We’d have bee abundance if there are less lawns.
Lawn mowing frequency affects bee abundance and diversity (2018)
151–160 of 277 posts
Re: Lawn mowing frequency affects bee abundance and diversity (2018)
#152I 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.
Re: Lawn mowing frequency affects bee abundance and diversity (2018)
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Lawn is really fascinating when you get into it.
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.
Re: Lawn mowing frequency affects bee abundance and diversity (2018)
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Are we really equating technology relevant to our survival in different climates to keeping a manicured lawn?
The overwhelming majority of HVAC energy use is for comfort, not survival.
Re: Lawn mowing frequency affects bee abundance and diversity (2018)
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But people like coldplay and voted for the Nazis! 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.
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.
Re: Lawn mowing frequency affects bee abundance and diversity (2018)
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a waste of time, energy, and resources to maintain something so unnatural. Truly a testament to man's hubris against nature.
Do you feel the same way about body odor?
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.
Re: Lawn mowing frequency affects bee abundance and diversity (2018)
#157Maybe 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.
Re: Lawn mowing frequency affects bee abundance and diversity (2018)
#158Also 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.
What clover? Would love to do this even though clover is really expensive. I planted some last year but it only half kinda took.
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...
Re: Lawn mowing frequency affects bee abundance and diversity (2018)
#159One 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.
Re: Lawn mowing frequency affects bee abundance and diversity (2018)
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Are we really equating technology relevant to our survival in different climates to keeping a manicured lawn?
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.