The Roaming Ecologist has a few words about lawns.
Lawns – those myopically obsessive (and evil) urban, suburban, and increasingly rural monoculture eyesores that displace native ecosystems at a rate between 5,000 and 385,000 acres per day* in favor of sterile, chemically-filled, artificial environments bloated with a tremendous European influence that provide no benefits over the long term; no food, no clean water, no wildlife habitat, and no foundation for preserving our once rich natural heritage. And there’s the unbearable ubiquitousness of mowing associated with such a useless cultural practice, which creates a ridiculous amount of noise pollution, air and water pollution, and a bustling busyness that destroys many peaceful Saturday mornings. The American lawn is the epitome of unsustainability.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter, and attend your weekly meetings protesting grass, rather than mow my lawn. That season is soon upon us.
But then he also shares this excellent illustration of native prairie plants. They’re all roots! Unlike that scrubby shallow Kentucky bluegrass film on the left, that just forms a superficial mat of roots.
Illustration by Heidi Natura, 1995, of Living Habitats. Click on image to see larger version. 80% of a prairie’s biomass is below ground, which is a part of the reason why prairies are the greatest soil carbon factories in the world. Those roots break up compacted soil, and as a portion of those roots die each year, they add organic matter and decompose into carbon, further enriching the soil; all of this is done without deadly pesticides or equally deadly petrochemical fertilizers.
OK, now what can I do to kill the ground hugging parasites covering my yard and replace them with cool plants like that?
Start by acquiring 8 foot deep prairie topsoil.
Far better to either figure out what should be growing in your region, or convert that lawn to edible plants. You aren’t going to return to an original viable ecosystem on your acre; so instead use it to reduce the number of acres of crop land that is planted at your behest, by eating things you grow yourself.
See, we just got finished replacing my lawn with fake grass and putting in fairly water efficient plants, and I think our yard has never looked better.
Well, I’m putting a lot of what’s called “ground cover” plants in my lawn, native to the area and not grass. Then, for the portion of the lawn that has to be grass (suburban tyranny), I’m putting in a grass that was developed for this area, that is “slow growing, no-mow” and “no-water”, because it has very deep roots that tap down deep into the underground water. Underground roots, no waste of water by me having to water it, no mowing!
The best lawn I ever had was before my street got suburbanized and so I could do whatever I wanted with it. I got some cans of “Wild Meadow” seeds and just threw them around. Soon I had a huge variety of tall flowering meadow grasses and beautiful wildflowers and other stuff that attracted all kinds of birds, bees, butterflies, frogs, toads, and all kinds of little creatures. It was so lovely and lively that even my old cats took to sitting in the meadow all day, instead of on the deck, just sunning themselves and smelling the flowers, like Ferdinand the Bull.
It came back year after year, with no maintenance. And then houses sprang up all around me, and how I wept the day that my meadow had to be mown down! Well, I will get it back as much like that as I can.
If I ever win the lottery and get rich enough to build a house, I plan to have a wall and a Japanese garden. If the neighbours don’t like it they can come over and tell me after they meditate at the koi pond.
Go to Morning Sky Greenery in Morris and ask them for advice.
Here in Portland (and, elsewhere, I assume), we have the Backyard Habitat program sponsored by the Audubon Society. The goal is to remove invasive species and plant natives – your yard is rated by both the fraction of landscape taken up with natives, the elimination of various species of invasives (for higher levels, there is a longer list), and adding animal/bug friendly features – a water feature of some kind, having bare earth for the ground-dwelling bees (and other beneficial insects) etc.
Of course – there’s no reason not to do all that even without the Audubon Society prompting…
Here’s a link:
https://backyardhabitats.org/
http://www.extension.umn.edu/garden/yard-garden/landscaping/establishing-and-maintaining-a-prairie-garden/
Start there?
I was talking about how much I loathe lawns recently. Golf course lawns are bland, boring, and non-nutritious. I can’t stand them.
Hmmm, we have almost all those prairie grasses growing all over our property.
Prairie gardens? What a luxury. I am the despairing owner of a 20-foot stretch of concrete. To say that it is not sun-drenched* would be an understatement. Nothing has ever grown successfully in my yard, not even a large tub of bamboo which should have been able to survive a Korean winter. Maybe I should become a lichen farmer…
* I can tell that the spring equinox has just passed because the top of the boundary fence was touched by a brief glimmer of sunlight slightly before 1pm today. By midsummer it’ll reach about three feet lower, but still only illuminate a small volume for barely four hours a day.
So much death and destruction involved in gardening. So many products for killing things in the gardening sections of shops.
I agree about clipped lawns being sterile, but it’s getting worse than that. Here, in the English Midlands (and, I suspect, a lot of the UK) front lawns are being replaced by hard surfaces – turned into car parks. I’m in a rented house and the front is completely covered in hideous bricks. Also far too many trees have been cut down.
It’s spring. In suburban gardens (such as here) there should be birds. But they’ve gone – the main noise I hear is traffic. There’s no bird song. There are magpies, crows and woodpigeons. I see very few small birds.
When I go to a place where there is undergrowth and mature trees, there is birdsong. The woods fall silent in late summer, but here there is a silent spring in a way I hadn’t thought would happen.
There is a lawn at the back of the house. I have to push the lawn mower. I went round most of the celandines on the lawn the other day! I never water the lawn. But if it’s not kept short, we’re likely to get complaints from the landlord.
If I had a say in what is in the “garden” around this house, it would be very different. Those bricks would be gone!
Soybeans! Pretty and yummy and you have an excuse not to mow them.
Years ago I removed most of my lawn (you can kill the grass without using chemicals – cover it with damp newspapers) and put in native prairie flowers and ornamental grasses. The garden is absolutely beautiful, with an ever changing display of colors from spring through autumn, and interesting seed pods sticking up out of the snow in winter, it is easy to maintain (set it and forget it, no need for fertilizers or watering,) it can handle whatever the climate throws at it, it attracts loads of bees, butterflies, and birds, and the only real maintenance it needs is mowing everything in the spring, in lieu of the burn that would take place in nature.
My favorite thing is watching the birds perch on the plants and eat the seeds right off the plants in the fall!
I can also walk a few doors down from my office and talk to a bona fide prairie ecologist.
My own garden is limited to windowsills and my front stoop (apartment dweller), so I stick to potted herbs. I might branch out to veggies someday. Mown lawns aren’t bad for playing on, but not everyone uses their yard as a soccer field or badminton court like we did when we were kids.
Operabuff @ 13:
They don’t just do that in Autumn. We have patches of wild mints, and it’s always fun to watch the finches perched on them, pulling sticky seeds out. They are on the wild amaranth damn near all year round, too.
In places with cold winters, the lawns are brown in the spring, also when the winter is mild unless there’s moss in the lawn. Of course moss is considered a pest/weed and destroyed with lime because of reasons.
I live in a condo, & they mow the lawn in our back yard. If it weren’t for that, I’m pretty sure that I’d plant a kitchen garden. I don’t expect that it would have much success, though. The resident racoon, rabbit, squirrels, etc would probably see to that.
I have large rock gardens. I plant trees, put down landscaping fabric and then cover it with rocks. After a few years, a surprising number of native plants thrive and bloom in the rock gardens. I also have a few large pots, some of them handmade, in which I plant favorite flowers. There’s very little weeding to do, but then I do live in an area that if left entirely to nature would be mostly desert.
Thanks to suburban tyranny, my rock gardens don’t take up the entire yard. They are bordered by lawn. I wish they weren’t.
My second cousin actually got arrested for never mowing his lawn, so don’t do that, IMHO. I had to bail him out. I think there are actual rolled up mats of planting medium embedded with wildflower and native seeds. Maybe you could roll some of them out in a pattern with some rocks in between for plausible deniability of neglect.
I know I’m demonstrating a failure of imagination and knowledge here, but I’m literally incapable of imagining what SHOULD be put between houses, if not grass. Astroturf? Cement?
I hate that grass lawns are pretty much mandated. They’re high-maintenance, require watering when it’s dry, and aren’t natural. Plus lawn mowers are, pound for pound, the worst type of engines for pollution (not to mention the stress chemicals that grass releases after being mowed).
For the past year, I’ve been attempting a compromise by seeding with dwarf clover. It makes the lawn more draught resistant, fixes nitrogen from the air (via bacteria that grow on the roots), attracts bees and is pretty. We just had to clear it with the neighbour with whom our lawn adjoins.
@21
Well, our lawn is 100% fake and bordered with low maintenance plants surrounded by woodchips. Other people nearby do the “sand and cactus” look, or just a trimmed ivy bush.
Dark Jaguar:
Something wrong with dirt all of a sudden? Dirt that could be planted with native ground cover, grasses, and wildflowers?
So how are those grasses when it comes to shade? I don’t really have a front yard because of the trees around me and I’d love to plant some grasses on some bare spots.
@Golgafrinchan Captain I have a townhome association too which is tied to a horrible management company that rarely does anything. If I tried planting some of those grasses (assuming they could thrive in the shade of the tree in what passes for my hard), chances are they’d get ripped up and replaced with something cheap that’s not even a tenth as good.
I live in a typical suburban neighborhood (complete with lawn warrior neighbors) and I hate them sooooo much!*. I’m required to “maintain” my front yard. But, I’m a passive-aggressive lazy person, so I’ve been slowly adding very large (very!) flower beds that are native wild flowers (and Polk weed, soooo yummy!). I figure, in a few more years, I’ll only have to mow (with my electric mower) a single swath, one mower wide, out by the curb.
Since there are no official strictures regarding the back yard, it’s become a wild zone. I’ve seen at least 5! Different species of lizards so far. :)
*the lawns, not the people.
For those in places where mowed lawns are mandated, I hear good things about swapping out the European shallow-rooted grasses for buffalo-grass (farthest right plant in that image).
To Caine:
So you’re saying I should replace grass with dirt, which I then plant grass in?
Anyway, after reading some of these comments it appears I misunderstood on a fundamental level. The issue isn’t with having a lawn, but with the kinds of plants that are usually in a lawn. Frankly I had never even thought of that. I usually just don’t even care what’s growing out there, assuming I just sorta got whatever was there when I moved in, but I guess I can see your point. I suppose a wild flower field would be perfectly dandy, I just never actually cared or thought that it was possible to change things. I just thought that’s how grass worked unless I ran a park or something.
I planted so many trees 30 years ago that a lot of the grass has been replaced by shade-loving groundcover. It’s harder to maintain than grass, though it looks better. Since health issues have forced me to become less active, I’m taking up gardening. In the spring, this includes pulling up 5,000,0000,000 maple seedlings. It’s a small yard.
As to the plaintive complaint of “no food, no water, no wildlife habitat,” I do try to fill the
birdsquirrel feeders and birdbaths regularly, and put up so many bird houses my backyard regularly sounds like a sparrow convention. (I like the sparrows because they’re so common they’re ignored … and yet they’re as interesting as any other bird, if you like them.)A friend of mine once tried to let her yard go “prairie.” Unfortunately, she tried this in the middle of a city with tiny little lots, including her own tiny little lot. It did not look glorious and open, it just looked scraggly and neglected and I secretly sympathized with the neighbors. I think the idea works best if you’ve got more land. Otherwise, it’s just trying to prove a point, and doing it rather badly.
Cheese plants, suggests the mildly deranged penguin. Generally polite to avoid the extra-smelly ones, and also the mobile carnivorous ones (although some of them can be quite friendly and like being petted, and can be quite good mousers). Amount of shade, unimaginative neighours, local climatic conditions, and angles of approach for incoming penguins should all be taken into account, but there are many low-, no-, or dangerous-to-maintain varieties suitable for the home garden. A good guide is the now-classic Growing Cheeses Without Being Eaten, generally credited to the same monks who brewed the legendary Veryy StrroooNG *Hic!* Biereeee.
It’s funny, I visited the family yesterday. My little nephew got a tree sapling which he really wanted to plant (along with some random veggies in a small garden plot), but my brother doesn’t want leaves to land on his precious lawn, although he spends lots of time mowing and raking it anyway even though there aren’t trees on the property (and the lawn still doesn’t look “perfect”). It’s a weird kind of logical loop he’s stuck in, but he can’t seem to find a way out of it.
In other words, stuff that you don’t actually have to “put” there. You could simply imagine that stuff outside as nature, and you can imagine it will take care of itself.
You already have the house as a separate kind of environment created for yourself, where nothing else gets to live. That’s what takes a lot of work, and the easy thing is to do nothing. So why does that need to keep extending outside the house, or why would you think it’s easier (rather than harder) to keep doing it? And how far does it go? What needs to be decorated by you or at least by somebody, because it’s not acceptable the way it is? Your lawn? Your neighborhood? Your town? Your country? Your continent? Your planet? Is it really that difficult to NOT worry about shit like this?
CR:
Some people moved to my tiny rural town a few years ago, and promptly cut down all the trees on their property because they didn’t like leaves, birds, squirrels or “other mess”.
I love corwyn’s response. That’s what it takes and lots of us don’t live where prairies work.
While lawns aren’t natural, sometimes they are the best option for protecting our soils and water quality.
Here in the eastern mid-Atlantic states native ecology usually involves woodlands.
Sure we can reestablish woodlands, but it’s not happening. People see anti-lawn stuff like this (especially those without 8′ deep prairie soil) and try to create a landscape without lawn. Sadly, it often doesn’t work and they end up with huge erosion problems, lost soil or severely compacted soil.
Our clay soils require some cover and those prairie plants won’t do it here. Even native trees won’t do it for a long, long time. For average landowners, properly planted and cared-for lawn provides the best protection from erosion.
People here want sun for veggies and other plants. They don’t like briers and poison ivy that grow as native understory plants in light woodlands. And people worry about trees falling on their homes and cut down those no one cared enough to correctively prune and train over the years.
Sometimes lawn is the best option.
lynnwilhelm,
Sounds like we’re neighbors. We actually planted an all-native garden in much of our plot a few years back, but we worked with a local company that specializes in native plants to plan it out and plant it. It’s doing quite nicely in the clay soil, and gives us an ever-changing variety of colors throughout the spring, summer and fall (and fortunately my wife enjoys gardening out there, so she keeps it up nicely). They also double-dug a small patch where I try to grow vegetables every year, though it’s the feral ones that usually thrive.
We’ve got a fairly large lawn area in the back that’s mostly there for soccer and badminton, along with a smaller patch in front. Aside from throwing down some seed every so often, the only maintenance I do is to run the (mechanical) mower over it every couple of weeks. So it tends to be weedy and raggedy and not very monocultural, but when child number 2 leaves I’m lobbying to have it replaced with something native.
Make sure what you plant doesn’t need a periodic fire to keep the flora healthy. The Lake County Forest Preserve is getting the prairie reestablished in many of their parks, and they do controlled burns every few years. Nothing like driving down a road seeing a Forest Preserve sign “controlled burn in progress, do not report”.
@Caine #33:
Sounds a bit like they paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.
@What a Maroon
Your place sounds lovely. But it does take a lot of planning and work to keep up. The average suburban homeowner doesn’t want to do that or spend the money.
@ garnetstar #3
I wish we could simply throw out some kind of wildflower mix and get a beautiful meadow. Some people try it and get deeply disappointed because they don’t realize the work involved to prep and then care for meadows here. So many people get turned off gardening after trying those mixes.
Lawn can be the best and even the lowest maintenance ground cover for most people who want their landscape to look good year round. Alternatives are hard to do and most people really don’t like the look of “natural areas” unless they are really well done. (Of course, we can keep working to change what attractive means regarding landscapes!)
Even if you want (or are required to have) a vaguely lawn-shaped thing, it doesn’t have to be grass, or not pure grass. Consider mixing in clover. Violets in the shady bits. Periwinkle is low maintenance and has nice flowers in the spring (in parts of the Pacific Northwest, it may also flower randomly any day of the year), though it may spread more than you like. Marigolds and some other perennials are often accepted by neighbors who would object to dandelions.
Our sister farm in Ri is experimenting with a blend of Tall Fescue, Kentucky Bluegrass and Micro Clover http://plantscience.psu.edu/reduce-runoff/questions-about-microclover . It seems to be going well. The clover provides all the N needed by the turfgrass and if blended properly is hardly noticeable. If you are having to mow your lawn more than once a week, you are feeding it to much. I am growing a blend of compact and compact aggressive cultivars and for most of the season I can get away with mowing it once every week and a half. During the spring I need to mow it every week for a month or so but I am also cutting it at 1.75in The average homeowner is keeping their lawn at 3in and can get away with much less frequent mowing. I am really liking what I have seen of the turf type tall fescues and I think that that is where the industry is moving. They are excellent for a lawn, they are a pain to farm though.
Rich Woods:
Heh. They did, actually. Their house is surrounded by concrete now. Idiots.
I hate maintaining lawn, but walking barefoot in a nice lawn is great, and it is very aesthetically pleasing frame for my various gardens. I am required to keep my boulevards in lawn, but have slowly been replacing them with short vegetation that is either native or an ornamental/ native hybrid. Violets in three different colors, true geraniums, penstemon, black eyed susans, daylilies, and invasive yet pretty ribbon grass are slowly taking it over. I need to get some little bluestem and some of the indian grass cultivars that turn orange and red in the fall. Once you get native prairie established it is almost maintenance free.
I have only gotten one complaint in ten years from the city due to letting the dandelions go to seed one week, but they have never tried to enforce the lawn ordinance as long as I keep it groomed and tidy.
When I worked in Horticultural Sales, I frequently tried to convince home owners to give up lawn space to create planting beds for shrubs/perennials which require less work than lawn. Sadly, I was rarely successful in convincing people since keeping a lush green lawn was frequently a requirement (both written and unwritten) in newer housing developments.
Lawn is almost *never* the best option. Particularly the brand of just-grass that gets promoted by people selling poisons.
There is more area of lawn in the US than the top 9 agricultural crops combined. Lawn mowers in the US burn 800 Million gallons of gas per year, and produce 8 TIMES the pollution that a car would produce using that gasoline. Do I need to talk about the toxins people put where their children play?
Growing food is actually easier than mowing the lawn.
lynnwilhelm,
We cheated a bit by having the company plan it out and plant it for us, but there are plenty of books available to provide guidance, and once it’s established the garden is pretty low maintenance–mostly just weeding and pruning, plus watering in the dead of summer.
A lawn requires a lot more work (depending on how pristine you want it to look)–seeding, fertilizing, applying pesticide and herbicide, mowing, watering…. Not to mention all the upkeep on the lawnmower.
I really like natural gardens but they are not no maintenance especially in the early stages they require, attention, observation and thought to be successful. They can also benefit from aesthetics they can be shaped for effect as well as naturalness and environment.
The result of the care and work and thought put into the garden is repaid in the pleasures received from it.
The lawn on the other hand requires very little thought and with the aid of the vast number of power tools and products designed for lawn care not very much sweat either. To highlight one difference, I was talking to a gardener that was working on a property I was working on and his comment on the work he had just finished was how clean it was. He was in fact not a real gardener he was more a cleaner I asked him about the beauty of some of the plants and he looked at me with a blank expression.. It leaves me with this observation that looking around it appears that most people are doing the same thing, there is not a very deep appreciation of nature or natural beauty, that reflects the disconnect from nature.
uncle frogy
@ Vivec #2
Don’t know where you live, but in Southern California you really don’t want that fake stuff, regardless of what the water districts promote. It get f-ing hot in the summer. I referee youth soccer in a town where most of our good fields are artificial. Last year I worked a game in late Spring. Field got so hot it melted the the other guy’s boots. He threw them away after the match.
It also reflects very well in spite of the dark color. You can get a very nice sunburn and not even know it’s coming –hat won’t stop it.
It, and cement, add to the urban heat island effect. If you need air conditioning to survive the summer, don’t be surprised if your bill goes up.
We have copperheads and rattlesnakes here. A friend was bitten a few days back.
Caine, 41, I’ve been saying for decades now (even before I ended up in city limits where they’ll fine my ass if my weeds are too high, and I only have, well, scissors, so far, to maintain the damn thing with) that I dream of covering all the grass in my yard with concrete, and being done with it.
I would keep my trees. Even the slightly terrifying one in the right place in the back yard to flatten the house someday.
I suppose either the city or the landlord would complain about the concrete, though.
I have odd tastes, garden wise. Although I have a degree in Horticulture, I am not a big fan of flowers (at least the big, blousy, show-offy kind) and I *hate* lawn.
I have tried to go native (New Zealand version), so I use ferns and creeping Fuchsia for ground cover. It helps that my property is pretty soggy for a lot of the year, is on a 45+ degree slope, and that the plants I have chosen are pretty good at spreading themselves around.
The habitat seems to be working…I found a peripatus family under a rotting log two days ago.
I think I would be extremely unhappy in one of those lawn-requiring suburbs…
I’m not sure what type of grass I have.there is some type of rye that comes up in the fall, plus various types of small wildflowers in the grass. The thistles kind of got out of control because of the warm weather and rain this year. I have a mower service come in every two weeks to keep the snakes from having a place to hide. Dn’t use chemical fertilizers or herbicides.
We don’t have a lawn as such on our 2 acres of rural Australia. Most of it is grass of some sort, well, grass and ground covering weeds. We keep most of it mowed quite short, or we used to. These days we mow around the house, maybe a third of the total area, and the rest is eaten down by our neighbour’s two cows.
This is a necessity, as well as required by local by-law. Fire risk in summer here can be extreme and having chest high dried grass next to your home is dangerous. Add to that the fact that Eastern Brown Snakes, Red Bellied Black Snakes, and Tiger Snakes are all native to this region and the dream of walking barefoot through a native meadow becomes a dangerous reality. I always snort at the shot of the movie protagonist strolling through high grass, hand trailing across the seed heads, symbolising the indolence of summer. In my world, you’re wearing your high gum boots, sweat be damned, and are warily tapping ahead of you with a stick to make the snakes bugger off before you tread on them.
I hate this, really, people shouldn’t be living in this environment if we can’t do so and still allow the native wildlife to thrive. I’d love to reduce our mowed area to the minimum safe distance around the house and let the rest grow up; I’d be okay with not being able to stroll through it safely in summer. But even if the law would let me I wouldn’t because doing so would still put our neighbours at greater risk.
Such is life in amongst the gums.
It always takes me a moment to understand that lawn != grass that you regularly mow in US-speak.
I don’t mind the latter, even if there’s still mowing to do. But what grows, grows – you’ll have dandelions and daisies in between various kinds of grass, an occasional primrose in spring. You just mow it down (the flowers will grow back quickly anyway) so that it doesn’t grow to your waist. It’s a shame that couldn’t pass in the suburbs some of you describe.
And of course, rose bushes, sunflowers and oleanders ; maybe a magnolia on the
lawngrass. Oh, now I’m daydreamingRoachiesmom @ 49:
And that’s fine. What bugs me about the people I was talking about? They moved from the city, to deep rural, and they hate trees, leaves, and wildlife. They had all the fucking concrete they wanted, but no, they had to move rural and completely destroy a good portion of the local ecology.
Beatrice
Same here. I mean, we just cut whatever is growing (clover, daisies, dandelions, violets, random crap escaping from the garden…) to a manageable height (though Husband has a thing against moss, I rather like it), with some possible fertilization in early spring, but otherwise… it’ll go for three weeks without a cut sometimes, and still looks good!
The only controlled aspect of grass-care here is roadsides and ditches, I think; to semi-control the spread of ticks and to prevent the early spring habit of burning old grass, most municipalities require that you keep your roadside grass at a manageable level, too (may apply to the actual backyard, but I’m not certain). But mostly, while within city limits, there’s no actual rules on what happens on your own property re: lawn.
@47
We don’t use our front yard for anything other than “that area in front of our house that the law says we have to maintain”, so whether or not it’s comfortable to walk on is kind of irrelevant. You can get from our street to our door without even risking stepping on it. It’s around a 2×2 meter area, with the rest being the aforementioned woodchips with local plants planted in.
Also, yeah, it probably does add to the heat island, but our bills have not changed significantly, and the amount of money and time we’ve saved by no longer having to water or maintain our front yard is pretty sizable.
For the record, at least in my neck of the woods, there aren’t really any grass lawns until you get to the big conspicuous consumption mansions a few miles away. Most people here either do the desert look with cacti, or just fill the front yard with rocks or woodchips,
@49:
No you wouldn’t. They would die. Trees require air and water FROM THE GROUND, which they won’t get if covered with concrete.
Why are people trying to murder the planet, and us with it?
Caine @ 54
The concrete gardeners bring to my mind the story that was circulating some years ago in Finnish equestrian forums about this family that moved to the country, saw neighbour’s gelding dropping its penis on the pasture while taking kids to school, demanded that he be held in different pasture and proceeded to call the cops when they didn’t oblige.
Moved to the countryside, not immigrated.
Ice Swimmer:
Oh FFS. Do people not even know what goes on in the country anymore? Rural is a word, they could look it up in a dictionary.
After an incompetent guy tried to mow over a log and destroyed my mower, I covered my lawn and killed it. Moss, mushrooms and other non-grass are taking hold. No more stupid mowing!
Stop watering it for 30 seconds. ;/
I guess I’m fortunate in that California, as I understand it, now prohibits Fascist Busybody Associations and local governments from penalizing people who remove their lawns and install drought-tolerant landscaping.
…though not fortunate enough to not be stuck in an apartment where it’s a moot point. >.>
My dream lawn is a moss garden. Nice, cushy green carpet that I would not be afraid to sit or lay on. Highly compacted soil would prevent weeds from establishing. No mowing whatsoever.
However, I’m not the gardening type, so I would likely either get a place without a lawn, or just hire someone else to take care of whatever lawn a house comes with.
Interesting. Not american, but here we don’t have any requirements to have or maintain lawns that I know of, and getting a native garden is literally no work as long as you have a patch of dirt. Unfortunately most people do garden and want things to be nice and tidy. It’s a real shame.