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

[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.