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Renowned Entomologist Says ‘Get Rid of Your Lawn’

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Re: Renowned Entomologist Says ‘Get Rid of Your Lawn’

#121
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

setbacks are about reducing FAR so people need to buy a lot more land than they need to build a home to live in. It helps keep property values high and land as a scarce resource.

That is a consequence, not the intention. I don’t see how you can avoid street canyons otherwise.

Don't you have to seek municipality approval for structures? At least where I'm from we have to seek approval from the municipality to build anything bigger than a certain size on our own land. Anything that is close to a public street or neighbor also have to be approved.

Re: Renowned Entomologist Says ‘Get Rid of Your Lawn’

#122
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could get my son to exercise twice a day. He hates going outside. He prefers his exercise running around in Minecraft, and if he does get it in real life, it's jumping around the living room.

Be a parent. Set rules and consequences. Outside time or no Minecraft seems like a no brainer. Interact and get him to join you in things you like doing outside. He’ll probably hate it for 1 month or 1 year, but it’s your responsibility.

If you're involved as a parent, sure. Just for the love of god do not just throw your kid outside saying "play outside", because that sucks. I'm speaking from experience.

Re: Renowned Entomologist Says ‘Get Rid of Your Lawn’

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does she play ball games, set up a paddling pool, and wrestle? I'd agree if you have a house big enough to have a playroom, and have open space close by, it's probably easy enough. Our lawn is kinda a tiny, tiny, wildflower meadow, ie it's not cut much. The bees love the Clover.

In what decadent universe is a pool expected or even necessary?

I suggest you google “paddling pool”. They are under $30 and for little kids. Not something decadent...

Re: Renowned Entomologist Says ‘Get Rid of Your Lawn’

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's sad is dandelions are neither ugly nor bad for your lawn. They feed bees and the tap roots draw nutrients from deep in the soil, which also benefits the grass.

Dandelions are definitely ugly. The problem is that they're weeds: they will grow with abandon and fill up every single possible spot on your lawn, crowding each other out in their rabid attempts to get some delicious sun. Mow them down and you're just acting as an evolutionary selection filter for short, creeping dandelions instead. It only takes a month or two of mowing to end up with a totally different, fully ada…

Having different preferences in garden plants from you doesn't make someone lazy.

Re: Renowned Entomologist Says ‘Get Rid of Your Lawn’

#126
post #25

Getting rid of our lawn and growing other stuff has been amazingly fulfilling. I have fresh produce most of the year, I've got honeybees and bumblebees and mason bees coming around. I have to do a lot less maintenance, and when I do it's more varied and interesting. Everything from fruit trees to berries, flowers to vegetables, herbs to herbal teas like chamomile. Strongly recommend looking at what will grow in your…

> I have to do a lot less maintenance, and when I do it's more varied and interesting. The irony is that people think a lawn is easier to maintain because it looks simpler

It is simpler in the sense that there is not really any thought required. I have to mow my small lawn every three weeks or so, true, but I know how to do that, because it's the same thing everybody does and you grow up watching your parents mow the lawn. It requires no judgement skills, and no gardening skills -- just run the mower over all the grass, and you're done. I would actually potentially be interested in having something less dull than just a lawn, but I wouldn't know where to start (what would work in my climate/levels of sun/shade/etc, what do I need to do, when does it need planting, does it need watering, all that). Keeping grass is simpler than that.

Re: Renowned Entomologist Says ‘Get Rid of Your Lawn’

#128
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think the largest crop in the US is? Hint: Turf grass. Figure all the land used to grow lawns plus all the land used to grow grass seed plus all the land to grow sod... It's absolutely staggering amount of land, whole integer multiples of the land we use for corn or any other irrigated crop.

I couldn’t quite believe this so I looked it up: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_55d0dc06e4b07addcb43435d Link to the actual paper, from 2005, is in the article.

Paper cited suggests 164K km^2 (about 40 million acres) of total turfgrass.

USDA estimate for corn crop in the US is almost 92 million acres.

Note that the paper claims that turfgrass is 3x larger than the largest irrigated crop, not that it's larger than all crops. Only about 20% of US corn is irrigated (~80% is rain watered only).

[1] - https://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVI/8-W27/milesi.pdf

[2] - https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2019/07/29/corn-americas-lar...

Re: Renowned Entomologist Says ‘Get Rid of Your Lawn’

#129

Are there environmentally friendly alternatives to the traditional grass lawn if one uses their lawn for sports, BBQ, and play? Maybe just allowing grass to grow more naturally rather than using pesticides and removing weeds?

For several years, I fed my lawn an organic diet (corn gluten meal in the spring, which serves as a mild pre-emergent, then mixes of cracked corn, alfalfa, soybean meal, often in the form of horse and rabbit feed).

Healthy grass, cut somewhat higher than typical will outcompete most weeds. The only weed I wasn't able to control effectively enough this way were grassy weeds (poa trivialis and poa annua). Triv patches had to be mechanically removed and annua needed late summer chemical pre-emergent (CGM isn't effective enough there). Once those were dramatically reduced (from the "yard" I inherited when we bought the place), the organic system was effective in keeping a >95th percentile lawn. That lawn was more resilient and beautiful than any of the chemically fertilized lawns (whether high or low input) I've maintained. In addition, we had more wild rabbits than I've ever seen, providing additional entertainment for the kids.

The big issue with the organic lawn feeding is that it's quite bulky. No more 15 pound bag of sulfur coated urea that would do two fertilizer applications on my small city lawn. Instead, it was 30-50# bags of organic material that had to bought at Agway or Tractor Supply (necessitating a car trip) and couldn't reasonably be stored for a long time due to bulk and being organic (subject to rotting and rodent infestation). It's also more expensive than the chemical feeding, but still not prohibitive.

Re: Renowned Entomologist Says ‘Get Rid of Your Lawn’

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining a lawn is more than just mowing it. There's aerating/seeding, watering, pulling-weeds/pest-spraying, etc. The mowing is the easiest part, at least for my relatively small lawn.

> There's aerating/seeding, watering, pulling-weeds/pest-spraying, etc. If you have a grass that matches where you live and don’t mind your lawn occasionally being brown, none of that is needed.

Agreed, apart from mowing it fairly regularly from April - October I've never done any of those things to the area of grass we have. Mind you we are in Scotland so water supply isn't really a problem.
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