Do you hate mowing the lawn? Holy cow, I used to. We had a lawn that was half the size of a football field, and I spent many hours doing it. It’s not a hobby. And loads of gasoline spilled, actually. It kills the grass, but the grass comes back after a week or two.
When I first published this post (in June, 2017), a friend just turned me on to the Freakonomics podcast episode about America’s “stupid” obsession with lawns. It has a lot of different points of view and recommendations on what to do differently. Native species, alternative lawn care, and urban agriculture are some of the topics. Listen at the link.
If you prefer to read an article instead, there’s 2013’s Outgrowing the Traditional Grass Lawn on the Scientific American Blog Network. (Comment with any others you’ve found useful!)
The ideas I’m trying to encourage and implement here have been around a few years now. I know it takes time for people to accept and adapt to new things, but it’s getting quite obvious that we need to change conventional landscaping.
Anyone with a yard can turn it into a meadow or something equally hospitable to wildlife. Insect and bird populations have plummeted due to lack of habitat, and we are the reason why. And it actually helps to put it back!
Please do not convert your yard over to hardscaping. That's the status-conscious or lazy person's convenient solution to "having a nice garden," but frankly, with the climate crisis, it's irresponsible. Landscapers promote and bill high for that kind of work (it's not cheap, and you have to keep buying ornamental plants for decoration), so they're happy to do it — and it is durable, so it's easy for you. But it's not what the world needs. The world needs more beauty and care and good design.
Even without the perennial plants and biodiversity boost of a regular yard and garden that keeps you shaded and cool, letting rainwater percolate into your yard – rain retention — is of benefit to your property, household, and neighbourhood. Water transpires out of the soil and vegetation, cooling it during hot times, rather than just baking, as hardscape does. Rain retention also spares your share of the flood surge during heavy rain events where all other water is sent to the sewer, via run-off and property drains.
Even a dirt yard with a couple of bushes is better than hardscape. So long you keep it clean, maybe put out a few flowers, the neighbours won't care.
(I won't even get into astroturf, except to say it's even hotter, and it is hostile to all biodiversity, including human. Yuck!)
A new wildflower lawn starts when the herbicide stops
A wild yard can look a little messy at times, but I wouldn’t embargo you from trimming and weeding it! It only depends on what’s a weed. Some plants are invasive and undesirable. I gladly rip those out. Some plants are just in the wrong spot and you can move them elsewhere. I would never have a front yard filled with violets if I hadn’t just let a strange plant grow. Now that I have, it’s beautiful.
A conventional yard example
See, my dad – the one who made me cut the grass while I was growing up – was an old farmer in a very conventional Ontario town. He must have applied herbicide to the lawn because now that he’s gone, the lawn went off to a heavenly variety of plants. My brother was the next in line to start using the RoundUp, but as I was the first one back to the house, he just asked me to cut the grass. It hadn’t been mowed in a while.
This brings me to mention the year my rabbits spent living there: My dad didn’t like them. Especially the brown one! She was naughty — but “the pink one’s alright,” he said, because she was a friendly girl. Even so, he readily admitted that while the rabbits were there, he didn’t have to mow the backyard!
This is a pictorial of what happens to a lawn with some disturbance, left to grow without herbicides:
Some of these plants I would weed, some I would encourage (especially in light of food for my rabbits), and in general, I’d mow it about once a month, where foot traffic is.
Create habitat for endangered bumblebees
In April 2017, news got around about the first bee to land on the US endangered species list: Bombus affinis, commonly known as the Rusty Patched Bumble Bee. It has a, well, rusty patch on its back. It’s endemic to North America, which means its range is only North America – and not all parts, either. Rusty-patched bumblebees have been decimated nine times over – that’s 90% – from earlier population counts.
Two types of bumblebees, B. impatiens (the Common Eastern Bumblebee) and B. occidentalis (the Western Bumblebee) are kept commercially. It’s through exporting and importing them again that introduced a disease (Nocema bomba) that the Rusty-patched bumblebee (I’ll only capitalize the first letter, not all) has succumbed to. There are two more species that are of concern: Franklin’s (B. franklini) and the Yellow-banded (B. terricola) bumblebee.
Unlike the European honeybee population and the disease that’s been plaguing them (Colony Collapse Disorder), where we boost their numbers through beekeeping, the best hope these bees can have is us understanding their lifecycles, habitats, and ranges. When we do everything we can to buttress their ideal conditions and boost their numbers, a species can begin to recover.
This Washington Post article tells you more about the bumblebee and the fight for its status. Pesticide use and habitat loss are two factors bedevilling insect and animal populations worldwide.
What you can do is really quite simple, and doesn’t require a lot of space:
- Only mow your yard in high traffic/leisure areas (a walkway, a patch where you like to sit and play)
- Make sure you have a water source that insects can drink safely from – a shallow bird bath, a pond, a stream, or another water feature will do
- Make sure there are parts where bare soil is exposed in proximity to dead wood, brush piles, variations in terrain, and other architectural or natural features – so that bees have a safe place they can tunnel in the soil.
- Some bees search for stands of tall grass. Make sure you leave some in a quiet corner, or around the perimeter your yard, giving them options.
- Watch for bees and their nests and report them to Bumblebeewatch.org. More info here.
You only need short grass where you’re going to sit and lounge, or play. Those parts don’t even have to be grass, but clover, moss, or a hardy mix of two or all three. At my own house, I use the edge trimmer and lawn scissors to take care of the high-traffic/unruly areas. I also let my grass grow tall enough to go to seed, and then clip it progressively lower. (Or let my rabbits take care of it, too.)
In the UK, there’s a campaign called “No Mow May” that’s been underway recently. Here’s an update from 2023 about this endeavour.
A suggestion, though, if you follow suite: when you next cut the grass, do not use the shortest setting on the mower. It’s a shock to plants that haven’t been cropped by animals or by trimmers to suddenly lose, say, 50% of their spring growth. Maybe start by using the garden scissors and strimmer at a high height, and then the next time, use the mower on the highest setting, before you settle into a regular mowing routine.
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