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A perfectly manicured green lawn is bad for health due to the amount of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and excessive watering required to maintain it. What to do instead that will be far less stressful, more beautiful, and good for your family and the community.
I hate lawns. No offense to any of you self described lawn freaks out there, but the fact is that the more perfect and unblemished a lawn is, the more I hate it.
Perhaps my extreme distaste for perfect lawns comes from my own Mother’s obsession with lawns while I was growing up. Even today, she waters, sprays, weed eats, fertilizes, and chemicalizes the living daylights out of her lawn season after season and then laments how my yard looks better than hers.
What do I do to achieve superior lawn status? Absolutely nothing. Please don’t call it a lawn, though.
The word lawn to me means that you actually work on it and spray things on it. I don’t work on mine at all; therefore, it is a yard. It’s amazing how nice – not perfect – things can look when you leave nature alone and don’t disrupt the soil balance with chemicals.
Golf Courses Are Just Too Perfect
As much as I love to play golf (and I played a lot growing up – basically every day), I would never live on a golf course because I hate how perfect they look all the time.
I much prefer the links-style courses of Australia and Europe where frequently nothing is sprayed and yet the grass is beautiful anyway with mottled patches of brown and various shades of green grass snaking up and down each fairway.
The “greens” may or may not be green .. but the grass is smooth and slick anyway providing a perfect putting surface just the same as the overchemicalized American versions.
I once was told that each golf course green in America requires about $10,000 in chemicals to maintain it each year. I have no idea if this is true or not, but even if it’s remotely close speaks volumes to the amount of poison that is dumped in our environment year after year simply to maintain small patches of green putting surface.
Insane.
Avoiding a lawn was a primary reason my husband and I moved to a rural neighborhood.
The thought of having a Homeowner Association send me a nasty letter because I had a brown spot or two on my lawn made no sense to me and knowing myself well, I realized I would never be moved to comply with these “rules”.
Such a letter would mean that I would have to spray chemical fertilizers and pesticides on said brown spots which my children would track into the house. Pesticides in a home take a very long time to break down. Kind of like a house guest you can’t seem to get rid of.
Pesticides on my lawn would also mean hormone-disrupting, cancer-causing fumes mixing with the air we breathed inside. Not to mention that pesticides have been linked with ADHD in children. Though I didn’t know this at the time we bought our house, it seemed common sense to me to avoid them.
I don’t need a scientific study to tell me that chemicals and children shouldn’t mix.
Weeds Can Be Beautiful
I love the mixture of weeds and grass that makes up my front yard. I even love the sandspurs. They have a place in my yard and my kids know to wear shoes in that area.
Do I try to get rid of them? Not a chance.
My front yard is predominantly one type of grass and my back yard is another type. Yeah and they look very different. Do I feel compelled to make everything uniform? Not in the slightest. If it’s green and it grows, I’m good with it.
I have never put down any pesticides or chemicals of any kind on my yard in the 25+ years we’ve lived here.
I love that my children can run barefoot on it and that when they were toddlers, they could eat the dirt, leaves, and grass without danger (toddlers eat dirt for a reason, by the way. It primes their immune system and leaves them healthier as adults).
Not only haven’t I ever sprayed my yard, but I’ve also never watered it either. Why? If there is no rain, a yard should die and turn brown.
I consider this a welcome relief from mowing and other yard duties. I hate thirsty lawns that suck up water by the hundreds of gallons. It is such a waste to me and a clear testament to the unsustainable living mentality of Americans in general.
A green lawn during the dry season is weird. It’s not only not natural, it’s downright distasteful. My brown yard comes back beautiful and green when the rains return. Do I need to resod or reseed? Of course not. Nature knows what to do. It’s only chemicalized perfect lawns that have trouble during and after droughts.
I’m thinking about lawns right now because my Mom is preparing to completely resod her entire (and very large) yard at the moment. The dirt had finally had enough abuse over the years and even the extreme treatments of lawn maintenance companies could not bring it back.
The soil was basically so dead nothing would grow in it anymore.
So, thousands of dollars are now required to completely resod the whole thing!
I am very happy to report that my Mom is open to using one of the new organic lawn services that have become more widespread in my community in recent years once her new lawn is laid. You go Mom!
One step at a time, though.
Maybe someday I can convince her to turn off those sprinklers and love the weeds as much as the grass!
I wants to plant a garden where there is grass now, but the laws in my state, Utah, won’t let me do so. I live in a state that encourages their citizens to be self sufficient, to grow a garden, and yet will not let me grow one in my front yard, such a waste, and I have yet to find a recipe to use all that grass in. So I have compromised and now grown in containers, that hang from every branch in my trees. Lettuce does well in containers and love the shade and early morning sunlight. Now I am fighting the laws about keeping chickens!
I totally agree. Another consideration is the fact that the perfectly manicured lawns are often over-fertilized lawns and are also contributing to the pollution of our waterways. Lawn fertilizers add Nitrogen and Phosphorus to the natural water systems and contribute to algal blooms. Some algal blooms occur naturally, especially during the hot summers, but the contribution of these elements to the waterways by humans cannot be overlooked. In Florida, the heavy summer rains move these elements from over-fertilized lawns directly into the rivers, bay and to the ocean. The environmental impact is unsightly, un-swimmable waters in some cases, fish kills and depletion of oxygen in the waters. For Florida, this is also a major economical impact due to the fact that we rely so heavily on tourism- if the waters are unsightly, smelly from major fish kills or un-swimmable, industries that rely on tourists suffer.
Fortunately, we have programs such as the Tampa Bay Estuary Program (and others) that study environmental issues such as this for our area. Since removal of these elements once in the waterways is extremely expensive, the alternative is to prevent the entrance into the waterways in the first place. Programs such as TBEP(above) has been working to promote seasonal bans of fertilizer application in order to avoid these nutrients from running straight into the waterways. Regions in the area have voted to enact a summer fertilizer application ban for the rainy months since most of the fertilizer applied in the rainy months washes off lawns and runs straight to the bay anyway. Just another reason to go natural! (In addition to avoiding pesticides and wasting precious drinking water on lawns). A wonderful alternative is to plant vegetation that is native to your area, or to xeroscape. Both are much more interesting than a boring old lawn anyway and much less maintenance!
OH MY GOODNESS!!! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! I have thought maybe I am the only one! I hate lawns too. I tell my husband if we ever built a house it would be situated to have no lawns! The time, money, and effort we Americans can spend on our lawns is insane. And I have never seen a well kept garden that I found more beautiful than wild things growing at will.
I hate pesticides and lawn chemicals of all kinds. I refuse to poison myself just because the neighbors are obsessed with having a “perfect” lawn. I refuse to put myself at risk for cancer and other chronic diseases just to get rid of a few weeds.
Besides I love weeds and usually let them grow! Its like natural flowers already in your yard.
What’s barbaric is that a person can be taken to jail for not keeping up their lawn. Way to prioritize. Though why said person would move into an area that requires you to sign on to that ridiculous agreement on maintaining a lawn with grass not meant for that part of the country is beyond me.
We hired an organic lawn service as soon as we bought our first house. Within a year, the front yard was transformed to lush green where it had been sparse and dandelion filled. As a matter of fact our neighbors started using the same service within another year because they were so impressed with our lush green lawn. We pull weeds by hand though there are hardly any growing at a time because the lawn is healthy enough to take care of itself. And our worm population is through the roof. Dozens of worms in every shovelful in the garden beds. And it’s so fun to hear the kids squeal with delight when a truly huge night crawler turns up. I figure if you can maintain a worm that is as thick as your finger and a good seven inches long, you have a healthy soil system.
We do let the grass go dormant in summer, though it’s been so wet the past few years, it never has gone really brown. And it totally greens up within a day of the first fall rains while I see nearby lawns struggling to come back to life. And those get manicured and chemical-ed and watered all summer. 😀
You would love our yard , then. We let one of our cows out each day to graze it, stake the lamb out each day, I herd my flock of goats around it each day to eat brushy stuff. We actually didn’t mow for the first time until 2 days ago! We have many weeds and grasses to feed our livestock.
We live in semi-arid Colorado and would rather have water for the kids and garden than a lawn. We have some potted plants and a mixture of texures from rocks and ceder bark and the “lawn” is a kidney bean shaped bit that covers a whopping 30 ft2. The backyard is just wild and a great deal of dirt. I can believe the water that people waste on something that can’t be eaten. I learned recently that we have the same water usage for our family of twelve and our garden as the elderly couple down the street and their inedble lawn.
I’m totally with you on this! I grew up on 7 acres with a back pasture to hold our cow and goats. I love the “rural” aspect of it. Now I live in an HOA neighborhood with a husband who is obsessed with a perfect yard. I’ve been wanting to put in a garden and he will only allow me the tiniest space where the grass wouldn’t grow and you can’t see from anywhere inside or outside the house. I think I might ignore him and put it right in the middle of his “perfect” lawn!
Because we live in Austin, TX, having a green lawn makes one suspect. We have several garden centers that only sell things that are safe and natural. I would be an outcast if I ever put anything harmful on my soil – it would end up in our aquifer and become part of the water supply. When we lost our entire side yard to drought last year, we put in a water-permeable path and plants that can survive without water (see blog http://www.seasonedhomemaker.com). The other half of the yard that died now has weeds which I call “our native grass collection”. I say I’m helping to restore the lost prairie grasses!
Homeowners should strive to maintain their property out of consideration for their neighbors. A neighborhood of homeowners is an investment group. Each homeowner is partially dependent on the others for the maintenance of property values. Until presentation and value become completely unrelated, the homeowner who neglects his lawn is expressing contempt for his neighbors. So I’m glad you moved out to the country. I wouldn’t want you to be my neighbor.
Betcha 10 cents my yard looks better than yours! 🙂
Tell you what, Michael. Email me a picture of your lawn and I will take a picture of my yard and I will put them side by side on my blog and let the viewers decide. Your chemlawn versus my au natural lawn that hasn’t had any spraying or watering in 20 years. Whatcha say?
Are you game??
And I have to say, I wish you were my neighbor, Sarah! We have a small yard, and we do “maintain” it – but it’s mostly my husband pulling weeds while the kids are outside playing. He enjoys mowing and that kind of “chore”. I wish our neighbors wouldn’t use chemicals. Not to mention, think of how much money you save (not including possible long-term harm to your health from the chemicals) without all the upkeep.
Value and beauty are in the eye of the beholder, and a thing is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. “Property values” is a thinly disguised codeword for violating the right to private property. Your communist ideals are what is ruining America.
Ditto! 🙂