Since lawns are bad for the environment, what do you think lawns should be replaced with?
Optional poll if you want, since this place doesn’t have polls,
https://submatrix.net/article/Polls/CYL6qLm7eL
I might add some of the suggestions
Natural local plants gardens. They take little maintenance or water.
It depends on the size and type of plants that you have growing on your lawn.
I will assume that you are referring to classic short green grass lawns but here in the UK that is not how we play.
In our garden we have a weed edge and a good covering of wild flowers amongst the grass which is of varying lengths.
Good for wildlife and the environment.
moss is quite nice
Can’t walk across it, it falls apart.
at least in our yard it holds quite nicely, though it also has some grass growing in here and there so maybe it needs both 🤔 though we also dont walk on it constantly but does hold even though we also cut the lawn with driveable lawnmower
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Well, any combination of species that are native to your area -slash- noninvasive and you find pretty or produce fruits that you enjoy or flowers that the local bees might enjoy.
It’s going to depend on your biome a lot. A pond is nice too, introduce a couple frogs and some fish, filter the water, plant some citronnelle around and you shouldn’t have to worry about mosquitoes…
Best answerof the thread. Depends where you live and what is natural to your area. Southwest is going to be rocks and draught tolerant foliage. PNW is going to be mossy and ferns. Midwest a lot of natural grasses. Not sure about Louisiana or the south but I assume just keep a swamp back there. In all cases friendly flora is a good start
As you’re “asking Lemmy”, I think the most Lemmy-like option is to set up a sort of paved guillotining area to be used to execute billionaires.
Once they’ve been culled to an appropriate level, they can be composted down into good soil.
Then you can rip up all the paving and deinstall the guillotine(s), then plant your moss/wildflowers/veg/local plants/bee-friendly plants etc.
Made me laugh, good one
The better option is a mix of denser housing with fewer mandatory setbacks, mixed with commercial space and public parks.
I think the common answer is native plants.
Fediverse community links:
https://threadiverse.link/slrpnk.net/c/nolawns
@nolawns@solarpunk.net
Gardening stores should more commonly have seed packs of hearty local plants that make good lawn replacements. People shouldn’t either be stuck researching and sourcing seeds or just giving up and doing clover.
native wild flowers and grasses make for a very pretty garden imo, and benefit nature a lot
Yes, I keep slowly expanding my mulched native flower bed.
If you’re in the US, Prairie Moon Nursery has a great selection of exclusively plants native to North America and ships. Live plants tend to be best in the spring, their seed mixes are excellent in late fall. And they have a lot of how to guides.
I didn’t replace mine with anything. I just stopped cutting it so now it turns into a field instead. The biodiversity grows by itself every year. You don’t really need to do anything to it - nature will take care of that.
You can still cut your lawn and have it be natural. Mine barely has any of its former monoculture and is now mostly clover and other ground cover plants.
But mowing is necessary for me because we have small dogs and the area has several venomous snake species. I keep my mower on the highest setting, though.
Each year my neighbor brags about spending $400 a month on his saint augustine, then asks me what my secret is when my grass is green in the middle of summer and I haven’t watered once. He refuses to believe the answer is controlled neglect.
Although I am planning on installing an irrigation system to run using the condensate my HVAC produces, the condensate my Dehumidifier used, and used aquarium water. (I’ll divert it from the lawn once I till up a patch for staple crops)
Honestly, local fauna is the best way to go
replace your lawn with local fauna, each blade of grass could instead be a deer
We have used the wrong word and that is the most appropriate response. 👏🏻 We hate English LMFAO Wtf is the word for local plants or should we just use local plants lmao. Thought fauna was related to plants 😭
“Flora” is the plants one and “Fauna” is the animals one.
[Edit] Depending on where you live, Flora is also a female name and a brand of margarine.
No, Flora is a football team.
I know of the Estonian football team, but are there any other Floras?
I meant the Estonian one, yes. I’m Estonian lol
Ah thanks bestie!! :D
I have a garden with vegetables, one with flowers, a few fruit trees and a maple, some elderberry trees. And a mowed space in front and in back. I guess technically it’s a lawn but we don’t water it or put any fertilizer or chemicals, just keep it mowed. We throw clover seeds out on bare patches but weeds mostly take over. It grows, we mow.
A non-traditional lawn? Instead of just grass everywhere, set up a biodiverse lawn with wild grasses that are safe for bunnies and such to eat as well as other things which don’t require constant watering or mowing or anything.
Letting what naturally grows without adding water grow.
It takes a LOT of work for most people to go from lawn to native plants. Disturbed earth will grow invasives first. I’ve got an unwatered 10x20 space that I hand weed, carefully preserving natives and desirable volunteers. If I don’t stay on top of it, it’s all burr clover, Himalayan blackberry and puncture vine in no time. I had hope that if I could reestablish natives it would settle down and be maintenance free, but it’s been too many years to keep that dream alive.
This generally doesn’t work in suburbia.
Its called a meadow yard or some such.
Theres one on my street, been like it for a decade or so. Its just weeds and Kikuyu from the neighbours.
A residential block is always going to need to be manicured to keep undesirable plants out.
My mom always just mowed whatever grew in the yard and called it “grass” and that’s all I have ever done. Mow the weeds, who cares? They get nice flowers, the bees like them. Except bull thistle. We dug that up with prejudice before it could flower. But as far as lawn, that is just a mowed space where I grew up, and I did grow up in a suburb, though not a house farm sort of development, not an HOA situation. And it’s just a mowed space where I live now too. Maybe 1 house in every 10 has the literal Grass Lawn, with the chemicals and monoculture. 9/10 have a mix of whatever.
Mowing removes undesirable plants as they don’t have a chance to flower. It’s the same thing.
When I had a house with a shady yard, it was mostly moss. It won’t take a lot off foot traffic but it doesn’t even need mowing.
It very much depends on where you’re located, what sort of climate the place has, even what sort of neighbors you have.
I have a relatively small front yard and am located in a temperate region with reasonably good rainfall. So I planted a bunch of perennial flowers and clover in the existing grass of my lawn, laid down some decorative stone pathways weaving through it, and some shrubs around the edges. Bought a sign that reads “Meadow Habitat Restoration - Please Do Not Mow or Spray” to make it clear that I wasn’t just neglecting my front yard but was deliberately turning it into a patch of pseudo-wilderness. Now I can basically leave my front yard completely untouched all summer (occasionally pulling a few thistles because I personally hate them) and it looks lovely and has plenty of bees and whatnot visiting it. There’s no such thing as “weeds”, just wildflowers.
My back yard is much larger and I wanted to keep the lawn because it’s a nice space for activities. But I got a pushmower, and the lawn doesn’t grow fast because I’ve allowed trees to grow all around the edges and that makes it quite shady. The trees make for a nice privacy screen once the leaves come in, it’s like my back yard is a forest clearing. I scattered clover seed among the grass there too, you can mow clover just like grass so I figure whatever survives best gets the territory.
Personally, I’m not fond of gravel because it’s an unnecessary dead zone. There’s already plenty of bare concrete everywhere, we don’t need more of that. But if you’re in a dry environment that doesn’t support greenery without watering or fertilizer then some hardscrabble landscaping could look quite nice. Maybe plant a few sagebrushes or even cacti (cacti can put out some very nice flowers) with some interesting piles of larger rocks to add visual interest.
Maybe take a wander around your neighborhood to see if other folks have set up interesting alternatives to lawns and get some ideas off of them, they’ll have done the testing to see if it works.
There’s a type of clover, I think. I saw it on Reddit a few years ago. I only remember it’s green and short and sort of looks like grass, but is better for some reason, I don’t remember its advantages over grass.
Here in NM, we mostly use rocks. This is common in front yards:
For backyards with kids, it’s real grass if you can afford the water, or fake grass and gravel. Without kids, it’s pavers, a pergola with furniture, and native plants along the walls/fence.
Rocks are so. fucking. hot. Landscaping with rocks increases the ambient temperature around your house by like 10 degrees vs. bare dirt. Even in New Mexico, there are so many native trees and shrubs. Please shade the ground and help keep your neighborhood cooler
In my neighborhood, each house has a large cottonwood (or other type) tree for shade, plus bushes, juniper, etc. and 3/4 of the houses have a plot of grass of about 100 sq ft, in the front yard. The other houses have only rocks. OP asked about options without grass, though.
Miniclover maybe. There’s a few varieties. I totally didn’t buy some bags a few years ago and accidentally dumped them in with the grass. That’s what I’d tell my HOA anyway. This year it’s coming back again slowly again.
