I like the way my backyard looks with all the clover and stuff for ground cover, but it also makes it almost impossible to enjoy it. The amount of insects and stuff that fly in my face or bite me while I’m out there just makes me miserable. I didn’t have this issue when it was just mowed down grass.
Do you have any trees back there? If so, the next step is to build bat boxes to attract bats to live there. They will eat those abundant insects and be very happy! Eventually it should become less annoying!
I agree with you, a bat box or a birdhouse for insectivorous birds.
A battery powered thermacell insect repellent will work in the meantime to keep many insects away while you are outside at least.
The only tree is marked to be cut down because it is dying/dead, and we are just waiting on the landlord to get to it.
Ahhh okay. Another approach to insect control (that doesn’t rely on trees) is a predatory bog. Loads of predatory plants as well as water with (insect / amphibian) predators of mosquitoes and flies.
Can be quite beautiful and special!
I’m jealous, I miss insectlife. Rarely see anything living anymore.
Global insect biomass has declined 75% since I was born. And a big part of it is people who don’t want insects on their property - reasonably, as the person you’re responding to points out - and manage their lawns to deprive insects of habitat. And there’s so many more people in the world now than when I was born, and correspondingly less habitat for insects. And everything else.
Then we spread water unnecessarily all over the lawn to help it grow?
A good compromise is to leave some “wild” patches for flowers and bugs and so on and use a mower robot to keep the rest short. Best of both worlds.
The only care my lawn gets is a mowing or needle raking once in a year. Some bush trimming maybe, but that’s it. Rabbits, neighborhood cats, and deer hang out in it all the time.
I would rather live in a dense area and not even have a yard, and instead visit the nearby park for my greenery needs.
As someone who lives in a dense area, doesnt have a yard, and visits parks instead; I wish the opposite.
I want to grow vegetables
i have a reel mower. until i can completely subvert my lawn, i don’t need to tolerate the smoke and noise, at least.
Get a push mower. It’s insane how much better it is in every single way. There’s no reason at all to push a 2 stroke across your lawn after paying for gas and getting it to star. You just quietly glide over that grass quiet. And some have a bag too.
Nah, get an electric mower, best of both worlds. Quiet-ish and still faster than an old push mower. No gas or mixing or worrying about it starting every season, just like the push mower except as labor saving as a gas
worry about it starting every season
Honda. Any mower with a Honda engine will start first time every time
Nah, throw your mower in the bin and let your yard return to nature.
Sure, then I can pay for a mower or two in city fines every year!
Sadly, that’s not an option for me until I can get enough allies to take over my HOA board and then proceed to dissolve it.
glide
Idk what push mowers you’ve used, but mine did not “glide” whatsoever. It was incredibly difficult to push through the lawn and mow, and took much longer because of it.
Just to be pedantic, mowers are 4-stroke because they need torque, not speed
Things like chainsaws are 2-stroke
My parents always had lawns but always had a battery powered mower. They currently have a small lawn that continues to their neighbor’s yard that they’re planning to replace with something more eco-friendly & drought-tolerant.
I remember my parents were early adopters in 2011 so we had an electric mower that wasn’t battery powered, you would actually have to plug it into the outlet. I remember going to school one day in the 3rd grade, we were assigned to talk about the chores we did around the house, I said that I liked to plug the mower into the outlet and mow the lawn. I got docked 50 points because the teacher didn’t believe my lawnmower was electric. “Are you sure you don’t crank it?”
My great-grandparents had an electric mower in the 80s. I never saw anyone else with one until the 2010s.
A plug in mower? Hopefully the cable was orange or something, that sounds risky.
I tried buying a plug in mower like that around that era. But the electric at the house we rented at the time was awful, so every time I plugged in the mower, the breakers would flip. Had to return the thing unused and bummed an old gas mower instead.
Recently bought an electric plug in mower. 100 ft extension cord and it can reach every end of the area I keep mowed.
Was considerably cheaper than an equivalent gasoline operated one and I don’t have to store/worry about gas. The cord is a very minor inconvenience comparatively.
I also have an electric mower and honestly that cord drives me fucking insane. There are many things in my yard that it can - and does - get caught up on.
Those electric mowers have been around for 50+ years.
This is the way I’m doing stuff. I only have electric yard tools, and really only mow when I have to for the city. I’m hoping to replace most of my front lawn with garden beds over the coming years!
I currently only have hand powered yard tools aside from the gas powered lawnmower that came with the house. As long as you stay on top of the pruning hand tools get the job done. I discovered a 20+ foot tall tree hiding in a larger pine when I went to pull a vine off of it and still managed to chop it up with the handsaw for normal city collection. Poured some stump killer on the stumps and one full spring later (I did this at the end of winter when it was nice and cool out, and everything was still dead/hibernating) only one stump shows any signs of life out of the 4 trees I chopped down, and it might even just be a new shoot.
As long as you stay on top of the pruning hand tools get the job done
Ah, you’ve hit me with my ADHD kryptonite, remembering to regularly do (and actually completing) normal tasks like that.
I happen to have family members with birthdays in early March and early April, so I just remember to time it between those two dates. Y’know because just going “it’s March it’s time to cut back the weeds!” Isn’t enough
I also do a daily bike ride around sunset, and I try to do a very quick walk around the yard before/after which gives another opportunity to grab thr loppers and chop a couple of things that are growing in a bad spot
I’ve planted clover and creeping thyme and wildflowers in my garden. I have a reel mower that I push at highest setting over the clover when it has a growth spurt.
I happy with my decisions.
Lawns:
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require artificial irrigation that contributes to depletion ofvaquifers
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create monocultures that reduce biodiversity and harm ecosystems
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require maintenance that usually involves burning fossil fuels
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shadeless lawns contribute to warmer neighborhoods
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act as nitrogen sinks
I’m not a fan of lawns but I have a huge lawn that does none of these things and looks fine. I don’t irrigate and my lawn is greener than the neighbors. I let anything grow and cut it long with an electric mower. Plenty of shade /w 20+ oaks covering the whole property. No idea about nitrogen, but I don’t fertilize, everything that drops from trees gets mulched back into the lawn which keeps everything healthy. At least there are ways to avoid these things if you care.
- Not necessarily
- Not necessarily
- Not necessarily
- So?
- Okay
But there are benefits too like useable play areas, and with well maintained lawns you have a lower risk of issues like ticks etc.
I realise where I am making this argument but I just came across this and didnt realise people hated lawns.
Ofvaquifers
I see you’re using a Samsung keyboard
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The only thing that sucks about it… is paying someone $65/week to get it done. I seriously need a zero turn mower.
You could do what I did:
- only buy a house in a place that has no HOA
- xeriscape the front, let most of the back just grow out wild, and keep a small patch of grass in an area where you like to chill (for me this is in a courtyard)
- use an old school push mower for this small patch. You get a little exercise with this, but not enough to ever stress ya, and it requires no gas, no oil, no electricity and barely ever any maintenance.
let most of the back just grow out wild
This, but native plants instead.
That’s exactly what grows out wild in my backyard here (which is against the edge of a greenbelt / drainage creek bed) - no intervention needed.
This sounds lovely
I love mowing lawns. Put some headphones on and a good audiobook and I can mow for hours. I’m actually a little sad that I only have a small lawn now, because I can barely get into a rhythm before I’m done.
Mow your neighbors lawns I’m sure they won’t mind lol
I’ve considered it, but they all want to mow it down to nothing and I like my grass longer
You can use electric mowers. They solve the belching fumes problem and nothing else.
They’re often pretty quiet too.
Get an automatic/self-driving one, and you can just watch your vegetation be mutilated instead of doing it yourself.
Yep, electric “Roomba” style lawnmowers exist.
Yeah mine runs over stuff a bit much for that…
Lol that sounds like a device that would mutilate the plants growing beside the grass too… like my precious strawberries
I’m pretty sure you need to set up an electric grid on the property for it to follow.
Like the pet “invisible fence”.
That, or GPS, but they’re more expensive
Adam Savage exploring Makitas autonomous lawnmower R&D facility
Yeah, and they’re super common too.
Husqvarna 115H! It’s down to like $600 now. This is going on its 3rd year doing my backyard, and its fking amazing. Once a month I trim the perimeter, but otherwise I dont have to mow most of my yard now, its always the same perfect height, the grass seems much happier with it too.
My elderly neighbor got one and it’s quite fun to watch it tootle around his yard.
One of my neighbors has an electric one and it’s shocking comparing how quiet it is to the gasoline one that came with my house
Up until last year I didn’t even know people in my country even still had petrol lawn mowers. I wanted to get one of those things that’s not even powered, just a rolling blade cage.
I’ve got a reel mower and lawn cutting doubles as exercise without noise or cables or bags. Just have to do it regularly.
But then, I also don’t water my lawn, so it’s dormant for large parts of the year, like nature intended.
How do you get the edges where the mower won’t cut? Still with a gas/electric trimmer or is there something manual that would work?
The manual options are ancient - like a sickle, or a scythe or clip by hand with garden shears bent down on your knees for hours. But fuck all that, you’ll want an electric trimmer for edges.
You can get long handled edging shears to save your back if you want to keep with manual tools.
Nature intended my yard to be mixed hardwood forest.
I used to think lawns were dumb but then I moved to a place where if you don’t take care of your yard, it’s just overrun with bugs and weeds. Planting too many trees makes things damp and miserable, open areas are key, but that’s where stuff grows. Most plants can’t survive being mowed, but grass loves it, and the birds can pick out insects when it’s low. So now I like lawns, it’s the human version of a meadow. And I don’t see an alternative, other than growing an extra long beard, converting myself in mud, and becoming a druid
It depends on how much lawn you have, too. If you’re sitting on a quarter acre (1000 square meters), then just mow it. You don’t want bug habitats literally on top of your house.
If you have five acres, you can probably leave a good chunk of it as natural. Mow the stuff closer to your house, and whatever you want to be able to use, and leave the rest. Maybe take a scythe to it every once in awhile.
I used to have about five acres and would only mow the area around my house. But when I went to sell it the realtor said I had to mow all of it because it looked “messy.”
Dumbasses want to move out to the country and live in a damn suburb smh
And I don’t see an alternative, other than growing an extra long beard, converting myself in mud, and becoming a druid
I don’t understand. Are you implying that’s not the obvious solution here?
To be fair, I do love mockingbirds, and mockingbirds love mowed lawns :)
Why not just fill it with gravel, put a few planters in if you still want some vegetation and then move on?
Ah yes, let’s take the low life area and make it 0 life
So close and yet so far
Let’s take the low life area and make it no life area
OP is literally saying they want less life… I wouldn’t consider an artificially manicured patch of grass to be much life anyway. The overgrown druid land OP describes sounds much better to me
This is quite nice in desert areas, but doesnt work well for areas like Florida where if you dont spend hours weeding or edging religiously, you’ll end up having to weedwhack your lawn because the grass and weeds have still grown, but now your mower has turned iinto a rock flinging machine with very dull blades
A yeard can be great space for kids to run and play, but still, fuck lawns for the most part. One basketball-court-sized lawn per couple blocks is plenty sufficient for kids. A soccerfield per 5 miles, and a major sports field per 10 miles…
Folks should let their yards be what the yards are in the wild.
In Florida, that means pine/oak forest with palm fronds. Maybe small grassy garden if folks want a spot to hang. But grass for the most part is shaded out by trees and covered by pine-straw and leaves.
Residential half-acre-plus fertilized lawns are stupid AF.
Maybe was cool in the 1950s when lawncare was a handy mode of wealth redistribution for a healthier economy, and no-one had thought of the negative environmnetal impacts.
Lawns used to be a big flex specifically because it took crazy labor to do; lords would show off how many gardeners they had under employ. Now folks are flexing in how they can kill everything including their wallets, free time, and planet
Push mowers are superior for small lawns.
Mowing lawnbots are the future for lawncare.
I would wager that the majority of people posting about lawns that require maintenance don’t actually own a home with one or are forced to do said maintenance by their parents.
The native plants that can grow in my lawn are not appealing so if I were to just let it go wild I would have a shitty looking, pest riddled, brown, half-dirt/half sticker mess that my kids can’t play on. We have beds where we can make them work but I do not have the time, money, or inclination to make it fence to fence flora. Also the most common bugs we get are mosquitoes and I would rather not encourage them any more.
