In my whole life, mowing the lawn was fun exactly once.
It was the first time that I got to mow the lawn at the house that I just bought. Every other time Ive had to do it, it sucks.
That’s once more than for me.
The only thing that sucks about it… is paying someone $65/week to get it done. I seriously need a zero turn mower.
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
To be fair, I do love mockingbirds, and mockingbirds love mowed lawns :)
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?
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.
Why not just fill it with gravel, put a few planters in if you still want some vegetation and then move on?
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.
Ah yes, let’s take the low life area and make it 0 life
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
So close and yet so far
Let’s take the low life area and make it no life area
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 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
Taking notes from Saltburn?
We have a nice wee patch for our daughter to play on that we maintain with a push mower. No extra power needed. Very satisfying.
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
Ofvaquifers
I see you’re using a Samsung keyboard
- 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.
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.
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i mean you don’t have to pick grass to be the lawn you have, unless you live in a HOA that requires it
Places like Maryland did away with that nonsense. It is possible if neighbors are willing to come together and fight for it.
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.
Look at Mr rich pants here, needing a ride on petrol mower. Most people round my way have small push along electric mowers.
Petrol lawnmowers come in push along models too. Before they had electric, that was the only type. It’s not fancy.
The post says you “you drive it” while you could say that for a push along it seems odd wording.
Before they had electric, that was the only type. It’s not fancy.
True that they did exist in the past, however unless you’ve got an old one they’re around twice the price of electric and more expensive to run. But, more than that, it points to you having enough garden to need petrol.
Definitely not more expensive here. We just had to replace ours on a budget and the affordable ones were all gas, over $150 less than the electric ones. Would’ve loved an electric one instead but it was a no go this time.
How odd, here an electric will be £100-£150 and petrol you’re looking £250+
Ahh, that’s fair. I didn’t read that properly. It does say drive.
And before the petrol mower there was the mechanical reel mower. My grandfather had one of these beauties. They take a bit of extra care and maintenance (sharpening, cleaning, oiling) but they do a great job and are much easier to push around than you’d think! Super lightweight and much safer around kids and pets too. Plus they’re basically silent compared to those extremely loud engine varieties (petrol and electric)!
They’re so difficult to mow a lawn with. I don’t envy the people that need(ed) to utilize these.
They’re terrible if they’re poorly maintained. A well maintained and sharpened one is very easy to mow with. The blades cut the grass like scissors!
Mine was brand new and didn’t cut shit. Any sources on how to maintain one?
My grandfather had one of these! I really enjoyed mowing my grandparents’ lawn with it as a child.
Lawns are one of those things we do without thinking about it because it’s what everyone else has.
If you have space for a lawn, why not turn it into something beautiful and productive like a garden?
Oh, because your neighbors will get made at you for being different.
Oh, because your neighbors will get mad at you
for being different.because MuH pRoPeRtY vAlUe!!Homeowner’s Association moment
Change the narrative. Tell them their property value will plummet because lawns were shit fads that are going out of style.
If people see more value in a patch of drying grass rather that a productive garden, how could they be trusted with enough money to buy a house ?
It’s the other way around for me, I don’t know anything about pruning… one of my neighbors cross over to my side to have a chat, and asks, “new home owner, huh?”… I instantly laughed and admitted that owning a home is a HUGE learning curve. You either learn how to maintain your property inside and out, or you pay out the ass to have someone else maintain it. No other option, unless you want to be that neighbor that everyone hates.
Man, guy behind us has a beautiful garden. Just a little plot, probably a quarter acre, but it looks so much nicer than the plots on either side. More functional, too.
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.
Those electric mowers have been around for 50+ years.
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.
A plug in mower? Hopefully the cable was orange or something, that sounds risky.
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 have a reel mower. until i can completely subvert my lawn, i don’t need to tolerate the smoke and noise, at least.
Reject modernity. Return to scythe.
look at mr. fancy pants here, thinks they’re too good for a regular old sickle huh?
Those are two entirely different tools with entirely different purposes. Sickles are good for harvesting small parts of plants, not mowing large swathes.
yes it’s almost like that’s the joke!
