I know this is a meme, but shit like this is why I allow wild growth on my property. First year I owned my home the ground got muddy as hell from the new build since the ground was all dug up and tilled.
From the second year on I’ve only mowed a path for my driveway and the front walkway and the rest grows wild. Sweetgrass and other native plants anywhere from like 1 to 3 feet tall and the area is high desert (Colorado) so the “weeds” suck up any moisture they can get, no flood, no mud. It’s great. I’ll never understand MFers in the rurals curating lawns.
Plus, it looks nice, and the deer in the area seem to like it as well.
I’ll never understand MFers in the rurals curating lawns.
Basically, it’s a flex. In order to have a perfect looking grass yard, you either need to kill all your free time to maintain it, or pay people a lot of cash to keep it tip-top. And the free time thing also requires money since you probably don’t have your life set up like that unless you’re paying for it somewhere else. Any other approach will yield mediocre results which will immediately mark you as unable to keep pace with your more monied neighbors.
Assuming you’re playing their game, that is. Which you clearly are not. Good job!
Totally different ecosystem here in NW Florida, but I am also getting great results. 75% of the yard hasn’t seen a lawn mower in 2 years, the 25% that has is still fairly wild. Lots of wild plants, lots of non-native but compatible plants, plenty of surface water. We planted a few “ponds”, 150G and smaller. Thought they would take a year or two to take off. NOPE. The 150G I buried last spring was teeming with life in 2 weeks. Maybe I cheated by throwing water plants, from the river and creek in there, along with their native mud. :)
We’re the only house in the hood with; frogs (deafening last spring), hummingbirds, pollinators of all sorts (forgot to make a bee hotel this year), dragonflies (hope to have shitloads when the adults come after 2-years underwater), fewer mosquitoes, butterflies, can’t remember what all.
The insect population is worse than it was 4 short years ago, drastically worse. That scares me more than anything I’ve seen. Even in the hundreds of acres surrounding the hood, not much, not like it was. Hoping I can turn things around in my tiny part of the world.
I love natural growth and we have plenty around (PNW), but that invasive Himalayan Blackberry is constantly creeping back out of the wild edges. We’ve done well enough pushing it back, but it is so pervasive and the animals help spread the seeds. That and the other noxious weeds (Scotch-broom, thistle, tansy, etc) have us quite busy doing our best to remove and keep out. It’s like spitting into the wind if the other land-owners around don’t do it as well. Oh well.
We also planted tons of native “deer-resistant” plants. They love it. I call it deer salad.
if the other land-owners around don’t do it as well
My fight with fire ants in the South. Insect populations have tanked over the last 4 years, but the fire ants are on the rampage in the surrounding forest. I poison my neighbor’s yards, it’s still a non-stop fight.
For any Southerner’s coming along; I don’t use any insecticides or herbicides except hydramethylnon. Yeah, it costs more, but a little dab’ll do ya. Amdro is a popular brand name, not sure who else uses it.
I was purposefully allowing my grass to grow because my area is in a severe drought and the herbivorous wildlife (groundhogs, rabbits, and deer) have slim pickings right now and they started coming onto my property to eat. I even leave the gates open to the fenced part when I’m not home so the critters can get in easier.
The other day my neighbor mowed half my yard without my consent because he saw a garter snake cross the road and go into my yard. I was, and still am, so pissed. He cut the grass down to the dirt. He didn’t even tell me after the fact. I had to go door to door asking my neighbors if they knew who tf touched my yard while I was out and about. My neighbor admitted to it when I got to his place to ask and had the audacity to get shitty with me about letting my grass grow.
I’ve had something similar happen too. There’s some shitty fucking people out there.
Right?? Like this neighbor seemed pretty damn cool until he pulled that shit. He lost a bunch of weight and he suddenly became the biggest dickhead on the planet…🙄
that’s so fucked up for them to do that
It really was. I had to pay my usual grass guy the price of a full cut to finish it, too. Apparently making the drive to my place for less isn’t worth it for him, which I totally understand. I could not afford a full cut on my own, so I had to borrow money from my mom. My usual grass guy is really great and he uses my yard to teach his kids yard work, so my mom didn’t mind helping me out.
Still super bummed about the wildlife needing food though. It’s super illegal to actively feed the wildlife where I live, so I can’t really provide for them.
ITT lots of people who blessedly have no idea what an HOA is.
Benefits of living in bumfuck. Though to be real, I’d never buy or build in a HOA. It’s a choice. Renting in HOAs was bad enough in the past.
Ur mom?
/j
Roundup doesn’t want you to know this. In their eyes… Dandelions are weeds, which is such a sad opinion.
Dandelions are awesome! You can make a salad of them with great health benefits and dandelion honey is also great! And the latex milk it has can be used to make rubber!
You can also make tea out of the leaves, root, and flowers (all together, or some combination of the three).
Dandelions have a lot of vitamin A and C, some B vitamins, calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, copper, and zinc. It’s good for the skin, liver, and digestion. It’s a diuretic and can help with cramps.
When dandelions pop up they let you know to start looking for morels in a week or so. Thank you dandelions.
Better idea, aerate it. There are loads of tools for that
Source: https://www.crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt.com/kill-your-lawn
Look, this guy is a phenomenon and worth at least some of your time. Not just for the kill your lawn stuff, but for making botany actually interesting. There’s a whole-ass youtube channel that is sure to entertain if not educate.
His rambling podcasts are great.
The shape of the roots of the shrubs is somewhat exaggerated. Many do go that deep, but they’re not that wide all the way down. There are only a few types that grow roots that look like that.
There are also deep root grasses if you want a lawn, but don’t want to ruin your soil.
- props to crime pays but botany doesn’t. Great stuff.
- needs a subtle Saddam in the root structure of native plant.
Unless you have really sandy soils. Then the rain mostly passes right through (ignoring all the parts that are paved - insta-flood!), and it’s just a situation with malnourished grass, probably more susceptible to “weeds”, and not a lot of organic matter to hold all that soil together.
That’s the thing missing from this image - it’s not just being more porous that makes larger plants retain water better, it’s that they’re a critical part in creating the conditions that produce more of that organic matter, getting that carbon (and a lot of other stuff) in the ground. It acts as a sponge, and in sandy soils that are too porous, it fills those gaps and acts as a binder.
I had a house with shrubbery growing around it. the roots were dense but light, so no real danger to the foundation. I had mentioned to my wife a couple times about removing the shrubs to replace them with flower beds with smaller shrubs to make it easier to maintain.
one day I came home from work and her dad and her had completely ripped up every shrub along the back of the house.
I was livid. I asked her what she was going to do next because money was tight. She shrugged and said we can save up to plant something for next year.
I explained to her that those shrubs were protecting the foundation from water egress and by removing them we would have water in the crawlspace. she dismissed me and said I was overreacting.
this was just as spring started. guess what happened next? yep, water started to seep into the foundation and the walls were clearly wet. I showed her, explained that in 5-10 years the mortar between the blocks would soften and begin to break down and fall apart.
for context, the house was built in the early 50s and the foundation was just raw concrete blocks without any moisture barrier. the shrubs had been there since the house was built (or at least very nearly the whole time). there was one corner that had a downspout that dropped right on top of the foundation that had some pretty bad spalling but was otherwise in perfect condition.
she listens to me now.
Also, you can totally have a lawn. It’s a great place to Do Things in your garden, and it’s better than bricks or concrete. I can’t host a bbq in between the shrubs after all.
Just, turn the bits where you don’t Do Things into some other plant than lawn grass. At the very least you don’t really need those corners, and come on, a natural zone is way easier to maintain than a lawn too!
There’s better ground cover that stands up to reasonable wear and tear from activities etc that also improves the soil, unlike standard grasses.
Right with ya, what I’m doing now. We have a tiny house on an 80’x200’ lot and the back 30’ was already left wild. LOL, now the whole backyard is an impassable mess. :)
I’m thinking clover next year if I can afford it. My 70s elementary playground was mostly clover and we beat the shit out of it, 3 times a day. (For you younger folks, “recess” was a time in the morning, at lunch and afternoon when we ran outside and did whatever the fuck we wanted.)
Ironically, they used to adulterate grass seed to clover to make it cheaper. Now we gotta pay a monstrous premium for clover seed. Go figure.
I have clover in an area where sometimes, maybe once-twice a week, a car parks. It doesn’t hold at all, I’ve been re-sowing it many times, even tried growing it in pots and planting once it matured.
Sounds like I need to study on the different types of clover.
Why is it someone hasn’t modified the dna of grass to give us one that has both deep roots and works like lawn grass on top.
As others have said, the size of roots is pretty directly tied to the size of foliage. Roots store energy(calories) in case something happens to the foliage or sunlight is low. The more energy they can take in, the more storage they need, as well as the stability that larger plants need from larger roots.
But how do you keep feeding the larger roots if the photosynthetic engines have giving them energy have been damn near removed?
Hm, this doesn’t fit. You are saying the roots store energy in case the foliage is lost, then saying the roots can’t exist without the foliage. Which is it? I get that they are energy storage. So the foliage in all plants must generate an excess of energy to fill the storage. That should mean that once the storage is full, extra energy can be spent to extend the roots, then fill with energy, rinse repeat.
It makes perfect sense. When the foliage is cut, it takes energy to regrow it. If there’s not enough greens or sunlight for photosynthesis to account for the plant’s total needs, it will draw those nutrients from the roots into the rest of the plant.
And there’s a whole lot of other things going on in the soil around roots as well. For example the interrelationships between plants and microbes has a tendency to start with the roots exuding sugars into the soil in order to attract those microbes. And that’s just a start. I think it’s really interesting stuff. If you wanna learn more, Regenerative Soil by Matt Powers is a fantastic book on the subject.
It is really interesting stuff. But it doesn’t explain why the roots can’t be bigger. You can take a small power source and charge a big battery or a small battery. It just takes longer for the big battery.
Well, to some degree it might be possible to selectively breed plants to prioritize root production a little more. I’m not sure to what extent that’s feasible though. You also have to understand, plants have evolved to actively want to be as big as possible. If you’re a small plant, your neighbor is more likely to grow larger than you, which blocks the sun from getting to you, which will cause you to die. So trying to make plants smaller in and of itself has ecological risks. Or at the very least, such naturally short lawns would be a lot more susceptible to weed encroachment.
I see that as a good thing. It’s like a check against uncontrolled spread. They would lose in natural competition. But a lawn of today already would. Yet the deeper roots would be good for the soil, flood control, drought management. Probably just not enough profit in the idea though.
I doubt think it’s a DNA problem, the amount of roots depends on the amount of leaves.
So keeping the grass short keeps the roots sorry as well
But why? Roots act as energy storage, so once full, grow more. Not full stop. That should lead to pretty decent roots.
There are prairie grass stains that have very deep roots. Not sure how they act as a replacement for typical lawns but they exist already
Relevant Climate Town-video which just dropped: https://nebula.tv/videos/climatetown-americas-dumbest-crop/ / https://youtu.be/KLYMjPNppRQ
eh, there’s a shitton of clay about an inch down here. turf ain’t the problem
Dandies eat clay for breakfast
I thought that was a slur for a second.
you’re assuming soil with clay mixed in it. you would be wrong.
Get yourself an earth drill, make some 40cm holes, add earth and plant: sunflowers, dandelions & poppies, tall grass works well too.
i really love when people assume i’m in the wrong climate zone and soil and end up giving advice that would be useless unless i popped another 3 feet of soil on top of what already exists.
there is a specific method you have to use to grow anything here. no, i’m not going into it as it would be overly identifying.
