the evil empire of lawnservice

[thanate]

This is the kind of thing that makes me not believe in the idea of people living other places than this planet. Not that we are incapable of more-or-less surviving in extremely miserable environments, and not that squeaky-clean starships and strange planets full of alien life don't make good fantasies. But even now I'd bet that most people don't know what a well-functioning ecosystem actually looks like, let alone how to create one that sustains the microfauna we need to be healthy.

Speaking of which, I keep forgetting that there are people out there who have no idea how terrible standard lawncare practices are for the environment. Aside from the whole problem of a monoculture being inherently unhealthy, the people who actually pay attention to how grass grows rather than trying to sell more chemicals and services will tell you the following things:

*Your lawn will be significantly healthier and need much less water if you never cut it shorter than three inches.

*You should never fertilize without getting a soil test first, as nearly all the time your soil is fine. If it's not, non-chemical amendments (mulching in your grass clippings, etc) will be far healthier than petrolium-based fertilizers. (yeah, think about that for a minute... would you want to eat things made of oil?)

*Grass doesn't take in any of the fertilizer you put down before summer. Anything you put on your lawn in early spring is just going to run off and feed the algae in your local waterways.

*Furthermore, either overfertilizing or overwatering causes the grass not to bother making deep roots, so that you have to keep on watering it at times when a healthy lawn would be just fine with the natural rainfall.

*And pesticides... we had a speaker from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation yesterday who compared regular pesticide treatments to undergoing chemotherapy when you're healthy. If you've got a problem, deal with it. Otherwise, don't put toxic chemicals on a lawn that you, or your pets, or your kids might want to walk on. Even if you use a lawn service, they'll have an opt-out block hidden somewhere.

Basically, if you're going to grow grass, pay attention to what the grass wants, not what Scotts or whoever (and Scotts, if you remember, also thought it was a good idea to put insecticide on bird seed) wants to sell you.

Comments

[tam_nonlinear]

I would love to have no lawn. I don't see the point. Give me an expanse of trees, or clover, or violets, or something useful. Lawn is just an old fashioned way to brag that you had so much land and resources that you could do something useless with parts of it.

[thanate]

Yeah. I want to live in a world where HOAs require some fraction of native habitat (particularly meadow, since that's the one that we're largely failing to conserve these days.)

Alternately, where is the option of getting buried in a fire-maintained meadow cemetery? Because I'd buy into that.

[cheshiretiffy.livejournal.com]

Score one for not chemical treating to kill weeds, mowing over leaves, letting the grass clippings lay where they fall and keeping it tall! We havn't had to fertilize since we moved in. The grass, clover, dandelions and that other plant I don't know what it is, all grow like crazy every year. The neighbor behind us has soft, dark, lucious grass and no weeds, but he's always out there with various machines (two riding mowers, one push mower, an aerator and a seeder) and watering every day. I can't imagine how much he's spending on water.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Yeah, exactly. Or gasoline for his mowers.

[dancinglights.livejournal.com]

Amen.

One of these days I am going to catch the next-door-neighbor I think is responsible for occasionally 'helpfully' mowing the tiny grass section of our front garden along with their own, too often, and too short, in order to shame us into some kind of suburban military standard. And I am going to chew them out at length because *some of our lawn is dying* only because it does not get enough sun or water or fertilizer to survive that kind of abuse and that is why we don't do it and by the way I'm allergic to that pesticide ten feet from my door and their baby shouldn't be crawling around on it either. Meanwhile, why don't they tend to the multiflora rose that is taking over most of their not-visible-from-street-inspection back yard right up to the property line where I attack it with hedge trimmers once a season and grow wormwood hoping to scare it back.

FFS.

Okay, I'm done now. Sorry.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Ugh. No need to apologize.

Apparently there's something called rose rosette's disease that's going around, which attacks most everything but the native roses; we've seen some beautifully unhealthy multiflora rose in the various bits of Howard County that the master naturalist class visited. Perhaps it will turn up in your neighborhood next.

[dancinglights.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, it's also killing fairly ancient ornamental rose bushes in old neighborhoods, and while I'm glad to see properly invasive ones develop some kind of natural check and balance, I was sad when I heard of it via kylecassidy having to remove the 10+ foot tall rosebushes that came with his house, and am worried for the fragile WW2-ish era ones at my grandmother's house. But if it takes out the mess behind my 30-year-old strip of subdivision where there isn't anything that venerable growing at all, I won't be too upset.