People on here always talk about how lawns need a bunch of fertilizer to work, but that never made sense to me because we’ve never done that around here. But then I learned that’s because everyone just has clover growing along side their grass.
Anyway I think shaming people for their lawn is a bad idea. I think killing your lawn will only catch on if it’s presented as a way to make your lawn cooler. You’re not a bad person for having a lawn, but you could change it into something so much more interesting by including native flora.
We have one that barely has any grass left. We are surrounded by meadows and there is so much just random plants growing. Don’t tell me our lawn is bad since the obly difference between it and the surrounding meadows is that we mow ours.
Pretty sure the mowing is the exact problem. Can’t remember if it’s solved by using an old school push-powered mower or something
Edit - after looking into it, seems like push mowers don’t help because Americans eating meat will cause as much pollution pushing a mower as using gas? Not sure
Why is mowing the issue? If you just leave it be it grows too tall.
It’s wasteful
Would you prefer I cut it with a scythe? I already do that with a particularly steep part of the grass
I don’t think I trust the studies saying human power is worse tbh. Cultivating food uses CO2, cows eat plants before we eat them, the plants drink CO2 from the air. Lawnmower takes power out of the ground and injects pollution in the air. Scythe has to be better
I thought a push mower might help but some studies say it might be worse. I guess the recommendation is to plant something other than grass that naturally stays good to walk on, maybe? I’m still learning about this myself
Half the grass behind the house is dead anyway and was replaced by moss naturally. The issue is the moss would dry out faster and die in the summer. The current situation is probably the best
What on earth is happening now?
So cheap lawns are trending in this context am i right?Grass lawns is a landscaping trend that came from the British aristocracy. Who had large manicured grass fields around their mansions.
www.healthyyards.org is the link in the image. I’m not affiliated with it in any way, I just hate when people put links in images and you can’t click on them. Almost as bad as texting someone a QR code. Motherfucker, what am I supposed to do with that, get another phone to scan it?
Heal thy yards
Screenshot, share to binary eye, done 🥳
Kind of amazing that people still need to be convinced to wear helmets while riding.
You’d have a hard time convincing me to ride without one.
Same, but it’s actually a charity I started recently to fundraise to buy bikes (and helmets) for teenagers who sign up for a cycling club at local high schools! There’s a bunch of kids who are interested in the club but can’t afford their own bike. Cycling is pitifully rare here in the US so I’m hoping to improve that in a small way 🙏
In that case, masterful self plug.
Where are you located in the US? I think I have a few unused bikes.
Thanks! South Carolina - details on https://helmetheads.club/ if you’re actually interested in supporting, anything is appreciated!
Thanks! Unfortunately I’m pretty far from SC, but I’ll see if I can contribute anything via the website.
This is very context related. As an example, in the Netherlands almost no one wears a helmet while riding a bike and the cyclist union discourages the government from any legislation requiring people to do so.
Cycling is so safe, you really don’t need one (unless you think you should also wear one walking down the street). The cyclist union’s argument is that if you force people to wear a helmet, fewer people would cycle, more would drive a car and in the end more people would end up getting hit by a car.
That being said, I would 1000% wear a helmet in most other countries.
https://zxing.org/w/decode.jspx
If on desktop
FWIW I know on iPhones if you tap and hold on a QR code in an image, it should give you the option to open the link.
I’d be surprised if Android doesn’t have a similar behaviour available?
But… they’re sharing an image? Where else would you like it to go, in the EXIF metadata?
Like in a radio advert, you just remember the URL and type it in!
Are you still dressed like this?
Then why does your bed still look like this?
Look, I get the idea. Lawns are bad. But, the argument is a stupid one. Just because things haven’t changed in a few centuries doesn’t mean they necessarily should change. Beds are essentially the same design as hundreds of years ago because that design works. Why are lawns necessarily different than beds?
Lawns were easily maintained by the livestock that simply ate the grass. What we are doing now is a facimile of that by wasting energy to pretend sheep live nearby.
Do you have livestock? By all means have a lawn, it makes sense!
I don’t care about lawns, what I care about is the bad argument claiming that just because things were done a certain way 300 years ago means that they’re necessarily bad.
Depends on the livestock. Some are top grazers like cows and other eat all the way to the base like sheep (this one can kill the grass)
Beds don’t have an adverse effect on our ecosystem like lawns do
Also beds back then were made of straw and rope, maybe feathers if you were rich. Nowadays they’re made of a precision engineered combination of different types of foam and springs, all topped with self-cooling materials, placed on bases that can detect if you’re snoring and automatically adjust the mattress’s angle and softness to get you to stop. Beds are way fucking better than they were centuries ago. Yards are still useless wastes of space.
Also beds back then were made of straw and rope
Mattresses, maybe. Beds were beds. The basic design of beds hasn’t changed.
The point is that some things haven’t changed in centuries because they do the job just fine. So, the argument that “this is the way it was 300 years ago, therefore it’s bad” is a shitty argument.
The point is things need to change when they no longer do the job just fine.
Then say that, instead of saying “do you dress like this?”
Ok but lawns have always been bad. Their whole original purpose was so rich people could flex their ability to leave some of their land useless. The whole point was for lawns to be useless. So like, the argument of “this is the way it was 300 years ago therefore it’s bad” is actually valid in this case. They were useless then, and they’re still useless now.
I don’t care about lawns, I care about the bad argument claiming that if things were done a certain way 300 years ago, they’re necessarily bad.
Yeah you keep saying that, but that’s not really the argument being made. If you’d actually read all the text, you’d find the argument being made is that lawns are no longer environmentally sustainable, which is just true.
Just because something was done 300 years ago doesn’t mean it’s ok to do now. And acknowledging that isn’t saying that things that are old are necessarily bad. It’s just recognizing that things change.
The basic design of lawns doesn’t need to change: a relatively cleared area around a house. The exact composition of the lawn can change, though. Why does it need to just be some genetically modified grass that provides nothing? Let natural grasses, clover, and flowers take over.
I’m pretty convinced HOAs are causing firefly extinction (among others). Better spray your lawn, i see a dandelion. Fire up the single-stroke leaf blower to push that one leaf out to the end of your driveway for the next 20 minutes.
The basic design of lawns doesn’t need to change
I’m not really interested in lawns, just the bad argument that was used to claim that something being in use 300 years ago means that it’s necessarily out of date and needs to be replaced.
rewild that shit!
I can revegetate her
Because of bullshit HOA rules.
Because I’m also on a lot of cocaine and I’ve cleaned the entirer inside of my house to surgical standards.
And a beautiful new coat of Scheele’s Green I hope
Bungalows have never been sustainable, tax and infrastructure-wise. We need a similar one.
Mayberry and cars were neat for the 50s, but we’ve sacrificed green space and agri space for bungalow sprawl. We either have to reduce people or forget single-level fire-trap houses and driving 20 min to a parking lot for daily needs.
I don’t know where you live but I have not seen a new bungalow built in 40 years.
I’ve seen plenty knocked down to build a McMansion on though.
It’s not an issue of the style of house; it’s an issue of the lot square footage allocated to a single house (i.e. dwelling units per acre).
Think of it like this: if you’ve got a single family house on a square 1-acre lot, that’s a little over 200 feet on each side. Assuming it’s not a corner lot and you’ve got a neighbor across the street, your tax dollars basically need to pay to maintain 100’ of street, water and sewer pipes, etc. plus the cost per mile of city vehicles driving past it. (Plus some amount related to the depth of the yard and its effect on the length of other roads on other sides of the block, but let’s ignore that for simplicity.)
In comparison, if it were 4 1/4-acre lots instead (with 50’ of street frontage each), each family would only be responsible for 25’ worth of infrastructure. Or if it were a 10-unit multifamily building on that lot, each family would only need to pay for 10’.
Unfortunately, because tax is based on property value and not street frontage and value doesn’t scale linearly like that, what ends up happening is that the city loses money on the large-lot single-family, and those people (who are already generally some of the richest since they can afford large lots) end up getting subsidized by the (poorest) people who take up the least amount of space.
It’s both unjust and a perverse incentive to consume more space than you need.
You have described the municipal struggle of Edmonton property tax to a T. And people here hate that old bungalows on huge lots are being torn down and split into 2 homes or multiplex builds. Bunch of moronic nimbys
I’ve described the problem in essentially the entirety of North America, at least.
Fair enough. First time homeowner in a new city and now I’m seeing it first hand
City ordinances…
Become a 🌻 Social Justice Druid 🌿
18th century? Who was doing this in the 1700s?
Today’s lawn is pretty much a tiny copy of the Estate Grounds that the Aristocrats used to have.
And they were spraying all kinds of nasty shit on grass that isn’t native to make it look pretty?
The “that isn’t native” part is mostly a US problem. The reason they aren’t native here is that Europeans brought over the same turfgrass species they’d been using at home.
“Kentucky bluegrass,” for instance, is actually native to Europe, despite the name. Ditto for fescue, bermudagrass, etc.
Nah they just used the poors to take care of it.
Which I guess is still sorta true today.
And they were spraying all kinds of nasty shit…
Yes they used literal shit, both animal and human.
…on grass that isn’t native…
I can’t answer that but it really wouldn’t surprise me. The ruling class commonly imported plants and animals from all over the world.
…to make it look pretty?
No pictures exist, obviously, but I’m quite sure that groundskeepers were doing whatever was necessary to make their Lords estate look as good as possible.
Mine’s all brown and overgrown, am I doing it right?
We only have yards because some asshat when creaytng the cookie cutter home system for suburbia thought it was a good thing to force non rich people to care for a thing only rich people had because they paid others to take care of it to show they had wealth to hire a ton of people, so that “they would be too busy to think about commuting crimes”…
We also have them because they are nice to look at, smell good, and pleasant to use; the exact same reasons that the wealthy had them.
Most alternatives to a traditional lawn lose at least two of those and they can take just as much time to maintain.
Suburban lawns are a problem but there’s very few, if any, alternatives that provide the same benefits.
Nice to look at is subjective. I find them ugly, but ofcourse that is rooted in knowing that they’re basically dead land that just looks green. Just like tree plantations aren’t as pretty as a forest. What I find prettier is chaotic growth that is mostly left to it’s own.
Smell, again subjective, I find the varried smell much more pleasant. But the smell is always superceded by the nearby dairy farm anyways in my case, as it is for my neighbours with their grass yards
“Pleasant to use” you mean easy for kids to play on? Can’t argue with that if you have kids. I don’t and I enjoy watching my chaotic yard used more by birds and insects. , knowing that there’s at least more life in there.
Can we get rid of lawns while bringing back the fashion please?
