Natural yard full of native species > gross manicured yard
this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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That's great if you don't have ticks, snakes, ants, termites, and mice.
See my reply to the other commenter
i hate insects tho?
Clip dragonfly models to wire rods. Scares the ever living crap out of anything that flies. https://www.getyourbug.com/
That's fair, but you don't gotta invite them in. And I will remind you that "outside" is kind of their domain, not ours 😉
All that said though, a rock or sand yard is still vastly better than a manicured lawn which serves basically no purpose other than to take in resources (mostly water) with no real output. Hell, even if you paved over your lawn with one big slab of concrete that would still probably be ecologically better than the waste involved in maintaining a manicured grass lawn!
Slabbing is much worse, holds heat and cold and prevent groundwater absorption. Crushed lava rock over sand and gravel would be a good idea though, nice and solid to walk on but drains out no problem.
Listen to this person, not to me, as it sounds like they actually know what they're talking about 👍
I gotta disagree there. My yard even when mowed is a haven for all sortsa critters. Lizards, squirrels, and birds prance around by day, and at night you can find hundreds of varying spiders and wasps hunting smaller insects. Rocks might afford some of that but just about nothing would be happy with plain sand backyard. Then again, I live in an area with lots of rain and no shortage on water.
I try to mow pretty high and I let it grow for a few weeks between, but unfortunately I cant just leave it be due to my hoa.
Have you tried aging past 8 years old?
i think it would be funny to start and HOA, and give it one rule.
The rule would that a total majority would need to agree in order for something to be passed. That way nothing gets passed ever.
I had a fairly large yard backing up on forest on three sides in the back, two in the front. I decided at some point that mowing was just stupid and gave up on it. I was thrilled with what happened in the back - it was just like this. Flowers started growing, including some I'd never seen before there or since. Birds came and started nesting in the middle of the long grass. The front, I gave in and mowed it a few times.
I lived across the street from this retired military guy who literally mowed his lawn every single day, riding mower on like half an acre. You couldn't even tell the difference between where he had mowed and where he hadn't gotten to yet. This guy had a bumper sticker "Never seen a FLAG burned at a GUN SHOW!!", whatever that meant. They invited me over to their backyard a time or two where they drank Busch Lite and grilled hot dogs over old furniture (seriously). Nice, but well, hmm. Anyway, he drove his mower over and mowed my front yard a time or two when I was out of town.
I have spaces in my yard that look like that, but it takes soooo many hours of meticulous hand weeding to encourage and protect the wildflowers and discourage the goat head burr, fox tails, storks bill and burr clover. And forget hiring anyone to help, professionals call them all weeds will only eradicate the whole lot (which would start it back to the beginning since those nasty ones are the first to take over when the earth is bared). Every year there are few more flowers and friendly "weeds" and few less horrible thorny noxious weeds, but it's been a process over about 8 years and it's not finished and probably never will be.
The easiest to maintain part of my yard is my "no mow" native fescue lawn, that would never be allowed in an HOA and you can't really walk on it, but it houses a billion bugs and the birds and spiders and cats love it.
The weeding is insanity. It felt like that's all we did last summer. I'm now paying some teenagers $40/hr to hand weed it because all the professionals just want to spray everything, and the kids are willing to be really meticulous because they don't want to jeopardize a really well-paying job.
Yes! The anti mow people don't understand that your yard doesn't turn into a wildflower meadow if you stop mowing.
I spent hundreds of dollars on wildflower seeds and tiller rentals to get a wildflower meadow started.
5 years later and it's just weeds. And not nice weeds- It's 1/2" long thornbush weeds- perfect for spreading tics onto the local deer population.
As an anti-mow person, I don't care, if it's a wildflower meadow. I don't call random plants "weeds", they're all cool with me. Like, alright, if you've got a super-invasive foreign species that's actively killing the local ecosystem, then I'm on board with doing something against that. But it can hardly be worse than mowing the local ecosystem.
That’s the thing, the super invasive weeds are what establish the best. I’ve got a broader definition of “wildflower” than anyone I know, but if you’re encouraging foxtails and goat head burrs in your yard, you’re a dick.
I live in an area where a lot of people raise sheep and you can check out x rays of storks bill seeds that burrow down through the fleece, skin And fat, into the poor bastards muscles. Being all “Look at me! I don’t judge plants, they’re all welcome!” is going to cause a lot of pain and suffering and punctured tires and shoe soles.
You forgot scythes
Or goats.
what's the third thing called?
A lawnmower
Edit - I'll stop trying to be funny. It's a manual cylinder lawnmower https://www.argos.co.uk/product/5818675?clickSR=slp:term:cylinder%20lawnmower:2:56:1
My landlords HOA would bitch at me if my grass was slightly too long.
My landlords HOA
🤢🤮
That's how I feel every time I have to mow the lawn even though I'm renting from them.
Free labor for them.
Is it in your lease that you need to mow the lawn? Here, it's the landlord's responsibility unless you specifically agree to it.
My lease has two things. Mow the lawn AND abide by any HOA shit, so I had to mow the lawn to their standards and do the random bullshit they came up with. My garbage cans were in front of my house for 9 months and then all of a sudden it was a problem. Fuck HOA's and land bastards
That second one is the real killer.
Well defined and constrained responsibility: No problem.
Open-ended obligation to people you don't know: Bottomless pit of potential despair.
check with local state and native plant groups – there’s several cases where native plant species are protected even from HOAs
Or you can go the complete other way and plant knapweed lmao
for California, the Monkeywrench Collection
Peppermint Candy Flower (Claytonia sibirica)
(Intentionally, in places where they're beneficial)
Ooh I wonder if there are regional versions of this. Would love to do some guerilla seeding down here
When you realize that most of what you're looking at around you is invasive species: 눈_눈
The vast majority of invasives take a foothold in already disturbed land. Natural ecosystems tend to be more resistant.
Native species look bad and I will not let the opps gaslight me into thinking its nice
Ok buddy.