Excerpts from a rant at Earther:
Americans devote 70 hours, annually, to pushing petrol-powered spinning death blades over aggressively pointless green carpets to meet an embarrassingly destructive beauty standard based on specious homogeneity. We marvel at how verdant we manage to make our overwatered, chemical-soaked, ecologically-sterile backyards...Suggestions at the link regarding how to cope with neighborhood associations.
“Continual amputation is a critical part of lawn care. Cutting grass regularly—preventing it from reaching up and flowering — forces it to sprout still more blades, more rhizomes, more roots, to become an ever more impenetrable mat until it is what its owner has worked so hard or paid so much to have: the perfect lawn, the perfect sealant through which nothing else can grow—and the perfect antithesis of an ecological system.”..
Up until the 1940s, we at least left odd flowers like clovers—which actually add nitrogen back to soil—alone. Then we figured out how to turn petrochemicals into fertilizer, Windhager said. “The new goal became to have a full monoculture.”..
According to the EPA, we use 580 million gallons of gas each year, in lawnmowers that emit as much pollution in one hour as 40 automobiles driving— accounting for roughly 10 to 18 percent of non-road gasoline emissions...
All America’s farmland consumes 88.5 million acre feet of water a year. Lawns, with a fraction of the land, drink an estimated two-thirds as much. Most municipalities use 30-60 percent of drinkable water on lawns.
Most insightful post ever! Is this the blogging equivalent of a butt dial?
ReplyDelete?? your implication being that "insightful posts" on TWYKIWDBI are accidents ??
DeleteNever mind. I figured it out. You wrote your comment after I accidentally hit return while typing the first letter of the title, thus creating the post with no further content. That WAS the blogging equivalent of a buttdial.
Delete:-)
I missed the memo about not having clover in your yard. My lawn is full of clover, violets, and moss. No fertilizer! I'm busy making more of it into trees and flower garden every year.
ReplyDeleteI agree totally, Miss C. My lawn in the pic has never had a broad-leaf herbicide broadcast on it; I spot-treat for any noxious weeds, and enjoy having clover intermixed with the turfgrass. I transplanted violets from our woods to the edges of our lawn; they "invade" the rest of the lawn, but are not unwelcome.
DeleteLawns are lethal to humans as well: http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/porter/coroner-rural-porter-county-man-found-dead-early-sunday-under/article_c89996e2-0254-5b3c-a2bd-d5b8a48d0d7d.html
ReplyDeleteWhich is why when we bought our house, we wanted a garden, not a lawn. Took a while to revive the soil left under the plastic net impregnated so,d and crowd out weeds, but we have a place that welcomes bees and hummingbirds, ladybugs and butterflies. The cats like the catnip, as well. Going into our 7th summer, and our little patch is alive.
ReplyDeleteIt's a tiny, urban plot along a busy street, but it's gorgeous.
Here in Los Angeles County, lots of people have torn up their grass and replaced it with drought-friendly plants, rocks, etc.
ReplyDeleteAs a british person living in the US, one of the most confusing aspects of american lawns is the quantity of them found in front of the house. Even one of the example pictures in that article purporting to be a lawn in beverly hills is almost certainly a small verge of grass the house inexplicably maintains on the road side of the sidewalk!
ReplyDeleteLawns are undoubtably not the most useful spaces for biodiversity, but at least they could be justified as a private space for people to spend time in if american houses weren't so often set at the back of their own lots. I've never understood this. Why do they have verdant, 20', empty, front yards. And scrub like, unwelcoming, cramped, backyards?
I'm an American, and I wonder the same thing. I have no clue why so many yards / properties were designed this way. Sorry I'm no help!
DeleteI think of lot of that came about as roads tended to become wider and traffic speeds went up. Houses along country roads had to be demolished or moved, and new development tried to avoid that in the future, which then became a trend. It's awful. My quiet street has the old-fashioned configuration at most houses, but a couple of newer houses with a large front yards look odd. You should be able to speak to people on the sidewalk from your porch for sociability, and have your garden in the back for family privacy.
DeleteMy wife occasionally talks about tilling and re-seeding the lawn. Our lawn currently is a mish-mash of various grasses and weeds, and in the spring I try to delay the first mowing as much as I can. I tell my wife, "You want bees and butterflies and insects? You don't want a monocultural wasteland."
ReplyDeleteOne idiot down our block overfertilized his front yard, and it is now _desertified_. I joke not. He just couldn't leave well enough alone. I refer to this patch as "the xxxxxx Avenue Desert."
Just checked, and hah! It's now visible via Google Maps satellite view.
Lurker111
He likely used chemical fertilizer. If he used something that was from recycled waste, like Milorganite, he'd have the opposite problem!
DeleteAgree with Roy. I remember seeing one large football-field-sized office building lawn turned to brown dead turf because someone used the wrong (too-large) setting on a fertilizer spreader.
DeleteWhen we lived on trees on the verge of the prairie in Africa, climbing down to look for food was not without issues (leopards et cetera). So, short grass where predators couldn’t hide that were green, indicating fecundity, were quite attractive. Moan away ecowarriors, but we are hardwired to want lawns.
ReplyDeleteWe don't go to the extremes of some. We have small lawn with plenty of clover, plantain, and dandelions. We're expanding our terraced garden each year, and we never water our yard.
ReplyDeleteThe benefit of the yard is that we have a nice spot for our three kids to play in, free of snakes, ticks, and chiggers which inhabit the nearby woods. There are no nearby parks, since we're a little ways in the country. It's this, or not allow our kids to go outside. I prefer this.
I'll pose that front lawns are caused by real estate agents that always stress the good looks of a house over functionality.
ReplyDeleteAs I drive through the new neighborhoods around here where fields filled with cows and grains have been replaced with fields with McMansions, I am always surprised how few children are actually playing in all those manicured lawns.
my lawn is green. on the other hand, i have purple violets, white violets, and white with purple speckles violets, all of which are just finishing blooming. and, some sweet smelling ones, too!
ReplyDeleteI-)