People Who Live In Suburbs: Classy, Icky, or Dudes?

Lawns are stupid. My children don't do much of anything outside anymore so all the grass is getting replaced with something else (cedar chips, plants, other ground cover.

As noted I spent the last few months trying to transition to clover, but unfortunately nature has had other plans. What I am getting instead is dust and ground ivy. Fine whatev. Just as long as it isn't grass.

I was all about finding a more ecological alternative to my lawn until I realized how much up front cost and hassle there would be to ripping up my lawn and replacing it. Eventually maybe but I have too much other shit to take care of rn.

i’ve heard good things about microclover

clover is high on our list of eventual possibilities

i think to work well it needs to be mixed in with your fescue or what have you. not sure can be the only ground cover.

can you just kind of plant it among whatever you already have or do you need to rip everything up and plant a mix?

I was all about finding a more ecological alternative to my lawn until I realized how much up front cost and hassle there would be to ripping up my lawn and replacing it

Yeah that's sometimes how it goes with ecological footprint. Like, hybrid and electric cars are cool but should you get rid of a 10-year-old Honda Civic or buy a new hybrid? Surely the industrial consequences of manufacturing, transporting any new car should be factored vs. the consequences of just keeping what you have and using it until it doesn't work anymore.

Then you think for just a little bit more than a minute and realize that an electric car requires electricity, which means your Nissan Leaf (or whatever) could have a sticker on it that says "powered by coal!" In a lot of areas, that's how you recharge your battery.

Ditto with lawn stuff - ripping up a lawn and replacing it will involve trucks to transport materials, trucks to transport materials away, machine labor to assist the process, hundreds of gallons of water (and all the infrastructure entailed in getting clean water from place to place), etc. etc.

Of course my strategy of gentle encouragement / gentle discouragement hasn't worked all that well either, so what do I know?

And yes, most folks go with a mix of miniclover or microclover with grass seed, or mixed in with existing grass. In theory you shouldn't need fertilizer as clover is self-fertilizing (and should also theoretically fertilize whatever it gets mixed with).

But lots will depend on your soil condition, mix of sun and shade, and what the weather decides to do.

I just rip up a few square feet of old, compacted sod every few months, throw it away, and plant either seeds or bulbs or a transplant in it. The things that had a lot of space between them last year, this year were overgrown and crowded and will probably need to be thinned this winter--it's not a quick process, but time makes it beautiful!

Next spring I should have over 2 doz new narcissus and hyacinths to make the front view pretty (from the street) which will die back in May/June and be covered by the perennial bee garden that grows up later in the summer.

This was my third summer of gardening, I should say! It took time to see what the prev owner had done and how it looked and aged during the seasons. Gardening is a long game by definition.

major LOL at Watership Lawn D-250

yes, that was beautiful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FriO91on3I

Lol

i'm standing with donna on this one

Donna is the clear hero of this story and also wkiw

The line about the warranty on the paint was a master stroke

Dick Hopkins is a fragile flower whose delicate constitution cannot contend with the trauma induced by bright colours two doors down.

FWIW i was just talking to the tree service guy, a longtime local, and he was saying the thinking in the area on lawns has "dramatically shifted" in the last two decades, and that many more people are just letting their lawns be semi-wild, planting lawn alternatives, etc. He said many people now just want "something green" and don't care about having "a golf course" in front of their house.

My father-in-law has had his lawn professionally re-done for what I'm pretty sure is the 4th time in the 20 years he's lived there. His lawn looked great to all the rest of us, but he was upset that weeds and moss were showing up in places and the grass was (apparently, to him) not growing in others. His yard is a mostly shaded area in sandy soil, so of course you're gonna have problems growing grass on it! The lawn basically exists to get mowed. Maybe 3-4 times a year, pre-pandemic, the grandkids would run around on it at parties, but kids don't count blades of grass. No one else in the family understands, but the mentality is so ingrained in him so we just congratulate him on the new lawn. Hopefully this time it will achieve his expectations.

Ours is mostly whatever is growing wild around here - dandelions, onion grass, clover, mugwort, etc.

I honestly like seeing all the dandelions and onion grass and stuff in my neighborhood, I think it's much prettier than just straight grass, esp since the landscape is already kind of rustic and rocky and hilly.

After that recent horrible freeze in Texas, the first thing my GF's dad did was start working on his San Antonio yard because the cold had killed everything. 81 years old, still recovering from Covid (which his wife also had)and frozen pipes, and he's out there yanking plants out because what would the neighbors think?

I would assume the neighbors' yards had also died but that's the mentality in the 'burbs.

lol yeah i mow something out there every two weeks in the summer but i'm sure a lot of it isn't really grass.

Yeah, it's a good vibe! Lot of pretty flowers out there right now.

xps

I remember my parents telling me that neighbors complained to them about our lawn maintenance, and that once a neighbor actually cut our grass without asking

One of the nice things also about not spraying a lot of chemical fertilizer and pesticide and weed killer is that you get tons of birdlife in the yard. I realized when I moved where I live that the reason a lot of suburbs I've been to feel sort of fake and sterile is that lawn maintenance and landscaping practices basically destroy the possibility of any kind of habitat.

A traditional lawn is fucking dumb, and it's insane that a more natural yard could get you fined in some communities.
Most front lawns by me here in AZ are gravel + landscaped plants/trees. But a few ppl have green grass lawns and they stick out like a sore thumb. Just that much more apparent how fake and unnatural they are when you see them in a desert environment.
My backyard seamlessly merges with the undeveloped "state trust" land behind me and I think it looks great. My gf who still spends good deal of time living in Illinois thinks I need to "get rid of all the weeds". Just indicative of a fucked up relationship with nature that most people have internalized.

We bought our last house directly from some acquaintances and they gave us a tour of the place which included thirty minutes of the dude explaining his lawn care routine and watering schedule (in a very arid climate) and my wife and I didn’t have the heart to tell him his life’s work would be brown and full of weeds and dog piss within three months.

A guy down the street has a magnificent golf course lawn that he spends hours maintaining and my neighbor and I just kind of laugh at him as we do the legal minimum required to not get ticketed by the city. A lot of the lawns nearby have permanent dead rings that surround the students outdoor drinking game tables anyway so nobody gives a shit.

yeah fuck a lawn, grow a damn habitat

Grass is stupid. I've been gradually replacing it with clover, ground ivy, and purple deadnettle.

I grew up in the woods. We had an acre of pine trees and pine needles between us and the road. Going through all that trouble so it can look like Soldier Field is ridiculous.

THAT SAID, God, I hate privet with a passion.

FWIW my favorite development since our move is that H has gotten massively into gardening, and even more recently into native plants. Going forward we are planting only native and especially plants that are good for pollenators, butterflies and birds. And we have begun plotting out our gradual lawn replacement plan and have already added clover and wildflowers in some areas.

Just started composting as well.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=nature%27s+best+hope&gclid=CjwKCAjwi9-HBhACEiwAPzUhHELZtaWTJlj0_-7Nitv5EV9KiXUlr8mwnOVQgJPD8oSQKDDDISkLABoCj9IQAvD_BwE&hvadid=409958545374&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9004253&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=17557947266658875369&hvtargid=kwd-780715891398&hydadcr=13631_11415873&tag=googhydr-20&ref=pd_sl_4o3wjs332b_e
Have not read yet, wife is reading. Author also runs this:
https://homegrownnationalpark.org/

Did you just post the book itself?

I really want to replace our lawn with native plants as well, kind of intimidated to start on my own since a) I know next to nothing about how to make sure it looks nice too and, b) I have literally the opposite of a green thumb. I've always wanted to get more into gardening, but I can't keep any plants alive.

part of the idea of planting native plants is they are more likely to just stay alive without constant intervention

Haha, I know, but this is how little faith I have in my skills. I understand they generally need a little help at the start though.

In Seattle there's a program that will pay for you to install a rain garden on your property and will help you with the installation; might be worth seeing if there's anything like that near you.

My wife is just kind of diving in and trying a lot of different plantings. I'm doing my best to help. There's a company called American Meadows she sometimes uses that will send you plants that go together, and in some cases they have seed packs of stuff that grows really easily and is hard to fuck up (like wildflower mixtures).

The book I tried to post above is called Nature's Best Hope, not sure what happened with the link.

We're only just getting started with replacing some of the front lawn, moreso have been planting in rocky areas in our backyard. H is way more the one doing it than me, I just kind of supply labor when I can, but I would say one way to avoid the intimidation factor is just to pick a small patch to start with, maybe something out of the way so it doesn't fuck with the "curb appeal" if you fail.

There may be a Native Plant Society facebook group in your area. They are usually good about offering advice to beginners.

Actually doesn't have to be local, statewide is fine. I'm in the California group and they give advice for every locale in the state.

Native plants are just taking off and it's amazing. We have a whole strip of steeply sloped land in between the patio and the terrace above our retaining wall that H just went nuts planting native wildflowers and other native stuff from seed, and it went from being this kind of scrubby, rocky, vaguely green blah to exploding with flowers and stems and colors, it's awesome.