171–180 of 277 posts
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…
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.
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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.
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> 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.
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
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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. https://ibb.co/nsB7fFT
When I see a picture like this, I wonder what everyone else is doing. This picture would be the result of extreme lawn care at my house... I normally don't cut the grass until it's long enough that I can pick the flowers there and bring them inside (monthly?)
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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…
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.).
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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.
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.
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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. https://laidbackgardener.blog/2020/11/04/clover-in-the-lawn-... The secret was to turn clover from a friend into an enemy. Pesticide companies decided to launch an intensive adv…