Table of Contents[Hide][Show]
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!
An interesting look at how looney our approach toward lawns can be in terms of the environment. A lot of weeds can actually be eaten, like dandelion leaves, which is a great way to live more sustainably. Thanks for sharing!
ha… As a kid, my dad and step mom didn’t take care of their lawn except to cut it occasionally. I think their reasoning for not doing much was entirely different (they didn’t care). Sometimes, the lawn embarrassed me, though, because of the type of “weeds” that would grow and take over; they were a bit unsightly. But I sometimes I did really appreciate the beauty of variety, especially in the springtime.
If you do a search on the history of lawns you will find that it started in Europe with wealthy land owners. Of course no sensible farmer would put in a lawn! With the advent of industrializtion came parks and the lawn as we know it. It is kind of a status symbol to have a perfect lawn. Isn’t that why the HOAs want them perfect, it supports property values! We have two acres which I am sure was seeded at one time. But the proper grass for the area was seeded, which does not require watering. I am grateful for all the grass even if it is filled with weeds and such. 2 acres of dirt would not be pleasant to live it! Especially on a windy dry day! Since we moved in 9 years ago, we have put in a very large garden, 2 dozen laying hens and raise our own broiler chicks on our property. It just seems to make sense to me to use it to produce something instead of looking like a park! And I can tell you, 50 broilers pooping on your grass in a movable pen is the most natural way to get gorgeous green lush grass! 🙂
Sarah, you’re a girl after my own heart! In my previous house about 5 years ago (before I moved to a farm), I sheet-mulched with layers of newspaper and cardboard over both front and backyard lawns and covered that with wood chips (free from a local tree service) and leaf mulch, and added more raised beds. I miss that yard! I grew the best tomatoes I ever tasted in that backyard, and the front was maintenance free, as the addition of more leaves just meant more mulch! Have you read the wonderful book “Food Not Lawns”? That inspired me a few years ago.
Great post! I hate lawns too. Especially those large, expansive ones. I always say to my husband what a waste of good vegetable garden space!!! I’d have the hugest garden if I had a large yard, – mine is tiny (our entire property is 30×100 feet!) My husband built me a raised garden bed and I have my pole beans along one fence. I cram as much as I can get away with in the yard, while still leaving room for the kids to run wild 🙂 My kids worked a long, wide compacted dirt path into the yard that I’m sure horrifies some people – lol
I’m so with you! Weeds can be very beautiful.
My parents never watered the lawn at our house (mostly because it was 5 acres of an old bean field), but so many of my parent’s friends who lived in nice neighborhoods with beautiful green lawns had dogs that died from cancer. Coincidence? I think not.
I once asked my mom, “How do you tell the weeds from the flowers?” and she told me, “If it’s pretty to you, it’s a flower. It doesn’t matter if it’s a weed to everyone else!”
My mom always grew things naturally, without any chemicals, and she always had a wonderful garden and yard. I remember picking clover and making “crowns” out of it as a kid! To me, that clover was beautiful flower, not a weed! You can have the chemically treated lawn- give me a natural yard that works with the environment and produces all the wonderful “flowers” that nature intended 🙂
Thank you for this. My husband and I are sort of battling about this right now. I let the chicory grow, he pulls it up!
But the natural weeds that grow in a natural lawn all have purposes:
clover — fixes nitrogen, doesn’t go brown in the hottest summer, very soft on feet (our yard is mostly clover!)
moss — makes the ground springy
dandelion — deep roots bring up nutrients to the surface from far below; plus, if you mow them frequently they learn to grow close to the ground
buttercup — pretty!
chicory, dandelion, plantain, purslane, onion grass, and wild mustard — tasty!
The way we usually grow lawns is like a perfect recipe for exhausted soil. We grow crop after crop of grass, harvest weekly, take the clippings away and NEVER replace the organic matter. Instead, we should mix in legumes (clover and alfalfa), let grass grow a little longer to develop good roots, and either leave the clippings or replace them with compost.
I never water my lawn, and it hasn’t gone dormant yet! It may eventually, but as long as it’s still green, I know my veggies don’t need much water either. I let them all grow deep roots so they will be able to find water in the hottest weather.
Thanks for bringing attention to the subject of LAWNS, Sarah! I loved my back yard as a kid which was mostly woods – and a swingset! Now that I live in beautiful Boulder, Colorado I cringe whenever I see a big green lawn because they ain’t natural here! Not even close. The sun and the heat at this altitude make keeping a green lawn a full time job. I didn’t read through all the comments, but this is true of a big portion of the country, especially the southwest. I know golf is very popular in Utah. Utah! And most of the west has been in a 10+ year drought. I see it as a water use issue out here. One day we will wake up smell the astroturf.
Thanks for chiming in Jake. A green lawn on Boulder, Colorado? Makes no sense!
I cringe when I see pictures of these beautiful, perfect green golf courses in the middle of Nevada – a golf course in the desert? How clueless are these people. What kind of water resources are being wasted for just a few rich people to play golf there? Shameful and downright disrespectful to the entire human race.
Grass that has been allowed to die back in the heat of season will definately come back in the cool of fall and spring. Our grass is a cool season grass and it’s natural for it to stop in the heat and drought. If allowed to do so, it will grow a better root system and be able to find that moisture in the ground. Grass/plants that are watered constantly, have shallow root systems since it doesn’t have to search for moisture and will therefor not do well if not babied. Also, grass/plants that are fertilized regularly become addicts to the chemicals. Sound familiar? So, a natural lawn/planting will better sustain itself than a manicured/over-watered/over-chemicalized lawn. BTW-I have an entire book on how to calculate fertilizers for golf courses. A course I had to take for my degree in horticulture was turf grass management. I really disliked it since I’m into native plantings/prairies.
Thank you for explaining this so well, Ann. I have never been able to adequately explain to my Mom how my lawn can go so brown during drought and come back with no apparent long term damage and be beautiful and green once the rains return (within DAYS in most cases) yet hers when it goes brown remains dead and won’t come back. She waters with a sprinkler system and I never water mine.
Ann, since this is your area of expertise, what is your opinion on the “organic” professional lawn services? Any good ones out there? If so what should people look for if they want to hire one? While my husband DIY’s it, it would be helpful info in trying to convert my neighbors.