A tick wrote this post
Yea a lot of people are clueless to how much of an effect lawns have on keeping pests away from the house. Mice love living in tall grass while using your house as a buffet and bathroom.
Yet people will blame industry when our manicured cities take up far more space and are ecological disasters.
If we keep blaming those that make the products we demand and not us the consumer, the earth will shortly look far different.
And yellow jackets
Subterranean ones. Makes me shiver thinking about it
Opossums ready to eat
I'm laughing way too hard at this.
We introduced a ton of clover into our lawn 4 years ago and have been letting it self-seed & spread. It's been great.
My boomer-y neighbors don't like it and make comments, but ours is the only green lawn for several blocks because it hasn't rained for shit all summer. Plus we have wildflower areas so we also have all kinds of bumblebees, butterflies, and dragonflies cruising around.
We've tried both clover and thyme, but we can't get them to really take off. But I think we just weren't doing enough at a time and wildlife was eating it all. Our current course of action has been killing sections of grass with a tarp, then planting the clover and our first patch is doing well.
You do need to water it pretty aggressively at first, or be lucky and have daily rain for about a week. ALSO, the first year is kinda underwhelming in general. It really tool off in subsequent years for us. This is our fourth (I think?) year of the clover lawn and it's really nice now.
Good luck with yours!
I showed this to my city's By-law officer. No luck...
It might help to make it look more intentional, such as a bordered flowerbed with native plants in it that just happens to be the size of most of your front lawn.
Good job at least trying to do something. My current city and previous home city have finally started doing more native plantings and my current local city's uni has started up a significant prairie restoration project right outside the city. There are also a few small prairie restorations going on inside city limits mostly in the burbs where there's space but I can't seem to find out what org is running them.
I can't play catch in a field of wild flowers, also snakes.
The snakes are only there to eat the mice and rats this brings. Which is why most locales in the US won’t let you do this. If you want a similar effect of this to simply encourage pollinators you can plant a native pollinator garden and get some pollinator houses. Similar, but smaller effect without the mice and the county/city giving you flack.
Another viable option isn't to completely convert lawn but just make one or a few native plant beds . If you aren't willing to give up the lawn completely, you could still convert smaller portions of it.
Also sneks aren't that bad.
You could also convert portions of your lawn to something like clover, which will be more "lawn" like while being much better for pollinators
check out the 'no lawns' community on solar punk
You can in clover or creeping thyme though. It also does not get real tall you do not really have to mow.
Snakes are better than playing catch
I hate lawns. They suck water like nothing, require a lot of work and never look quite the way you want.
But let's keep things in perspective here. The big argument against lawns is water use. I agree. But in California, for example, all residential water use accounts for less than 15% of the total use of water in the state.
If we want to save the environment we should start with what's taking the remaining 85%.
My main argument against lawns is the massive amounts of pesticides, weed killers, and fertilizer they require to look like the ones in the picture. Coincidentally, that's the point this meme is making.
Also, just because lawns aren't the worst possible use off water that you can think of, doesn't make them not wastes of water. Just because almond farms in California use more water that lawns on the same state doesn't change the fact that lawns waste water. Those same California almond farms sissy have nothing to do with the thousands of suburbs in other areas which have HOAs that require grass lawns.
Aside from all that, not all of the 85% of industrial water usage is wasteful. Efficiency needs to be improved, but we do need to grow food to eat.
So don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
I partially agree with your comment.
I'm not saying that we should not improve lawns (by removing them), but rather, that we should also go after the big offenders, and maybe focus on them first because that's where the most immediate gains are.
Every time we have a drought, I see the old drama of taking shorter showers, people filling buckets in the shower to flush their toilets later, etc, all while farmers are planting Alfalfa to export it for cheap. IIRC, alfalfa was the largest consumer of irrigation water, which breaks down the farmers mantra that "we are using water to grow your food".
Even when you consider almonds, which we do eat, it's not a staple food. Nobody will starve if the almond industry collapses. They make a lot of money but mostly for a closed set of farmers. They're also not a large employer on the state.
I was talking to a guy at my neighbor's party and he asked how I keep my lawn looking so good. I said "I mow it infrequently, keep it long, and don't try to get rid of weeds." In the hottest part of the summer mine still looks good, and it's full of clover and dandelions for the bees.
living in North American style suburbia 🗿
I grew up in a rural area where most lawns had lots of clover, wildflowers, stuff like that. Never realized that’s considered “unusual” until I left the area and realized, “wow, most suburbs don’t have that!”
I'm trying to get that. The red clover took over and the bees love it.
I wish I could HoA would throw a fit. Long term plan is more rual and will try to keep it local for most of the "lawn"
I'll never understand why so many people seem to willingly buy houses under an HOA tyranny
So many times it's the only thing available. There's a John Oliver segment about it if you'd like to know more. We bought in an HOA. I didn't want to but I read the CC&Rs beforehand and they seemed pretty chill. The HOA itself has proved to be pretty chill as well and our fees pay to take care of a little park I don't really use but whatever? It's fine.
My HOA is pretty much: no car hoarding, don't let your house look like it is falling apart, don't let your grass get 6 ft tall in the front (back, we don't care). They are sticklers about not letting trash bins be visible from the road which is dumb and weird. It's like the only thing they care about.
Unfortunately many areas are fully saturated with hoa. If you want a commute you can stomach the HOA is just part of the acid.
That said, I live near Boulder CO and frankly wish I had an HOA now. My neighborhood is being overrun with people living in rvs . Total respect that people gotta live but my neighborhood is way different now with folks spreading junk all over. Chopping bikes on the sidewalk and leaving sharp metal, needles, hardware and trash everywhere.
Again, respect that people gotta live but now my neighborhood has dangers it didn't. Things that could literally hurt me or my dog.
An HOA would keep em out.
For us it was either live rual (which I would like) but live far away from everything, good schools and massive drive to go anywhere. Or Settle for HoA... We settle for HoA while kids are young.
Say goodbye to lawns! Yes!
Do we have a nolawn here on Lemmy?
If you dont atleast have 1 part of your garden unmowed youre a weirdo with bad taste to me
A colorful biodiverse lawn is nice and all, but I'd prefer not to be harassed by all my neighbors, eaten alive by bugs, and be unable to use the lawn for anything other than looking at and feeling smug.
That's funny because that's exactly how lawns were created - to showcase that lords were wealthy enough to waste land rather than use it for food production. it's essentially the 'smash a bottle of expensive champagne challenge' of the feudal period.
Get clover and creeping thyme. Neither grows tall and both stay green without really any watering.
Nice try EpiPen.
Second photo reminds me of when I visited the Scottish Highlands and I miss it so bad.
Our garden looks much more like the right one :) Like there is still grass, but first, it's not pure grass, but with daisies, dandelions and tons of other stuff like it between it, and it doesn't get always mown to nothing.
And additionally to the grass, there are so many huge bushes, many flowers, trees, full of different flowering colourful beautiful things, and just so many plants and big amounts of green and much place for bees and whatever they like :DTicks are gross. But also where the hell do you live that you can buy a lawn‽
