentence - I want to hear from a lot of people with narrow expertise and different perspectives on anything important, but I probably don't care what a generalist thinks, because why should they be better at synthesizing the experts than me?
For me I pick and choose. I pretty much leave my car and rooftop to the experts but I dabble in electrical, plumming, carpentry, landscaping, etc. Etc.
Your second sentence is about when you defer to experts and when you don't, so apparently you too are your own generalist.
There are no "expert generalists"! If you wanted one, you'd need an even more general generalist to choose which generalist was trustworthy...
I think my comment was misinterpreted, but it's not clear how.
it does require maintenance but choosing the right plants can do wonders
It has been widely observed that humans, having adapted to life in the African savannah, have a tendency to turn everything into an idealised version of their natural habitat.
Regents Park, or your local golf course, is like a superstimulus version of the nicer parts of prehistoric Kenya. Lots of nice green grass; not too long, indicating grazing animals nearby. Trees scattered around for shade, but not too many. A bunch of clearly visible landmarks for easy navigation. Flowers, indicating... fruit maybe? I’m not sure. Either way, it’s exactly the sort of environment that an omnivorous savannah ape ought to prefer over any other.
Anyway, I like lawns because my genes tell me to like lawns.
We can, and do, rise above our evolutionary biology if it suits us. It's a good thing too, or violence and rape would be far more prevalent.
I don't see this claim in the comment you originally replied to. The poster gave a theory as to why people like lawns, they did not say that this means we should have them.
To reset my mind I take trees (that often come with some wild meadow and grass), or forest every time. A neatly trimmed lawn is for sports pitches.
Citation needed. My anecdotal experience doesn't agree.
> It has been widely observed...
Really? By who?
> ...that humans, having adapted to life in the African savannah,
Citation, again, needed. As far as I know, practically no ancient hominid artifacts have been found in the 'African savannah'.
> ...have a tendency to turn everything into an idealised version of their natural habitat.
Except that lawns are absolutely nothing at all like an 'African savannah'. And the fact that the largest part of humanity (India, China) live in habitats that resemble ant hills more than they do a savanna.
When Jan Smuts coined the term [1], he was unfortunately at a too immature scientific stage to pave the way for a careful and thorough academic field of study. Moreover, due to his political full time occupation he never got to the stage of forming a precise idea of what he wanted his book to be about. I personally think that his book should have been a fine ecological assessment rather that a somewhat philosophical treatise.
But to answer your question, I think absolutely they are able to provide such advice, with the limitation that it would be holistic in a small and specific context. For example, recently a scientist commented to me that wildebeests being replaced by cattle (wildebeests are not endangered) does actually not negatively affect the microbial biodiversity. But the comment was about specific biomes in a specific area. When you move from grasslands to bushveld, then cattle have a side effect of stimulating the growth of sekelbos [2].
The way I take it, Holism and Evolution was Smuts's response to Darwin's work and in a more ideal world, Smuts's work could have been a nice addition to On the Origin of Species. Smuts's main observation was that the whole is often "greater than the sums of parts". I lament the lost opportunity, but this kind of idea even occurs in pure mathematics. That is why you take transitive closure when you take the union of two or more equivalence relations.
In the ecological context, what he essentially meant is that two species in isolation from each other, as a whole, has a smaller ecological impact than those same two species living interactively.
I have not read his book, but I understand it to be (in the scientific formulation sense) unfinished.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holism, first sentence [2] https://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sekelbos
It’s just grass with pesticides.
I take care of about two acres of lawns across a few properties for a few decades. I’ve never put pesticides on the lawns. Herbicides, sure, sometimes lots of herbicides, but all very much plant specific. I suppose some places must use pesticides, but here in the middle of the US grass just sort of uses sun, water, nitrogen, and some other stuff and grows.
Also the sentence attributing Illinois prairie loss to global warming is hogwash. Global warming didn’t turn the prairies into giant farms.
So, grumpy stuff said, I do keep lots of varied native plants too. Grass is just for the area that want to survive occasional foot traffic and be open to show something else.
It wasn't perfect, nobody cared. There were dandelions, there was some clover.
If you can bear to tolerate the fact that your lawn isn't going to look like a putting green, you can do literally nothing but cut it and perhaps water it if your climate requires and be done with it. If there are plants you don't want in your lawn, take them out with your hands or a hoe. If you can't be bothered, then be happy with what you have. If your lawn really can't grow without intense chemical assistance, then maybe don't have a lawn.
Upvoted to try to fix the balance of downvotes.
It reads wrong to me but I get it.
as lawn owner, i like the flowers, and abhor the dense wad of ugly they leave behind after seeding, which in my experience actively displaces the grass that was trying to grow there.
The infection needs to be removed and defended. Entire neighbourhoods need to work together on this; one lazy house is enough to poison the block.
We have a corner of garden that we left to nature to get a little wildlife oasis. The nettles and brambles nature added need regular effort to keep controlled, the dandelions are mostly benign in amongst the 6"-foot long grass, they don't dominate like they do on a cricket pitch length lawn.
Nah. A weed is an undesired plant, primarily, but also typically one that grows and spreads aggressively and doesn't play nice with the sort of plants one actually wants to cultivate in an area.
This is the easiest way to prevent them from multiplying while not wasting them.
Dandelions are pioneer species, they out complete grass but they have a really long tap root and are pulling up minerals from deep and bring them to the surface. They are very short and cannot complete with the shrub layer, the vining layer, and tree layer, and the canopy layer.
Heck they cannot even complete with normal prairie plants which grow 4 to 8 feet tall at my house.
A lot of dandelions taking over an area is a hint that that area is lacking a lot of basic needs of other plants. The dandelion fills a void to make the place more suitable for other life, not the other way around.
Steam the leaves to reduce the bitter taste. Wash the white latex from leaf stems which is also bitter.
[1] https://www.graffitiboeke.co.za/af/a/Soek/0/price+DESC/Erik%...
Herbicides are a type of pesticide.
Herbicides—like insecticides, fungicides, and rodenticides—are a subset of pesticides. So it is impossible for you to never have put pesticides on the lawns if you have put herbicides on them.
Also, glyphosate (RoundUp) is debated as far as safety... and unfortunately for Monsanto, they got too cozy with the EPA and trying to ghostwrite positive scientific studies that no matter the scientific evidence one way or another, a jury found them responsible for causing cancer in civil trials. [2]
[1] http://www.npic.orst.edu/factsheets/triclogen.pdf [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/05/30/727914874/sa...
However, this has nothing to do with why the city's ordinances require a properly maintained lawn.
Subsection B6 states that "The following are hereby declared to be health nuisances affecting public health ... rank growths of vegetation upon private property [which] ... harbors rodents or vermin". This is one of the first 3 reasons listed.
https://library.municode.com/ok/tulsa/codes/code_of_ordinanc...
Everything from fruit trees to berries, flowers to vegetables, herbs to herbal teas like chamomile.
Strongly recommend looking at what will grow in your area and start replacing your lawn. Chunk out a four by four foot section and grow some sugar peas and tell me it wasn't a thousand times more rewarding than a lawn.
With a kid, I’m suddenly super grateful for my little lawn.
I have a kid and I'm grateful we gave up our lawn. She plants in the spring, harvests, cooks, and preserves with us. She's excited to make pickles, jam, squash, pumpkins, corn, etc from things she's grown and tended to. She even got to pick out some of the flowers and make her own little square.
Watching her step out to grab some blueberries, raspberries, or strawberries is one of the best feelings in the world.
We read seed catalogs together in the winters and plan what we could grow (Ooh, what if we grew purple cauliflower? Or rhubarb for pie!)
I'd agree if you have a house big enough to have a playroom, and have open space close by, it's probably easy enough.
Our lawn is kinda a tiny, tiny, wildflower meadow, ie it's not cut much. The bees love the Clover.
There's also a substantial difference between a "natural" lawn, where clover and other plants are allowed vs the stereotypical "perfect" lawn (in the US) with a single grass species (and heavy application of herbicides and fertilizers).
It's almost like sweeping statements such as "no one should have a lawn" need modifiers. ;o)
I'd guess grass is still better environmentally than gravel; so long as you don't over tend it (and our mower was rescued from the dump).
Have fun.
You have to mow it. You have to mow it every week. You have to mow it every week even if you're tired, or sick, or it's hot, or it's cold, or it's rainy, or your friends are playing a game, or you had a sleepover. No excuses, no exceptions. You can't mow it too early in the morning, or too late in the evening. You can't stop halfway through and do the rest later (back yard/front yard perhaps, but not half of the front yard). The grass does not care what your reasons are. It just cares that you didn't mow it. If you don't, it punishes you. Sometimes the neighbors do, too.
In theory they understand this, in practice there are plenty of other activities that result in a litany of renegotiations. Grass. Doesn't. Care.
Edit: To add a bit of context here a lot of people are talking about pesticides and fertilizer and stuff like that but we don't do anything like that, we just mow it when it gets a bit long. Does that mean our lawn is technically a meadow?
A meadow, or natural lawn, or whatever you want to call it would be a mix of grass, clover, and other "weeds". It wouldn't require anywhere near as much chemical treatment (if any) and could be mowed and watered far less often. To me, it would also be allowed to grow long enough to flower, to promote pollinating insects.
I tend not to let the clover or dandelions flower though, as it attracts bees to the lawn, and barefoot children (very common in my country, and not looked down on like in the US) and bees on a lawn aren't a happy mix.
My garden is filled with heaps of flowering annuals and perennials though.
In my limited experience (ex cub leader [mixed sex groups], church kids helper, worked with children for 15 years; kids and nieces/nephews of my own) most boys behaviour declines rapidly if you don't "run them", but most girls aren't affected in the same way.
On our scout camps (mixed sex, mixed age, for the last 20 years at least) in free time the girls _tend_ to retreat to their tents and chat and the boys _tend_ to hit the field and run around like idiots. There's obviously a lot of selection bias in these groups too, they do outdoor pursuits, rough camping, etc. -- these girls are fit and hardy and as capable at kayaking/hiking/climbing/backwoodsmanship as the boys (indeed at the top end, 14yo, the girls are often fitter and stronger as they tend to grow a little earlier than the boys do). There's probably some observer bias too, of course, and this is anecdotal (but longitudinal).
My observations of toddlers at "mums & toddlers" groups suggests the ones who run around with a pram are usually boys (though that's far from exclusive; and the mothers [it's about 1:30 men] have very strong gender bias, which might be the origin of that effect).
YMMV.
Interested in other observations, FWIW I'm in the UK.
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/exercise/physical-activity-guid...
I always just took them as fun time and some kids took them as annoying burden that should be avoided. I not once thought about that they are necessary to develop my body and motor skills.
I always took Judo training as a near perfect way to improve my movement skills though.
We do set rules, it's just that we don't always maintain them very strictly, and he loves to bend them. And when he does play outside to get more Minecraft time, he thinks 15 minutes outside it enough.
It seems he just has no idea what to do outside. As a kid, I regularly played outside, probably because I had to, and so did the other kids in the neighbourhood, so we played outside. But none of his friends plays outside, so there's nothing to do for him outside.
What doesn't help is that we live in a city: no backyard, no fields or forests behind the house, and watch when you cross the street. Plenty of playgrounds fortunately, but the youngest, who loves to play outside, is just 5, which is a bit young to be outside on his own, so he's learning to adapt to indoor play. Maybe playing outside is getting trained out of kids because of the environment we live in.
Regarding setting rules: Kids are very bright when it comes to getting their way. If there's any loopholes they'll exploit them. If they detect weakness in resolve then they'll push and push using negotiation, guilt, deception, etc... The question they're trying to figure out is, is my parent in charge or can I be? The hardest but best thing you can do as a parent to instill disciple is to be clear, consistent, and follow-through. It's really hard. I'm in the midst of it too!
I loved playing in that yard. It had great places to hide. Ample trees to climb. Wildlife to look for and learn about. A variety of fun tasks to perform, from picking fruit and berries to making jam and juice.
When my younger brother turned 10, our parents decided that he had to play football. Almost all of the trees were felled. Everything I loved about that place was destroyed, and replaced by one, big, boring, lifeless lawn.
Instead of fun tasks, I was thenceforth assigned the task of mowing the lawn. Which I resented and continue to detest to this day.
A garden is always going to be better than a lawn. A garden of plants that grow faster than trees may be higher-maintenance, though.
Playing in his yard was way more fun.
You know, lawns were simply not a major factor in that, outside of perhaps once-in-a-year water gun fights with some neighbor kids, the wilderness held far more appeal. Back-lot tracks, untilled fields, marginal scrubland running along stream beds. That was where the majority of my 'green time' took place.
I do remember a few families around the village that had completely unkept, wilderness yards. They provided far more entertainment than any with manicured lawns.
The irony is that people think a lawn is easier to maintain because it looks simpler
We on the other hand make hay. Meaning depending on the year, we spend several hours once or twice a year to cut the meadow (by scythe, but that's just because I like that). And then some more time to turn the hay and bale it to produce something which is then worth some money. And yields vivid fauna&flora (we also never cut everything every year, some random parts can stay till the next year). Still I get neighbours telling me 'wow that's a lot of work you put in there'. At first I thought they were joking but theye are not: I really have to do the math for them to make them realize several hours every month is way more work than what I do (and that's not even talking about the money spent). I'm not sure why that is. Maybe they perceive running behind a mower or sitting on one not as work. Or not as lost time. Or they see a scythe and think it's extremely hard work.
> you might just as well have concrete and paint it green
No, you would miss out on the feel of soft grass under your bare feet, and your kids and dogs would be having a whole lot less fun playing in the yard.
> Maybe they perceive running behind a mower or sitting on one not as work. Or not as lost time.
A lot of people find lawn-mowing relaxing. It's light physical labor, it has an immediate payoff, it involves motors and/or engines and/or tools depending on your preference, and the smell of fresh-cut grass is amazing.
Should have made this more clear perhaps, but I only put in that farmer's concrete quote (which I don't agree with for the reasons you mention) for the biodiversity aspect not everything else grass-related :)
A lot of people find lawn-mowing relaxing.
Yes but that is true for me as well so doesn't really explain why more than one neighbour made a similar comment about me spending more time mowing than they do while in reality it's the opposite, by far. Maybe it's just coincidence (N=3) and/or maybe they were just making conversation or so.
probably better
Considering the biological side, it's way beyond 'probably'. For example [1] gives a rather high-level overview and [2] goes into (one of) the more specific aspects. [3] also talks about the history/future bits.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19092 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632071... [3] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6411/148.full
The mowing is the easiest part, at least for my relatively small lawn.
If you have a grass that matches where you live and don’t mind your lawn occasionally being brown, none of that is needed.
Compared to a well established bed of flowers, which every season at the very least needs:
For a garden with flower beds the size of the typical lawn I'd say there is at least the same amount of work required. And you need to have quite a bit more knowledge for it to be easy, compared to a lawn anyway.For a vegetable garden there is significantly more work involved.
There is realistically something to do every single week.If you live a place where it rains enough for the grass to make it on it's own, it's the path of least resistance only bested by a concrete slab, or perhaps tiled that you spray to kill weeds.
A woodchip mulched strawberry patch uses requires zero human labor except from harvest and the occasional propagation of runner plants which 4x each year. All you have to do is cover with leaves, straw, or evergreen branches to help the crowns over winter and they will be back each year.
Raspberry canes will literally walk all over your property and only need to be mulched (with leaves, grass clippings, or woodchips) to keep them looking tidy)
The gas used to power mowers is a huge subsidy. A vegetable garden bed uses a lot less energy and time. Remember to cover vegetable garden beds in fall and winter.
All of the bullets on your list are optional in a veg garden and perennial garden. I don't rotate my crops unless I have a compelling reason to do so (like a pest eating all my potatoes)
For perennial crops, you still need to do more work. Manure (and you have to source it too), mulch and pruning is a bare minimum. If you care about the harvest, you have to continuously keep an eye on it and treat various problems. For apples in particular it's imperative to remove monilia infected fruit continuously, and especially after harvest. You also have to prune the crop to ensure a larger harvest.
A garden is as much or as little work as you make it, but a lawn is probably the lowest bar of minimum work if you get enough rain to water it. It didn't become popular because it's more useful that everything else, but because you really don't have to do much work to keep it.
When Roomba came out everyone flipped like it was an amazing invention that nobody had thought of. All I could think of was that little yellow lawn mower diligently mowing its grass. Cute little guy is still running today.
Why don't more people have these? I'm gonna buy one when I have a yard.
edit: I see they are decently expensive. If they work still totally worth it.
Just mowing less isn't perhaps simpler by the definition of it but is way better for biodiversity. You could try it in just a small piece of your current lawn and see what happens. Mow once near the end of spring and again once 3 to 4 months later. Shouldn't take long before native flowering plants will pop up.
It's particularly difficult with the mild Winters we have had of late because it's almost as if spring goes from December to May now. Sods like Bermuda or St Augustine still go dormant in fall but the weeds don't stop growing.
Grass types are a reflection of the climate and vary dramatically due to factors such as sun, growing season, and soil composition. In Florida the soil composition is mostly sand, and they receive a lot of year round sun so the predominant grass is St. Augustine because it thrives and produces thick turf that chokes out weeds.
St. Augustine is also very similar to Crab Grass, which is considered a weed in many places, like Georgia. And it is easily killed by all but a few herbicides (e.g. MSM). So while St. Augustine is great in Florida, doesn't work well in Georgia where the soil composition promotes more aggressive weeds, and the tree canopy inhibits St. Augustine's growth.
In other words, Florida grass is Georgia weeds.
> Up here it's mostly weeding, adding soil where needed and reseeding every spring, mowing it every couple of weeks, and watering once in a while. Maybe 2-3 rounds of chemicals a year if you want that healthy deep green lawn look.
In the south your yard can grow 4-6 inches a week and during the growing season you sometimes have to mow as frequently as every 5 days. The mowing season in Georgia is from March to November for grasses that go dormant, it's year round for those that don't.
Weeding is a year-round chore and many people opt for year round weed services that spray for weeds on a monthly basis if not more frequently. Pre-emergent weed control is put down in February or March, and other herbicides are used through out the spring and summer.
Fertilizer is only done a couple times a year and varies depending on the type of grass.
Source: friends and I installed native lawns.
I'm personally a huge fan of native lawns, but this is always in the back of my mind and I haven't seen it addressed.
Weekly maintenance is similar - just mow it (though let it grow long when it's flowering - cut off the flowers and you lose the pollinators).
Not really, but I hate the stuff. I finally managed to get most of it plucked out of my front yard. Hopefully the additional clover will displace it fully next season.
It's OK to kill plants so just get a small variety and see which ones take over. They sort themselves out or they don't and you try again next year.
We've replaced our lawn with wild savanna, and it's zero work. We just let it go. It looks totally wild, and I'm happy with that. (Getting it in place - removing the invasives, improving the soil, planting trees, and spreading native wildflower and grass seeds was a lot of work - but since its established its very little work. Just occasionally walking through it and pulling out the invasives that are trying to move back in.)
Part of the change that needs to happen is a change in our aesthetics.
Community reputation means a lot more than some people realize. Source: I've been on both sides of this one.
That's a 1946 ideal. In the same way that it was a 1946 ideal to build a residential-only neighborhood away from the big city, with racist covenants and redlines to keep the black people out. It was designed to evoke the manicured lawns of English and French castles, especially the "green carpet" at Versailles. Mount Vernon and Monticello and the White House featured grass lawns. And the mechanical lawnmower opened that aristocratic status symbol up to those without herds of grazing animals or scything slaves to keep it close-cropped. That, and lawn bowling and golf courses, made everyone crazy for grass lawns.
Abraham Levitt (of Levittown) and Frederick Law Olmstead then installed a whole complex of unreasonability into generations of Americans.
It is reasonable to surround yourself with people, each of whom arranges their affairs such that they need not have similar opinions on the disposition and upkeep of each other's properties. It is reasonable to mind your own business when someone else rips out their useless bermudagrass and replaces it with edible flowering herbs. It is very unreasonable to march up to their door to wave HOA covenants and city landscaping ordinances in their face in an effort to make them replant the grass. Yet that is what neighborhood busybodies do on a regular basis. We can't get rid of them, because they have the 1946 racists on their side, and they got there first, and they built entrenchments--legally, of course, as actual entrenchments would ruin the neighborhood aesthetic.
If you want a lawn, buy yourself a nice, square mile of property in the country, build a castle on it, and cut down everything that could hide approaching infantry. Rotate your herds around so that the grazing fodder is kept short. Then you can also have the formal gardens in the back, and maybe also a hedge maze. If you want a lawn in the suburbs, fine, but keep it on your own property and don't try to grow it over your neighbors' properties with some sick legal scheme.
The irony here is that your response violates the very same principals for which you seem to be advocating. "If you want _____, follow my instructions exactly". Hmmm....
- I am fully aware that the kinds of rules, in particular, that spurned this conversation have been (and likely continue to be) abused as a facade to hide bigoted motivations. I absolutely DO NOT condone the tactic of using "personal freedom" as a means to promote these kinds of views. That IS NOT the point I was trying to make, rather, that people often _do want_ to surround themselves with like-minded people. The social science on this is crystal clear.
The fact that land covenants were overwhelmingly used for racist purposes is just the largest strike against them, not the only one.
Nobody is forced to purchase HOA property, but everybody has to live somewhere, and pay for that out of their income. If you pin a map wherever some member of the household has to be at some time every weekday, and draw 30-minute isochronic lines for the commute time from each pin, and then sum all the household incomes and multiply by 25%, you can find the intersection of the isochronics, filter out housing that exceeds the rent/mortgage budget, and possibly find that everything that remains is HOA controlled, or that there is nothing left. You can draw new isochronics for longer commute times, or you can choose a property that is not perfect, by virtue of being encumbered by covenants. That "live somewhere else" mantra favors the rich over the poor, simply by virtue of having options available that are more expensive than some people can afford.
I don't believe that community standards should be codified and given the force of law. The standards should be voluntarily upheld by the community. And that requires actually building a community first. Of real people. And that is not a profitable activity for suburban cookie-cutter subdivision home-builders. So the HOA is set up beforehand by the developer, to resemble the sort of community that they imagine people with plenty of house-buying cash might like. Oh la, this vision somehow always includes grass monoculture lawns. And a few of those people can move in during phase I and set themselves up as the HOA overlords. The developer continues to advertise and sell, and then automatically bails when the lots sold cross the percentage threshold, leaving everyone to the mercy of the busybodies, whom they have invested with contractual authority.
Some of us just want to live at a location, and generally be left to our own devices, without being subjected to intrusive assholes all the time.
It's easy to say "just live somewhere else". It's not so easy to live anywhere that isn't spoiled in some way by a negative externality in one form or another. Don't like coal plant exhaust? Live somewhere else! Don't like noise pollution? Live somewhere else! Don't like the smell of rancid livestock manure? Live somewhere else! Don't like a jerk threatening you with foreclosure because you didn't pay the HOA tax and your grass is 10" high? Live somewhere else! Don't like it when people erect TV or radio antennas and paint their front doors purple against the standards of the architectural committee? Live somewhere else!
It is better (in my opinion) to prevent those negative externalities from spoiling people's enjoyment of their own property. Barring some legislated community standard that does so, the only truly effective way to keep your neighbors from screwing up your lifestyle is by effectively not having any. Move to the center of your own square mile.
> Barring some legislated community standard that does so, the only truly effective way to keep your neighbors from screwing up your lifestyle is by effectively not having any. Move to the center of your own square mile.
Can you not see that the above is essentially saying, "Either create community standards where you live, or (wait for it...) live somewhere else!"? Your argument boils down to "YOU live somewhere else!"
Living on the square mile is the hyperbole non-option. Most people can't live on their own square mile with effectively no neighbors, so they have to find some way to get along with the neighbors they will always have. They either can't afford it in money, or they can't afford it in travel time.
Should I have said "go live on the Moon", or "go live on a libertarian seastead", instead? It's supposed to be an unreasonable alternative to being reasonable to all your diverse neighbors.
Go grow your wildflowers on your nice, square mile of property in the country instead.
There’s nothing admirable about petty rebels who’ll cry “racism” at the first sign of something they disagree with.
There's nothing wrong with a yard full of native plants. You should stop trying to keep up with the neighbors and start letting people live their lives without your input.
The reality is that the community around you can and _does_ produce effects material to your life, even if you aren't aware of them. Maybe you weren't invited to that BBQ? Maybe you then missed the opportunity to connect with someone in your field of work? Who knows...
Personally, I've never experienced a neighborhood with a strict HOA that I could stand to stick around in. There always seems to be a minority with too much time on their hands playing neighborhood CIA operative and acting like they've just received power for the first time in their lives. I know that might be a little harsh but there always seems to be some variant of this around.
I live in a condo now where those people still exist, but it is so much better. They have much less power and visibility.
Focus on how sustainability is good for people and how it will improve their lives. If they prefer orderly, manicured lawns, don't look down at them saying they need to change their aesthetics.
Chickens are another option.
This is about learning how to fit ourselves comfortably in to nature - because pretending we can be above, outside, or removed from it is sending us careening towards disaster.
It's gonna be a hard sell to get people to enjoy something their grandparents overwhelmingly knew to be inferior.
We have the benefit of better science and a bit of hindsight and can see how the move to lawns has caused pollution on a massive scale and reduced native insect populations. I think at the very least stopping the use of fertilizers and adding wildflower gardens at the borders of your yard is a good plan.
The mosquites were here before the transformation - they come from the scrapyard up the road - and the changes we've made have actually reduced them in the local area. We've increased the number of frogs, bats, and dragonflies to keep them under control. We don't have ticks to speak of, the possums take care of them.
As for hay fever, you get that in suburbia just as bad or worse. You realize that the Yew bushes that everyone loves planting are among the worst producers of allergenic pollen, right?
Again, this is part of the aesthetic change we need to make. Realizing that we are a part of and depend upon the natural environment. And figuring out how to fit ourselves into it comfortably, instead of trying to remove ourselves from it or pretend we are somehow above it or separate from it.
I'm sure the landlord went with it because it drops their groundskeeping costs to something approaching zero. But it's been great for everyone else involved, too.
If you have an HOA - there might be a bit of problem...
1) grow things like wildflowers that don't get eaten (but do get pollinated) 2) grow things that produce more than you need (tomatoes in our case, but summer squash is another good example) 3) grow things that produce more than can be eaten by the critters (pumpkins) 4) grow things that most critters don't want (chili peppers, basil) 5) enjoy the fact that some critters got something to eat, instead of treating it like a problem. We don't try to keep anybody out of anything.
#5 is easier for us than it is for a lot of people, I'm sure, but it's easier if you get #1-4 right. If I were growing things that took lots of effort I might be annoyed but where we live (southeastern Pennsylvania), most things just grow.
If there's a local butcher they're a ready supply of the stuff, and it helps your local markets so win-win. Or if you already hunt for meat (or have friends that do), it's just making sure you're using even more of the animal, so again, win-win. If you don't think that locally sourced meats are ethically/environmentally sustainable then... ummm... /shrug; there's other methods, but none that have been as effective for our plot size.
Other things I tried that did not work:
Repellents, both natural and synthetic including but not limited to deer blood, other animal blood, predator urines (tried multiple types and brands), soaps and bitter and/or spicy repent sprays and gels.
Fake snakes, fake predator models and even real predators (not uncommon for foxes and coyotes are to be seen in our neighborhood).
Noisemakers and motion activated lights.
Lots more.
I wasted a ton of time and money trying the above, not to mention all the time spent gardening only to have it eaten by our woodland friends. A fence just works and does not harm animals. It can look very attractive too and can be relatively inexpensive if you keep an open mind w/r/t materials and look out for good deals/craigslist.
Probably works better in a square lot than a rectangular one.
Most other yardwork activities can be done in the damp, or even in the rain (hello REI/Patagonia). Gardeners will tell you never to dig in wet soil, but the clay content in coastal soils is so low in many areas that it's a non-issue.
Agriculture is a major user of ground and surface water in the United States, accounting for approximately 80 percent of the Nation's consumptive water use and over 90 percent in many Western States.[0]
Households only make up a small percentage of the total water consumption worldwide[1].
Recommendations to cut foods that require an inordinate amount of water per calorie are probably better served(if you care about freshwater consumption) and it appears the simplest way to reduce this would be to cut out bovine meat.[2]
[0] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-practices-management/ir...
[1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/water-in-water-ou...
[2] - https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...
Hint: Turf grass.
Figure all the land used to grow lawns plus all the land used to grow grass seed plus all the land to grow sod... It's absolutely staggering amount of land, whole integer multiples of the land we use for corn or any other irrigated crop.
Link to the actual paper, from 2005, is in the article.
USDA estimate for corn crop in the US is almost 92 million acres.
Note that the paper claims that turfgrass is 3x larger than the largest irrigated crop, not that it's larger than all crops. Only about 20% of US corn is irrigated (~80% is rain watered only).
[1] - https://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVI/8-W27/milesi.pdf
[2] - https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/07/29/corn-americas-lar...
> “Get rid of your lawns,” she said. “Lawns are total biological deserts. It’s just grass with pesticides. The way it’s grown does not support a lot of biodiversity.”
But if doing that was as pervasive as owning a lawn? You’d bet[1].
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ods-phaseout
You are responsible for yours and who it infects. Is yours a sustainable one? If not, you're likely programming the world to die off.
It's not only about you. It's about the ripple effects of you and a greater understanding of responsibility in the face of culture as a force to reckon with.
Most of the world is in neither one of those places.
The somewhat ludicrous figure provided at that link - of 15,415 litres of water per kilogram of meat - is oft' cited by vegetarians and vegans, but doesn't bear scrutiny.
CAFOs are undeniably bad for everyone (the land, the animals, and the consumers) and while they doubtless skew the stats, those grossly artificial environments are clearly not locking up 15 tonnes of water per kilogram of meat.
Something closer to natural - say pastured raised cattle - are using much more reasonable volumes of water, especially at low stocking rates. But the whole 'using water' claim is muddied. The water the animal drinks passes through it and into the ground. Irrigation of the pasture, if performed, can't be thought of as 'lost' water either, as some will go underground, some will be lost as transpiration / evaporation, and some will be stored in the plant to then be consumed by the animal (qv).
> Why do lawns even factor into the equation when the reality is ...
Because lawns are, for most people, for most of the time, pointless wastes of land, water, pesticides, and energy. There are myriad (good) reasons to surrender some lawn and instead grow some of your own food -- TFA just pointed out one of the less obvious ones.
Yes, it's not like the water is destroyed. It may be diverted from directly flowing into a river, sure, and perhaps goes straight back to the atmosphere rather than into the sea via evaporation, exhalation, and transpiration... but it's not gone.
It's still not a perfect perspective, because the exact nature of what's in the water can be an issue (i.e., urine is "bad" for most uses, but may fertilize well, etc.). But it's at least closer to the truth than the mindset that water is poured into a cow and disappears from the universe entirely. If goodness and pureness was a one-time consumable item that way, the way some people seem to conceive of it, the ecosystem would have run out of it billions of years ago. It is a renewable resource.
Evaporated water will come down again as precipitation.
Your example (cotton) is a truly horrendous crop / textile, but that story sounds like a combination of very poor crop choices for the environment and spectacularly poor resource management.
Also, if you apply water at or beneath the ground/mulch layer, overnight, then your loss to evaporation is very low. Similarly, even suspended drip irrigation (think grapes or other trellis grown plants) versus mist or sprinkler systems.
Lawns, coming back to TFA, are almost exclusively irrigated by sprinklers, and because they're primarily residential (ie. no automated irrigation systems) they're often watered by hand during the day -- so incur a high evaporation loss.
I agree, most of our water is technically "reused". However, one minor caveat is that if it goes down the drain then it most likely gets mixed-in with sewage and thus needs to be treated before being released. Which can definitely be some sort of resource burden.
Edit: Formatting.
CAFOs are objectively horrendous things. Feeding grain to ruminants is also horrendous.
Using lots of fresh water, pesticides, herbicides, and fossil fuels to grow grain on high quality land -- rather than allowing grazing animals to graze on marginal lands -- is a highly dubious practice.
Nothing about that cycle is good for any of us, any of the animals involved, or the soil or water resource management.
When you get people to make small changes like this, they’re more likely to support big changes in polls and at the ballot box. That’s the lever by which one moves government and industry.
Note that the suburban lawn does not need chemicals. If you want green colored lawn you need them. If you want green as in good for the environment a lawn without chemical input does fairly well, but it won't look as nice.
That's not what this article is about at all. But that's cool, I guess.
I keep trying it in Seattle, but the invasive blackberry bushes and scotch broom keep throttling the native stuff.
It was our old pal Louis and his Versailles palace that introduced the close-cropped grass lawn. It was kept short by grazers and gardeners. The poor used their near-house property to grow vegetables and culinary herbs. The rich used it to feed cows or sheep.
It wasn't until the mechanical lawnmower that the grass lawns became entirely useless. Grass is ruminant food, and ruminants are meat.
But we don't keep herds of sheep and cows in the grass-friendly suburbs now, because we don't like stepping in or smelling ruminant poop. And all the pesticides and herbicides would be dangerous for the animals and anyone who ate them.
But ruminants were never a part of the American suburban lawn the way they were in old world villages and wealthy estates. American lawns are almost completely post lawn-mower.
The American suburban lawn is an explicitly visual copy by the post-war working class of the luxuries previously available only to the upper classes of both American and European societies, minus the undesirable aspects like manure.
The new resistance to lawns is occurring in places where the post-war fantasy of pseudo aristocratic life for the working class is breaking down, for either economic or environmental reasons.
Checking Internet... mechanical lawnmower 1830 exactly, tennis invented between 1859 and 1865, and Oakhurst Links is the oldest 9-hole golf course in America since 1884. Croquet apparently became popular in the 1860s. So that all checks out.
The lawnmower made the lawn. The lawn games and status-associations made them desirable to have.
So the lawn is essentially a long-enduring symbol of upper-class lifestyle. Resistance to grass lawn mono-culture is a symbolic rejection of aspirational wealth. People who live in personal fantasy-lands love their symbology; undermining their symbols can reveal the lies behind them. Those folks that reject the lawn are essentially admitting that they will never get rich. Maybe America will finally stop being a land of temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and start being one that eats home-grown dandelion salads when not eating the rich.
Of course, when everyone has a perfect lawn is it doesn't serve that symbolic purpose nearly as well (other things take it's place, like exotic travel photos), and it increasingly just becomes a maintenance hassle.
Some of the healthiest old wise ladies I've ever known have had the most vibrant gardens in the neighborhood, whereas the clean/white picket fence guys all seem to be grouc
Sadly, garden souls are often in much worse shape than what natives need (usually very compacted and lacking in organic matter). Some native plants are native to moist soils and would require more water than a (non-invasive) plant from the Mediterranean, for example. But native plants are tremendous fun and there are ton of resources available to help you find the right plant for the right spot.
If you’re not sure what to plant, walk around your neighborhood and see what plants are thriving. If you see something growing well in a lot of gardens it will probably do well in yours too.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkstuin
This summer I stopped at a petrol station located in some remote forest area. There were literally heaps of dead bugs inside and under the neon panels. Since then I have been wondering how much of the insects are killed simply by the lights that we keep on in the outdoors.
> Instead, plant native flowers that provide nectar and pollen for pollinators, Berenbaum said.
I see this a lot recently where I live in Germany, but at the same time I see the opposite as well. Lawn replaced by gravel, often pitch black one. I don't mean that people replace their lawn with parking lots, I mean nice green front gardens turn into minimalist charcoal stone gardens. It has its appeal but not if it is overdone. Is it good for insects? I don't know, certainly not for the flying ones.
My wife and I feel like we are being looked down on by some of our neighbors because we only maw our lawn twice a year and don't use store bought fertilizer or any pesticides. Before our neighbors gave up on us they would tell us a lot about having to get rid of all stinging nettles (especially after getting children!) and the need for yearly scarifying the grass area (which we are actually trying to turn into a rough pasture) and cutting every bush down to a single twig every year so it wouldn't get out of control.
The good news is, if you talk to those people about your own rationale, they sometimes tend to soften their position or even change it completely and relax themselves a bit. Personally I can't wait the day I can sit outside during spring or summer and not be surrounded by the constant buzz of lawnmowers.
Maybe there's more diversity in types of lawns than the anti-lawn crowd like to consider?
Healthy grass, cut somewhat higher than typical will outcompete most weeds. The only weed I wasn't able to control effectively enough this way were grassy weeds (poa trivialis and poa annua). Triv patches had to be mechanically removed and annua needed late summer chemical pre-emergent (CGM isn't effective enough there). Once those were dramatically reduced (from the "yard" I inherited when we bought the place), the organic system was effective in keeping a >95th percentile lawn. That lawn was more resilient and beautiful than any of the chemically fertilized lawns (whether high or low input) I've maintained. In addition, we had more wild rabbits than I've ever seen, providing additional entertainment for the kids.
The big issue with the organic lawn feeding is that it's quite bulky. No more 15 pound bag of sulfur coated urea that would do two fertilizer applications on my small city lawn. Instead, it was 30-50# bags of organic material that had to bought at Agway or Tractor Supply (necessitating a car trip) and couldn't reasonably be stored for a long time due to bulk and being organic (subject to rotting and rodent infestation). It's also more expensive than the chemical feeding, but still not prohibitive.
At an industrial scale, the land used to grow that "fertilizer" could be put to better use growing actual food!
(Quibble: unless the animal feed is itself certified organic, it is not an "organic diet" for your lawn in the recognised sense of the word.)
Note, if you lawn has a wetland or stream do not cut closer than 1 meter to the wetland, the uncut lawn will filter runoff for the wetland/stream and keep everything healthier.
Some of my neighbours would even spray a single dandelion growing in between pavement stones with pesticide spray.
If you're curious about it: we have a nicely sloped back yard but one small part is 1)shrouded by the fence and 2)a tad lower/steeper than the rest, and so it's a mudhole where nothing will grow.
Our HOA is constantly angry about it, as our back yard now doesn't have the required square feet of grass coverage.
Similarly, others have problems getting grass growing in front yards because of house position, slope, and other factors. Constant harassment from the HOA that amounts to "why aren't you spending hundreds of dollars a year constantly re-sodding your tiny patch of townhouse front yard".
My experience is common around here, FWIW. I have friends in different nearby neighborhoods with the same kind of snooping, nitpicking "fix it or we'll put a lien on your house" stuff.
The perfectly manicured lawn, in many places in the US, is a strong signal associated with middle to upper middle class status. It's a signal that you have the expendable income and time to spend on something non-essential.
Many HOAs are used to enforce that signaling, rather than limiting themselves to ensuring physical safety through proper maintenance of homes. You can see this in HOAs that disallow front yard vegetable gardens (though that was recently banned in FL[1]).
HOAs are actually necessary when homes occupy a shared parcel of land, like with townhouses or condominiums. In those arrangements, the landscaping is commonly owned.
The aesthetic enforcement of things like lawns vs native grasses happens more in HOAs that govern large areas of suburban tract housing, where the HOA enforces rules on property that isn't actually held in common.
1. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-p...
They say exactly that in the article.
Personally, I think people don't appreciate how little manual labor can help you focus and keep things in perspective.