The previous owner of my house was maintening a picture perfect green. With the kids and the jobs, I didn't want to follow that practice. Too much time for a soil not made for this, lots of fertilizer, various chemicals...
I fix the dead patches every spring and autumn with clover seeds and compost made from grass clippings, egg shells and vegetables/fruits peels. Zero fertilizer or weed killers, I remove by hand the weeds I don't like once in a while. I rake the garden twice a year to keep moss under control.
5 years later, our garden no longer looks like a green, but a prairie with the usual local plants. Since 2 years poppies are colonizing the most sun exposed parts, with spectacular blooms we are eagerly waiting for. Worms, larvae, slugs and snails are plenty, so birds are always at work foraging. Whatever dies during the hottest weeks regenerates in autumn. Plenty of bees are foraging the clovers and bindweed flowers.
It's looks nice, it's alive, it's much less work and money to maintain, it's self regenerating.
That's awesome - natural and native ecosystems are what we should be aiming for, not sterile lawns. It's better for the environment and for biodiversity, lower maintainence, and you get the benefits of an ecosystem like surprise blooms.
I don't know if you're aware of this (you probably are but I'm posting it for readers anyway) but there's a movement for doing this in many aspects of our nature management called permaculture. It's pretty cool!
I don’t know what a HOA is, but sadly, I think some neighborhoods in the US have regulations against the sort of good practices the OP described. My only source: family members living there, but my information may be a couple decades out of date. Perhaps this is a thing of the past? One can hope.
Last year I mowed only 2 or 3 times in the whole year because my automower died and I wanted to try what happens.
The increase in insects and birds was incredible.
I therefore do not repair or replace the mower. Instead I only regularly mow paths through the garden so I can walk through it and a "central place" where I really need and use low grass. Only 2 or 3 times a year I mow all of the garden with the scythe.
Also stop using herbicide and plant some clover. My neighbors hate me but I (and the bees, bunnies, and other critters) love my almost white lawn in July. It smells great, and the clover keeps the grass healthy.
Not OP, but here was my yard a few years ago. I never planted any, it just spread itself I guess. Very beautiful and attracted bumble bees and rabbits. Apologies for the quality, cheap Android cam 4 years ago, zoomed in at that.
In that particular city, monthly wouldn't fly. The grass would be nearly 8 inches to a foot tall, which means mice, snakes, mosquitoes, ticks, you name it.
Though it's really just the grass and dandelions that grow tall. If I had my way, I'd kill all the grass and just throw out wild violets and clover. So much prettier, and requires way less maintenance.
I move the guinea pig run across our lawn. Once they've cut it down "enough" I move it, so that it overlaps slightly. The wild bunnies do help. It's funny when they look at each other. Cavies inside the run, bunny outside, all of them chewing.
With chickens inside, this would be called a "chicken tractor."
We have chickens, but they free-range for the most part, until they're locked out of the garden. They don't chew the grass, but do eat lots of other things. (And some plants, hence being locked out the garden for summer.)
We have very few rabbits around me. I've heard it's because the nearby golf course provides space for foxes. Otherwise I imagine they'd struggle with all the backyard fences.
My real goal is to provide a maximally inhospitable environment for cockroaches of all sizes.
I don't have any clover here, but lots of flowers. We usually wait with the first cut in spring until the flowers are mostly gone. They displace grass unfortunately, but look very nice, and insects love them. https://i.imgur.com/sbqhEYt.jpeg
Currently in the process of finding a house, and specifically avoiding HOAs. They'd never let something like this fly, which IMO should be illegal(not your yard, rules banning something like your yard).
I rent, but the homeowner doesn't care. We're three parties in the house, one neighbour doesn't care either, and the other neighbour's wife is sad if we cut the flowers :)
Wow! Do you happen to know what flowers you've got planted there?
I would love to do similar. So far I've been doing lots of clover and putting in crocus bulbs randomly.
I didn't plant them, they grow like crazy and destroy the grass :D I don't know what they're called, but I could try one of those plant identification apps. Check back in a few days, I'll try to post a comment if I find out more.
We’re planting clover in our park strip to augment the lawn.
We had some naturally move in last year and we really liked it So we’re going to help it out. It was soft, and keeping the lawn green/alive/pretty in the park strip is notoriously water wasteful.
We just gave up on the parking strip. Close enough to the heat of the asphalt road that it takes a fair amount of water to keep it green. So instead I ripped it out and put in rocks of varying sizes 1-3 inches, along with a few hardy shrubs that can take some abuse and don't grow too fast. Capped all the sprinklers but one next to each shrub and then ran a drip line to it.
The use-case for herbicides are large agricultural fields (several acres) where a worker can no longer deal with weeds individually.
Most herbicides require you to wear PPE. But in the residential market people ignore those instructions. Most of them are also unaware of the existence of safety data sheets, and are also unaware that the product packaging is not required to have every safety instruction for the product. The result: a proliferation of cancer lawsuits against herbicide manufacturers.
After use, herbicides still leave the dead plant behind that needs removal.
So, in practice, using herbicides for a residential yard is as stupid as declawing a cat.
It's a mix of white and pink, mostly white though. I also planted some creeping thyme and I keep a lot unmowed with some wildflowers. I have a decent sized lawn (little over 1/2 acre), but a good chunk of it is taken up by a septic system.
Do you have tall grass too? I planted clover a while back over my existing grass and if i didn't mow i'd still have a foot tall grass, which i find really annoying.
I still love the clover, and it helps keep the grass a bit more sane - but the length of the grass is my primary fight.
No, but rabbit poo is tiny and isn't too nasty. It won't stick to your shoe if you stand on it for example.
Your biggest headache with rabbits is they'll eat other plants you might want (vegetables etc), and will dig burrows in random places. But in my opinion, both those are well worth it for having a lawn that mows itself.
America, the place where one of the cheapest team sports on the planet (real football) is too expensive to be played by poor people and one of the most abundant weeds in temperate climates is too expensive...
It's not too expensive; it's too class-coded. The football/soccer, I mean. There are plenty of poor immigrants playing it. And where I live the clover appears for free. Maybe it's spread by rabbits.
I consider clover to be a weed and go to great lengths to eradicate it. People underestimate how many people just want lawns of perfect, green, undifferentiated grass.
I'm going to be that guy and point out that clover wasn't considered a weed until a chemical that killed clover, but not grass, was developed by Dow Chemical and the company wanted to sell it as a weed killer, so they ran a campaign about it.
The secret was to turn clover from a friend into an enemy. Pesticide companies decided to launch an intensive advertising campaign to convince homeowners that white clover was a weed that needed to be destroyed. They spent literally millions on advertising to persuade unconvinced gardeners.
Probably not independently. You no doubt got the idea from TV, movies, etc which are basically pushing the same propaganda. You think you're above such things, when in reality you're a victim of it.
Propaganda can turn black to white and white to black. And it propagates down the generations better than genetic damage. And we just call it "facts" or something.
"Natural" at my house would be forest. I'd like some local "weeds" instead of grass, but all I get are invasive species, generally from Europe. I don't use herbicide, in any case, and the area is too large to remove all the weeds by hand.
I don't feel the same way about bacteria colonizing my skin as I do about an ecologically dead crop monoculture that came into style among the British nobility as a way to show off wealth (look peasants! I don't need to grow food with my land)
If I ignore the smell of my body I'll eventually be rewarded with a staph infection or worse. If I don't use grass monoculture on my lawn I eventually am rewarded with pollinators, blooms, and an ecologically active space.
Lawns require 200 gallons of drinking water per day. In 2005, the amount of lawn cultivated in the US would cover the entire terrestrial surface of Texas. We use 17 million gallons of gas on lawn mowers every year, and tens of millions of pounds of chemical fertilizer and pesticides. All said, Americans spend more than $36 billion USD a year on lawn care, more than 4x the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency.
At least with a shower I get something out of the water I used. With lawns what do you get? Empty green space. Fuck bees, fuck butterflies, fuck rabbits, I need my neighbors to know I can afford to let my land lay fallow in an aesthetically inert way.
Deodorant doesn't prevent infections, pretty sure that is what parent was referring to. Not showers.
My lawn gets most of it's water from rain actually. We supplement occasionally when necessary. But during drought we just let it go a little brown. Not a big deal.
I still love my lawn and mowing it is a very nice break from sitting on the computer.
Or people who live in extreme climates and rely on HVAC systems to pump air conditioned / heated air in their homes and environments the majority of the time?
The reality is the majority of our modern world and lives can be seen as a waste of energy, resources, and, "hubris against nature" and it seems like there is some subjective line for each person that delineates what is too far.
This just proves my point. Quite a generous framing to support your subjective view! "Technology relevant to our survival in different climates" can also be restated as "wasting energy and resources to support people living comfortably in naturally uninhabitable environments", it just depends on what degree of an environmentalist extremist you are.
Why should we burn endless amounts of gas/coal/other energy when the "natural" solution is to either naturally adapt or to simply live in more habitable environments.
Anyways, yes, I'll give you that comparing HVAC to lawns is silly, but it doesn't take much imagination to think of less silly examples that we accept. So my question is who draws the lines? Whose standard is the standard that everyone should follow? Manicured lawns not cool, ok. What about backyard pools? What about irrigation systems? What about drainage ditches or other infrastructure that allow for land to perk so more housing can be made available, but negatively affects downstream wildlife? Etc, etc.
It's not clear that "drawing lines" is a useful mental model in this scenario.
Speaking personally, it's about externalities: American suburbs have ludicrous amounts of common and private infrastructure, all financed through the lie of infinite and perpetual growth. All of that infrastructure has hidden externalities, ones that aren't being addressed on the individual or state levels. Monoculture lawns are just one tiny example of that, manifest in their cost to the local ecosystem (and additional water demands, pesticide use, &c.).
I think this is a poor analogy. Body odor is a proxy for personal hygiene, and can be anywhere from unpleasant to actively revolting for others. Whereas how nice your lawn looks will pretty much be a matter of subjective opinion. Things that look orderly may be more pleasant to look at, but the lack of order in this particular context is unlikely to, say, make someone gag.
It's worth realizing that carefully curated and maintained lawns are more of a signifier of wealth than anything else. The trend originated in Victorian-era Europe, and somehow stuck.
Yeah Americans not wanting to interact with pollinators is why they are disappearing from our environments. You could achieve the same thing with zero-scaping also, not like you need to waste water to create a pollinator-free zone.
But then it wouldn't look the certain way you want, would it? That seems to be the main concern for Americans.
Aren't there plentiful suitable environments for bees outside of suburbia? I don't think the issue is lack of environment so much as herbicides and destructive habits.
No, I mean wild lands. No shortage of that in Canada. If the U.S. lacks in protected public lands so much, you're kind of fucked in this regard and others. Many cities here aren't just surrounded by farmland, but forested valleys and lakes. That's "the environment".
i stepped on a bee once and only once in my life and it was on the gravelly bank of a river. you know how it's hard to swat a fly? bees aren't trying to get stepped on, abd they're watching more closely than you.
If you don't want a weed on your garden, fair enough, but what's the point of the homogenous-lawn ideal Americans seem to have? It feels like a holdover from something like cold-war cultural propaganda.
Not American, but keep a relatively short mono-cultured lawn. Having short grass keeps the outdoor space usable, my kids can play outside in bare feet with no fear of stinging nettles or bee stings. They're always playing soccer, obstacle courses, or just running around. I have plenty of native and exotic trees and shrubs around the yard, so there is always something for the numerous birds and bees to eat.
What's the point of a manicured English garden? What's the point of a fine suit or dress? What's the point of a nice oil painting? What's the point of a Porsche 911 or Ferrari 488?
People have different preferences and that used to be OK.
I wonder if there's a term for things that used to be Veblen goods, but then became accessible to the average person. Old useless antiques might fall in that category, kept around because they really meant something 100+ years ago.
Maybe I have slow growing grass. I mow every three weeks, and I feel like my neighbors do it every two. I thought weekly mowing was something mostly only seen in fictional portrayals of American fathers.
Here in suburban Australia, in my street anyway, there's several households that do it multiple times a week. My neighbour mows every other day. I had a neighbour in another place who was on his ride on mower every afternoon at 5pm. There isn't a daylight hour of the weekends where you can't hear a mower or whipper snipper (weed whacker in American) in the vicinity. I've really grown to hate lawns.
How hot is it there and how much does it rain? I grew up in Idaho, where in the summer it'd get to 42-44C relatively regularly. And there was at most 200mm of precipitation a year. Most of the grass in my parents' neighborhood was Kentucky Bluegrass. Mowing the lawn weekly was something that happened to help a bit with water retention.
My dad always insisted on mowing every 4 days though.
I don't know about op but keep in mind it's a big country. Very close in size to continental USA. With as much climate variation.
Sydney for example has a higher annual rainfall than places that Americans consider rainy (eg. Seattle). Combine that with warmer temperatures and in many parts of Australia you are fighting a potential jungle more than fighting desertification.
Canberra, the capital, on the other hand regularly gets below freezing which means less mowing required.
Looking at that map, there are very few places that rain as often as Seattle. Most of the US that gets more precipitation, gets it in large downpours (thunderstorms).
Where I live is subtropical, and there are times in summer where the grass seems to grow tall overnight. For the rest of the year you can get away with mowing every two or three weeks to keep it under control. It's the striving for constant perfection that bothers me, instead of just waiting till it needs to be cut. I know these people probably enjoy it and have a lot of pride in a manicured lawn. I just want to live somewhere with less of them around.
It depends on your climate and grass. In MA (where this study was), many cool season grasses can grow well over an inch per week in the mid-May and late-September windows. (Turf type tall fescue can grow over two inches per week in those windows.)
Yeah. I have a biweekly mowing service in MA. It's barely adequate in late spring (and especially if they get behind because it's been rainy) and it's probably more frequent than needed during a dry late summer.
Our cool season grass grows pretty fast and weekly is best. Plus it is better for the lawn to cut more frequently as it stresses the grass less.
There are a lot of things you can do to help bee populations. I can't imagine how you mow the lawn is that large of a factor considering the other things you can do.
Yeah, weirdly, here in the Canadian “frozen tundra” West of Alberta, there’s about 2-3 months where my grass goes into overdrive and I have to mow it once a week.
Seriously considering landscaping to not need to do this. Wife and I have thought to turn the whole front and back yard into other greenery.
Other do better at hosting butterfly caterpillars, bees, etc, which helps feed birds and other wildlife, so I think that’s a great idea that everyone should consider.
Nice! We're looking at doing that too. This is a cool site for figuring out what to plant: https://www.nwf.org/NativePlantFinder/Plants - ranked by number of butterfly species they can host.
If this year is anything like last year, I'll have to mow twice a week in the spring and then once a month in the summer. I mow at the second highest deck height though.
My yard is a mix of shade, part shade and full sun. Different areas of the lawn grow at different rates, but some definitely need to be cut more than once a week during the worst of the year to avoid constantly clogging up the mowing deck.
Bear in mind this is a 5 acre lot that is 4/5 forest or water- definitely not a stereotypical suburban uniform green carpet. No pesticides or fertilizers used at all either.
In Austin Texas. I mow weekly during the growing season. We previously had lawn service and it was every 2 weeks. Once lockdowns happened I took this over. Mainly out of habit and a need to get some exercise, so it’s every Saturday morning. I have kids so maybe there is some correlation :)
Could be they're putting down nitrogen. My lawn grows much faster if I throw down some nitrogen a couple times a year. As a bonus, happy grass crowds out most of the more obnoxious weeds (looking at you, quack grass).
Depends on how much water you get. During wet times of the summer, if you didn't mow at least once a week the mower would just clog up the next time you tried because the grass gets so thick so fast.
My local London borough was short on cash last year, and while that was a shame, the fact that one of the things they cut down on was mowing the parks was fantastic. While I get some people want short grass in parks for e.g. ball games, I wish they'd keep leaving larger parts of the parks mowed less often - the parks had far more flowers and far more bees etc. than usual.
TBF one of the issues with long grass is they also favour ticks: ticks need a relatively wet environment, short grass prevent moisture retention which is an issue for all sorts of good critters... but also for ticks.
I'm in London. Everywhere is a relatively wet environment almost all the time.
And my local borough at least have plenty of high moisture wooded areas whether or not the grass is cut short, so allowing more of the open grassland to grow out would not make a material change.
Ticks are uncommon here (EDIT: Here being in my borough; there are definitely parts of England where it's more of a concern - and if I had a dog or if I was wandering around more in the woods, I'd still check for ticks, just in case) - some have been found in adjacent boroughs e.g. in Richmond Park, but that's thought to be due to to a high population of deer, but even there the proportion of infected ticks is tiny.
The problem with trying to reduce ticks and mosquitoes in unnatural ways is that we often harm the things that eat them too. Since ticks and mosquitoes feed on us and other larger animals, they're the first to rebound their population, while their predators take longer to come back to keep their numbers down.
I live surrounded by hundreds of acres of forest. Wildlife is abundant, but there is absolutely no keeping up with the mosquito and tick population. Using deet and grooming ourselves and our dogs after they come inside every single time is just a fact of life.
It's a slow moving solution, but abundant bat boxes do wonders for mosquito control. Of course you'll never get rid of them entirely, but the population can be kept really low. Also promoting dragonflies helps a ton.
For ticks, wolves are actually really important. They keep deer and coyote populations in check. Deer of course feed ticks, but what's really interesting is that coyotes have a two fold effect on ticks. First they eat some of the tick predators like opossums. And second they eat mouse predators like foxes, with mice being a major part in tick reproduction. Wolves don't usually eat these smaller animals. So wolves help keep a balance.
What are good ways to do that? Everything I saw that's good for dragonflies is good for mosquitos, but I'm not going to promote mosquitos. (Sure they've got a place in the world, but I wish it wasn't so close to my house)
Often times it is required by law or HOA. For example the FL fire code has a mandate that buildings be set back from the road a certain (insane) distance, ostensibly for fire safety reasons, and then people don’t really want to see huge dirt fields everywhere, so the HOAs require lawns.
"Huge dirt field" is not the only alternative to lawn. I would NEVER live somewhere where some busy-body group of Karens can tell me what I can, can't or must plant on my own property.
Are you implying that not having a lawn means not having greenery? I would argue the opposite is true. While a monoculture lawn may be "green" it's about as barren a green space as you can imagine.
Are you construing a requirement to have a lawn as prohibiting more intensive gardening? I have never heard of that.
What I do see all the time is the front setback given over 100% to driveway and parking. These neighborhoods become very drab, even though if you look on satellite view there’s plenty of plant life - it’s just all locked away in private backyards.
My personal preference is neither. Pull the buildings right up to the sidewalk. Present an interesting pleasant facade to pedestrians. But to the extent you are going to have setbacks, they should at least have some redeeming aesthetic value.
I just checked my local code and it calls for “lawn, ground cover, hedges, bushes, or other vegetation, maintained as necessary to create a neat and attractive appearance.”
That seems reasonable. Are you seeing codes that require specifically grass and not other vegetation?
I'm not most people, but I live on an acre and between myself and my dog, we use almost all of it. Probably half of it has grass, though.
Also, in many locations, the grass is already there when the house is built, but maybe needs some help coming back around the construction areas, so it's not like they're putting a lawn in that wasn't already there. It's just that perhaps now it's a lawn instead of a field because the house is there.
In my neighborhood, there are quite a few wooded lots, where they just let the trees grow with varying levels of deliberate gardening under the trees. It's quite pleasant.
My neighbors have something like that in their back yard, and prairie grass in the front. My house has a big vegetable garden, some flower gardens, some bushes, and trees. We also have some lawn, but it's un-maintained and only needs to be mowed a couple times during the spring before it goes dormant. It's also about 1/2 weeds. Every year we convert more of it to garden.
Only about 1/5 of the houses have actual managed green lawns.
Contrast with my parents' neighborhood in another state. Every lawn in the entire 'hood is bushy bright green, and the people are out there mowing all the time. Many of their neighbors mow twice a week. One neighbor had a large mature tree cut down because it was shading their grass. Of course you can't see the lawns because all of the streets are lined on both sides with giant cars.
In addition to the visual appearance, there's the noise. A relative of mine went on vacation recently, to a place that was more or less off the grid. His comment was that there were no string trimmers or leaf blowers. A lot of suburban neighborhoods are just a constant racket of equipment.
I get it, it's a culture thing. But it's interesting to see that there are actually lots of possibilities for what to do with the grounds around a detached house.
To my that implies wandering around in a forest or tracking the edges of farmland (this is a very British thing keep in mind, YMMV), I don't think I'd get the same effect from some grass.
I count myself fairly lucky that I can walk from the sea to a suburb to a field full of cows in less than an hour where I live.
There are a lot of green alternatives that don't require the weekly maintenance and are better from a flora/fauna point of view than grass monoculture.
My front garden is full of various different plants, much nicer to look at. Back garden has a lawn which the kids play football and other things on, not very interesting - the squirrels on the fence and power line, and and pheasants which seem to somehow get in are better
The odd thing to me is that grass fields I see in nature are not arbitrary high. It naturally stays small in a lot of places. And there are even small flowers in it. Nature had also high grass, but why do people put the high one into gardens is weird.
Every lawn in my neighborhood has all of that, in addition to patches of green grass. Not many houses I've seen just have perfect manicured golf-course style green grass with no other plants.
I noticed the last couple seasons that certain parts of the lawn by the curb were really active with pollinating bees. I stopped mowing that area, much to the chagrin of the city who warned me (there’s a blue law it must be shorter than 10 inches).
So now, I don’t mow that part until they warn me, then I’ll trim it with a weed trimmer but leave some clusters here and there.
I don't live in the US nor speak English natively, but are you referring to neighbors around you as "the city"? And what does "blue law" mean in this context, as it seems to mean "Blue laws, also known as Sunday laws, Sunday trade laws and Sunday closing laws, are laws restricting or banning certain activities on specified days, usually Sundays in the western world." but that doesn't fit the context.
It can't actually be illegal for you to not cut your grass at your property right?
> It is pure insanity but America has a weird fixation with lawn.
It's classism. The entire point of requiring large setbacks with front lawns is to discriminate for homeowners who can afford to maintain a large completely useless surface.
But I have a lawn that takes me an hour of hard work to mow. It is not visible to the public. I adore it. The dogs adore it. The children are too little to appreciate the effort, but they like it too.
There are other reasons to have lawns.
Also maintains an area around the house that does not burn
i don't think anybody is arguing that well-maintained lawns are nice. they're great, but they're undisputably a luxury.
the only reason for a law requiring other people to have a manicured lawn is to ensure that a neighbourhood is only populated by the class of people who both value and can afford that luxury.
Or maybe, not everything is about power, and nicely tended to lawns look nice enough to the majority of the neighborhood families, such that they want that enforcement
Sounds like democracy. Neighborhoods with enforcement voted for it.
If you've ever lived somewhere with 'that one guy' who completely flouts the norms in all regards, it's easy to see how people decide to enact regulations. I lived in such a place, and the whole neighborhood had to live with his stinky, half-burned shade-tree mechanic operation with junked cars and chemicals everywhere for years before he could be forced out. He didn't even live there, he had a house somewhere else. What finally pushed the city into acting was when we were able to document rats.
After serious cleaning (including hauling away truckloads of contaminated dirt) there's a nice little house on the old lot that matches the rest of the neighborhood, and we can forget what a jackass Verl was.
I don’t know where OP lives, but inside of the town where I live (the Borough) there is an ordinance about grass height. You get 1 warning per season, with 7 days to rectify it. After that any violations become a $50 per day fine. (With no additional warnings)
If you live in the city they will eventually come and mow it for you. The fines and fees will be added to your taxes. I had it happen to me when I owned a house in Rochester.
It’s actually illegal in some areas. Tall grass is considered by some to be a public health issue, as it’s more likely to be home to rodents and snakes.
I think generally I want to keep much of my lawn unmowed. But the large number of ticks and kids / pets that wander through, make me somewhat hesitant. I think I'll compromise on leaving an area unmowed and if anyone complains I will put a border around it and call it a "pollinator garden"
In my experience (I am at 45°45′S 170°34′E in the South Pacific/Southern Ocean area) the lawn flowers do not mind being mowed. It seems to encourage them if you mow like I do (a bit irregularly, when it looks too long) they seem to thrive.
I am really pleased to see this article. (I have only read the abstract) It matches my experience.
I am based in the UK and I cut the "grass" every 6 weeks in the spring and summer. I have severe hay fever and I only mow the grass after a good bout of rain, otherwise I get quite a severe reaction. My neighbor does religiously mow every week in the spring and summer season.
I have found my green carpet to be a lot more drought resistant than my neighbours perfect lawn, and the biodiversity attracts more bees, toads and other insects. However, I appreciate many would class the biodiversity as weeds (moss, clover dandelion, daisies).
I’m not sure why this comment is grey. I know this wouldn’t necessarily work for everyone, but hey voice/video meetings don’t work well for some of us either. Folks, do what works for you and your team. Not everyone has to do the same thing.
a #TeamPlaybook suggestion: add a copy-and-pasteable monospace markdown text template for #ThreeQuestions in the #TeamHandbook-specified chat #channel for #3qs:
Personally, I'd love to just get rid of most or at least part of my lawn and replace with growing food, like Rob Greenfield. anyone interested in turning their lawn into a food growing yard, should check out his work: https://www.robgreenfield.org/
Regardless of whether I mowed 0.5, 1.0, or 2.0 times per week, my lawn already has no “lawn flowers”, aka weeds.
We keep some milkweed along one fence and have a bed of local wildflowers along the roadway and a vegetable garden for the bees, but this article is about increasing lawn flowers/weeds rather than directly about mowing frequency.
Flowering lawn weeds are such a wonderful addition to a lawn.
The bees will be pleased, but you may need to get a hive nonce you have flowers established. From the complaints here about local by-laws you may need to have a stealth hive.
Bad approach to life. My advice is to either learn to love things that have to be done (and frequently like mowing) or pay someone to do it. Life’s too short.
OK, but can't you learn to love bees, too? I am not even half joking.
The fascination with lawns, and everything that comes with it, is something I could never get. Flowers might not be manly enough but why not grow trees and/or produce? Not talking commercial efforts. Just a hobby. One that doesn't involve horrible motorized mowers, water waster, and what have you.
Growing produce is super hard. It also requires more water than a lawn for similar area. But you can also do both. We have a pretty big vegetable patch too.
But I love a lawn. They’re beautiful and it’s a fun hobby. They also make a great ecosystem for lots of bugs and worms which love organically fertilized earth. Lawns are also a carbon sink depending on how you maintain it. Not to mention they’re great for erosion issues. Not to mention the kids love playing on it.
As for water I live in an area where you can’t really “waste” water. Mowers can be electric as well.
Or affect change to not need it. My advice is to not have a lawn, and instead culture semi-wild patches of flowers by only weeding what is unattractive. No mowing for me, and no high maintenance manicured flower beds, and lots of bees.
Many people are required to have and mow lawns by their HOA or local government. For those people, the choice is mow, move, or eat some fines.
Mowing may also be necessary if you live somewhere with a rodent problem, or particularly if you live somewhere with a rodent and snake problem. You don't want rats nesting right up against your house, nor vipers (attracted to the rats) nipping at your heels every time you go outside to check your mailbox.
Of course there are outside-the-box solutions like surrounding your house with gravel.
I have a lot of space around the edges that have trees (fruit trees, nut trees and decorative native trees as) I pull out the plants I want to discourage (hemlock, stinging nettle, dock by the roots...) and other plants like ferns, flaxes, butter cups fill in the spaces.
My lawn would be so long if I mowed every other week. It would also be extremely bad for my lawn (fescue with KBG and rye).
I mow about twice a week and keep my lawn at 3” - 4”. I like it a bit longer.
If I let it grow for 2 weeks I’d be chopping off 50% or more of its length which puts the lawn under so much stress. It would be wide open for disease and it would actually be wasting water.
"It seems they created lawns of unsustainable crops that allegedly had aesthetic appeal, and then proceeded to maintain these crops until they ran out resources and all went extinct."
-some alien archeologist in 1000 years
"Mowing less frequently [than 3 weeks] is practical,"
Not in all areas. Some grasses grow much more quickly, especially in warmer areas. Many areas require a lower mow to inhibit mosquito reproduction. Every 2 weeks tends to work well for my lawn.
Depends on the location. Southern states in the US and many countries in Latin America have strict rules against rubble that accumulates still water, and you can even get fined if you have a pool and don't keep it clean and treated.
West Nile virus and Dengue virus are serious health hazards transmitted by mosquitoes, and many places try to contain it.
Purely anecdotal but i used to live in a mosquito heavy country. What I've noticed is male mosquitoes tend to hand around densly packed tall plants. Especially under the leaves. Not sure if tall grass also have the same effect
The tall grass gives them a place to hide. In theory they can even use small amounts of water under the tall grass to reproduce (the tall grass prevents evaporation that would happen with shorter grass).
One thing i personally noticed and wanted to ask someone who might know (perhaps they are reading this)
Does the abundance of color in the modern world harm bees in any way? I ask this because I've seen bees repeatedly fly into modern packaging, signage and bright clothing. I can imagine that the wasted energy flying into a sign that is as colorful as a flower harms bees.
But I'm not sure if there's studies on this or if it is even a big deal. So opportunistically asking here in this semi related thread to see if others have thought about this.
In my neighborhood, green lawns are frowned upon and most yards are left unmowed for the duration of the summer. Some are mowed infrequently for insurance reasons. Others are mowed frequently. It's grown on me and now I find the diverse array of wildflowers and grasses to a mowed yard. As a result, I've progressively become more curious about the results of different lawn maintenance strategies. Here what I've observed: (1) Many plants seem to require their seeds to stay on the plant until late autumn to effectively reproduce. Mowing, even if only in the late summer, seems to disrupt the overall plant diversity. Unmowed lawns have the most diversity. (2) Invasive plant species thrive because they are able to colonize recently disturbed soil most quickly, crowding out other species. They are incredibly effective at colonizing infrequently mowed yards. The unmowed yards have the least number of invasive plants. (3) Native species seems to be far more drought resistant than grass. They maintain a green appearance long after the grass has turned brown. (4) Bees are far more plentiful around large flowering plants which have been allowed to grow in unmowed yards than the clover found in infrequently mowed yards.
I let my 3 acres go fallow for the last few years (half an acre I mow so my kids can play and not come out covered in ticks).
I wondered if it was helping a lot until I took a few walks in the grass and nesting birds were startled by my presence (I let them be after I knew where they were!). I don't think they'd had the chance to nest there when it was being cut for silage.
This is happening in my front yard literally as I type this!
The colony in my tree is electing a new Queen. Last week half the colony left with the old queen - and a bee-keeper noticed they were all bunched up in the yard and brought a hive and harvested them off the lawn. (Ill ad pics of that later)
I havent needed to mow the lawn in months, and this literally just happened in the last 30 mins as I returned to costco...
What was crazy is I read this article this AM before heading to errands, and then I came home to this!
And I was recognizing the hive was there, and I was recognizing I havent mowed in months! and I planted a crap-ton of bee friendly stuff in the yard last summer...
When these topics are mentioned I remember once how police wanted to give my parents' neighbour a ticket for trash on her property, it was fly tipping. Turned out my parents personally knew the police officer and after being asked "so if I break a glass bottle in your garden, you will give yourself a ticket?". The guy let them go without a ticket... so when this US HOA thing is mentioned in extreme scenarios like someone isn't allowed to grow carrots, they have to have grass or be fined, what is stopping people from passing by a HOA president and throwing random clover or dandelion seeds at their properties at night, or simply if you live around, feeding birds seeds? Would it be possible to seed-pollute their lands to the extreme until they give up on what you grow on your soil?
A LOT of the HOA president types are retired and stay at home a lot, and watch things like a hawk.
I would expect a decent number of them to consider throwing ‘invasive’ seeds onto their lawns some kind of terrorist act. And almost all of them would comb over every legal resource they could find to try to nail you with something over it.
This is definitely a case where you’d be better off just avoiding it entirely.
>A LOT of the HOA president types are retired and stay at home a lot, and watch things like a hawk.
Well, I'm just passing by, and whoops I need to tie shoelances, and here I drop some super tiny seeds for the bugs, birds and wind to do the rest. Planting them is super easy.
I had a friend once who got followed around constantly by someone on the HOA because they suspected they were the ones putting unsorted recycling in the recycling bins. They even installed security cameras watching the recycling bins and all other common areas as part of their hunt for the offender.
I’ve tried to imagine buying a house with an attached HOA. I already have three layers of government, what does adding a fourth layer get me beside more busybodies telling me what (not) to do?
Nothing, but you can't get everything you want. It's fair to say the number of people who like HOAs is much lower than the number of people who are part of them. Having an HOA is a tradeoff many people are willing to make to get a home with other, more preferable qualities on a limited budget.
Lawn services work on a schedule. I'm not so sure that's as true as home owners who mow their own.
I (DIY home owner) don't schedule, I mow on demand. That said, if the lawn gets too long our electric mower struggles.
Finally, wouldn't longer grass also be a better environment for ticks? Don't get me wrong, bees are important. But grass length has been a constant, and while this information is helpful it's not doing much to address root cause (without that its influence could get worse).
Anyone look into how the noise might affect insects/animals? Personally, nothing ruins my day more than hearing a lawn mower starting on a quiet morning or afternoon.
> Lawns were mowed from May through September in 2013 and
2014, using a Toro 19″ self-mulching push mower, (mowing height set
at 6.35 cm). Grass clippings remained on the lawn. We assigned each
yard to a mowing frequency regime: mowed every seven days (oneweek; n = 8 yards), 12–14 days (two-weeks; n = 7 yards), or
18–21 days (three-weeks; n = 8 yards) to represent the range of typical
mowing behaviors (one to two weeks) to a more extreme frequency
(three weeks; Robbins, 2007). Seven yards participated in both years of
the study and thus these repeat yards were assigned a different mowing
regime for the second year of the study. To ensure households adhered
to the experimental restrictions (e.g., frequency and height of mowing),
we provided a free lawn mowing service and mowed all participating
lawns for the duration of the study
> Summarized bee abundance
and richness in relation to lawn mowing treatments were as follows:
weekly mowing = 1425 bees representing 72 species, mowed every two
weeks = 1903 bees representing 60 species, and mowed every three
weeks = 1259 bees representing 62 species (Fig. 2, Appendix A1). Our
rarefaction analysis reflected these overall abundance and richness
values, showing lower bee richness in the two-week treatment
I really dislike mowing in general, so mow as little as possible. Yes, I have the worst looking lawn on the block, but I also now have less grass and more diversity in "weedy" plants. My quote is "if I wanted to be a land lord, I would move to England" when asked about my lawn.
Wait, what? Weekly mowing? What the hell? Who does that? This sounds absolutely disastrous for grass and its ecosystem. I don't see a reason to mow more than a few times per year.
In weeks with more rainfall it can 5-7 cm. If you skip it, then by the next week it looks like jungle / prairie.
The only way to avoid frequently cutting grass and not having your lawn look unkempt is not to have grass. Either replace with some other short green or keep a neat garden with nothing else. Culturally people just don't do that. But you'd sooner see a trend shift towards alternatives than "just don't cut as often".
I have grass in lawn and in my experience, when it's about 10-15 cm tall it looks and feels the best. When it gets longer than that it's good to cut commonly used paths. Full mowing is good to do at spring and autumn, because doing it in summer tends to make it dry up. This way I use no fertilizers, no extensive watering, no weekly mowing and have a nice, green, relaxing and living lawn.
I'm actually building a DIY lawncare app right now. One of the features is having the right frequency of mowing depending on how much rain & fertilizer product plan you follow.
It would mean a lot to me if you took a quick survey so I could understand if there's value in the idea:
> Bee abundance differed among mowing treatments (p = 0.002),
such that lawns mowed every two weeks had significantly more bees
compared with the weekly and every three-week treatment (Fig. 4c,
Tables 1, 2).
Bees aren’t the only insects. There may be spiders eating them. Habitat destruction leading to one species expanding doesn’t mean it’s beneficial to the ecosystem.
Lawn mowing is among the top most useless energy wasting human activities.
It's noisy (of course nobody syncs with neighbours to mow so you can be sure to hear mowing noise every day), polluting, and so fucking useless.
As someone who tends to be a super inconsistent lawnmower and often goes 3+ weeks in between mowing, I'm not sure I totally agree.
Leaving the lawn to grow out for more than three weeks makes it pretty unusable, especially for our dogs, with giant weeds (with spikes that hurt the dogs' legs) and thistle bushes and whatnot, and when you do mow it takes 2-3 times as long and the mower tends to get clogged up a bunch, and you need to extra careful about not hitting a rabbit or other nest, which might have been built in your yard because the weeds got so deep.
When I do mow I do try to leave some patches of clover for bees, though, and let some thistle plants grow in a few clumps.
I do wish people wouldn't obsessively mow and poison their lawns with weed killer to keep their lawns only consisting of grass, though. Nothing wrong with dandelions and clover and the occasional thistle.
As for polluting, I use a plug-in electric mower, so it doesn't really pollute much. I do wish electric mowers were the norm.
And where I live in New England, it will grow to very tall grass, brush, and eventually trees which you really don't want right up to the house because it's a potential fire hazard and you can't easily even walk around the house through it after a while. I don't have most of my property mowed (just basically a band around the house) and I don't apply weed killer/water to it. I do have someone knock the field down with a tractor brush hog once a year so it doesn't transition to forest which it would on its own.
I maintain a forrest around the house with just enough shade to make the undervegation grow with berries and such. Once per year I just walk around, remove small saplings, do some chainsawing of larger things and take down one tree. That's all. The tree is a quite a lot of work when you do not know how to handle it but it gets easier every year in the beginning.
This is not considered a fire hazard here, but yeah we do not have that many trees close to the house.
Plant local flora/grasses that don’t need constant management. The manicured lawns we generally do are full of non-native plants and require more care.
It's not pointless. It's nice for myself and my dog to be able to use my yard without catching ticks. Seeing where I step when I walk is a nice perk. Also I like to minimize the places that rodents and other animals can live around my house, to minimize on the damage they cause to my house. My mower was down for the better part of the year last year and it was not pleasant for me or my dog.
Some of my yard already is clover. It still needs mowing from time to time. I have no interest in spending the time and money to replace grass with clover.
Edit: I'm not particularly attached to grass. If clover took over and pushed the grass out, I wouldn't be upset about it.
Another edit: A clover lawn also might not be durable enough for the usage much my yard gets.
Not noisy or polluting if you use an electric mower. Useless, kind of, although I appreciate not having a literal million insects floating into my house when I open the door (I live in FL) so it keeps those populations in check. Most of the macro bugs know the mower is coming and hop out of the way.
In some areas you have no choice, otherwise your entire house will be swallowed by tall weeds and other stuff. It also can create safety issues with snakes and other creatures coming close to the house. I can't imagine living in a house totally surrounded by 4 foot high grass!
Electric mowers are much less noisy. But lawn services don't use them and in my area - central NJ burbs - I would estimate 50% or more hire a lawn service.
I have always wanted to allow more lawn growth to create room for insect and animals to thrive, and to replace the invasive grasses that are so common in my state with local clover and creeping thyme ground cover but I have been surprised at the level of resistance this has been met with by landlords and nosy neighbors. Keeping a "neat and tidy" yard is one of those weird cultural values in the US that was born from misguided beliefs about patriotism and is rooted in classist ideas.
Even the idea of dandelions being "weeds" is ridiculous as the dandelion is an incredibly useful plant that can be used in a variety of circumstances.
I really suggest that anyone interested in these topics check out a book called Lawn People
How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are.
I fix the dead patches every spring and autumn with clover seeds and compost made from grass clippings, egg shells and vegetables/fruits peels. Zero fertilizer or weed killers, I remove by hand the weeds I don't like once in a while. I rake the garden twice a year to keep moss under control.
5 years later, our garden no longer looks like a green, but a prairie with the usual local plants. Since 2 years poppies are colonizing the most sun exposed parts, with spectacular blooms we are eagerly waiting for. Worms, larvae, slugs and snails are plenty, so birds are always at work foraging. Whatever dies during the hottest weeks regenerates in autumn. Plenty of bees are foraging the clovers and bindweed flowers.
It's looks nice, it's alive, it's much less work and money to maintain, it's self regenerating.