Unless you have really sandy soils. Then the rain mostly passes right through (ignoring all the parts that are paved - insta-flood!), and it’s just a situation with malnourished grass, probably more susceptible to “weeds”, and not a lot of organic matter to hold all that soil together.
That’s the thing missing from this image - it’s not just being more porous that makes larger plants retain water better, it’s that they’re a critical part in creating the conditions that produce more of that organic matter, getting that carbon (and a lot of other stuff) in the ground. It acts as a sponge, and in sandy soils that are too porous, it fills those gaps and acts as a binder.
Is there an alternative to grass that covers well, and doesn’t spread fast like an invasive plant?
I’ve read about clover but it does spread fast.
Clover is honestly fine, its short so even if it spreads into your flowerbeds its not going to do any damage, in fact since its a nitrogen fixer it might even help, and insects like clover a lot more than grass
eh, there’s a shitton of clay about an inch down here. turf ain’t the problem
Dandies eat clay for breakfast
I thought that was a slur for a second.
I was purposefully allowing my grass to grow because my area is in a severe drought and the herbivorous wildlife (groundhogs, rabbits, and deer) have slim pickings right now and they started coming onto my property to eat. I even leave the gates open to the fenced part when I’m not home so the critters can get in easier.
The other day my neighbor mowed half my yard without my consent because he saw a garter snake cross the road and go into my yard. I was, and still am, so pissed. He cut the grass down to the dirt. He didn’t even tell me after the fact. I had to go door to door asking my neighbors if they knew who tf touched my yard while I was out and about. My neighbor admitted to it when I got to his place to ask and had the audacity to get shitty with me about letting my grass grow.
I know this is a meme, but shit like this is why I allow wild growth on my property. First year I owned my home the ground got muddy as hell from the new build since the ground was all dug up and tilled.
From the second year on I’ve only mowed a path for my driveway and the front walkway and the rest grows wild. Sweetgrass and other native plants anywhere from like 1 to 3 feet tall and the area is high desert (Colorado) so the “weeds” suck up any moisture they can get, no flood, no mud. It’s great. I’ll never understand MFers in the rurals curating lawns.
Plus, it looks nice, and the deer in the area seem to like it as well.
Totally different ecosystem here in NW Florida, but I am also getting great results. 75% of the yard hasn’t seen a lawn mower in 2 years, the 25% that has is still fairly wild. Lots of wild plants, lots of non-native but compatible plants, plenty of surface water. We planted a few “ponds”, 150G and smaller. Thought they would take a year or two to take off. NOPE. The 150G I buried last spring was teeming with life in 2 weeks. Maybe I cheated by throwing water plants, from the river and creek in there, along with their native mud. :)
We’re the only house in the hood with; frogs (deafening last spring), hummingbirds, pollinators of all sorts (forgot to make a bee hotel this year), dragonflies (hope to have shitloads when the adults come after 2-years underwater), fewer mosquitoes, butterflies, can’t remember what all.
The insect population is worse than it was 4 short years ago, drastically worse. That scares me more than anything I’ve seen. Even in the hundreds of acres surrounding the hood, not much, not like it was. Hoping I can turn things around in my tiny part of the world.
How do you deal with native fauna that lives in wild vegetation? Mosquitoes, flies, ticks, etc.?
It essentially all takes care of itself, it’s a whole ecosystem. There’s no standing water for mosquitos thanks to the foliage. There’s also lizards, the occasional frog, birds. The deer eat some of the taller stuff. Even with the deer, there’s at least one mountain lion in the area I’ve seen, which I presume helps keep the population reasonable. I dunno, it doesn’t really need any tending, other than to clear a path where I need.
Aside from that, my neighbor has pine trees, and occasionally pine cones take root and need their root- balls shoveled out. That’s the only big maintenance because I don’t want the big trees on my property. I wouldn’t mind, but for two things:
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They always seem to root down near the road on my driveway path or walk-down.
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I have solar panels and can’t have them growing up on the southeast side side of the house, and that’s where they tend to fall.
Besides that, I have to knock down the occasional wasp nest (paper wasps) on the house, but if they nest away from the house I leave them alone. It’s all minimal maintenance. If you let nature do its thing it tends to find a balance. Humans are the ones usually screwing it up.
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I live in a decidedly different environment, but have also let my yard go to native plants (the HoA is mad, but the state passed laws protecting my native plant yard so they can get fucked) and it took a couple years for there to be a bug balance.
I had a ton of aphids the first year, but the second year the aphid wasps and lady bugs knew where I lived to handle them.
Nature will balance itself if possible
Mosquitos hardly exist in much of Colorado, so that probably helps them.
Mosquitoes need standing water
You know it’s odd. We have no streams or ponds. I make certain we have no standing water around us by ensuring unused pots and other items are upturned, but we always have mosquitoes around. It’s forest around us which is very nice, but the mozzies get very thick. I am sure I miss some water, but not enough for the numbers I see. Don’t know how far they’ll travel, but there’s gotta be some junk somewhere on the neighbor’s property in the forest holding water.
They can breed in a few cups of water. Try what I did this year at our camp in the swamp. Purposefully set stagnant water traps, buckets or whatever. Get Mosquito Dunk. Another user here turned me onto that. Its bacteria that kill the larvae.
This was my first year, but it seemed to work. Hard to say because it’s a swamp with loads of neighbor trash and stagnant pools, but the actual camp seemed better. Didn’t hear a single blood sucker today. I know, it’s October, but it’s still in the high 80s down here.
Moskitos live anywhere there is stale water, so either clean it or have it wild enough that other insects outcompet them.
Put your compost pile somewhere you don’t walk past a lot, because that’s where flies congregate.
Ticks aren’t that mobile, they need some animal to carries them there.I’ve got loads of stale water in 4 ponds from 150G down to 20G. I let those go wild and they filled with tadpoles eating the mosquito larvae and the water attracts dragonflies, the deadliest hunters on Earth. Part I didn’t expect, they went “natural” in 2 weeks! I think much of that was throwing native water plants with their mud balls I dug out.
For water you can’t control like that, say a birdbath, a lemming turned me onto Mosquito Dunk. Take a 1/4 piece and throw it in. Makes bacteria that kills the larvae. I set buckets of swamp water around my camp for traps, hit them and the 2 birdbaths with dunk once a month. Seemed to work, but I need to try again next year.
I love natural growth and we have plenty around (PNW), but that invasive Himalayan Blackberry is constantly creeping back out of the wild edges. We’ve done well enough pushing it back, but it is so pervasive and the animals help spread the seeds. That and the other noxious weeds (Scotch-broom, thistle, tansy, etc) have us quite busy doing our best to remove and keep out. It’s like spitting into the wind if the other land-owners around don’t do it as well. Oh well.
We also planted tons of native “deer-resistant” plants. They love it. I call it deer salad.
if the other land-owners around don’t do it as well
My fight with fire ants in the South. Insect populations have tanked over the last 4 years, but the fire ants are on the rampage in the surrounding forest. I poison my neighbor’s yards, it’s still a non-stop fight.
For any Southerner’s coming along; I don’t use any insecticides or herbicides except hydramethylnon. Yeah, it costs more, but a little dab’ll do ya. Amdro is a popular brand name, not sure who else uses it.
If this isn’t the most relatable thing that’s (kinda) specific to me
ITT lots of people who blessedly have no idea what an HOA is.
I think it’s a curse to know what HOA even are. Rest of the world is just normal.
Benefits of living in bumfuck. Though to be real, I’d never buy or build in a HOA. It’s a choice. Renting in HOAs was bad enough in the past.
Or we know all about them and avoid them at almost all cost.
Ur mom?
/j
Not shown: the limestone 16" down.
Why is it someone hasn’t modified the dna of grass to give us one that has both deep roots and works like lawn grass on top.
As others have said, the size of roots is pretty directly tied to the size of foliage. Roots store energy(calories) in case something happens to the foliage or sunlight is low. The more energy they can take in, the more storage they need, as well as the stability that larger plants need from larger roots.
But how do you keep feeding the larger roots if the photosynthetic engines have giving them energy have been damn near removed?
I doubt think it’s a DNA problem, the amount of roots depends on the amount of leaves.
So keeping the grass short keeps the roots sorry as well
Because releasing genetically modified organisms into the wild can have absolutely disastrous consequences on an ecosystem. I think there are cases where the benefits are worth the risks, but pretty lawn is not one of them. Might be nice in the future when we have a better grasp on what we’re doing.
There are prairie grass stains that have very deep roots. Not sure how they act as a replacement for typical lawns but they exist already
Because lawns are fucking stupid.
Context is important. I grew up on 5 acres of pretty wild land so the lawn around the house was anything but fucking stupid.
Gave kids a place to play in view of the big windows in the house, was a very very small part of the overall land. A small maintained area is a very good thing to have access to. But so was the wildness behind it
In more suburban or urban environments is a completely different discussion I will grant you
Instructions unclear: lawn covered in bricks and sponges now.
The shape of the roots of the shrubs is somewhat exaggerated. Many do go that deep, but they’re not that wide all the way down. There are only a few types that grow roots that look like that.
There are also deep root grasses if you want a lawn, but don’t want to ruin your soil.
- props to crime pays but botany doesn’t. Great stuff.
- needs a subtle Saddam in the root structure of native plant.
We tore our front lawn out this summer. By the time we were working in July the (clay) soil under the sod was brick hard for 18 inches before it got workable again.
The yard is now 70% native and the area with high sun is drought tolerant. It’s only been a few weeks and already the pollinators are here in force and there’s a pair of mourning doves that come by to hang out most mornings.
Mine yard is about the same, I’d guess 75% native, wild as hell, can’t walk in a lot of that.
What surprises me is how fast the insects and animals came back. I’m nowhere near the insect population of 4 years back, can’t fix that by myself, but it’s way better.
Plus lawns are typically domed up to avoid sogginess, causing tons of runoff into the storm drains (including runoff from sprinklers). It’s lunacy.
I work in municipal government, and I have very strong feeling about leaf blowers.
All these assholes blowing all the great fertilizing trulimmings and dirt off their lawn and into the street to clog up the storm drains.
My father, and mother after he died, spent 40 fucking years raking the leaves from under the shrubs and throwing them away. Our house was surrounded by lush bushes, entire house, entire back yard. Took little me and dad 4 hard hours to trim all that.
Got back from taking botany related classes in college. Tried to explain that bagging the lawn clippings and raking the leaves would kill everything. She wouldn’t hear it.
Anyway, dad’s dead, mom’s dead, entire fucking yard is dead. Lost it all but some barely hagin’ in there grass. It’s a fucking desert.
Old lady on the corner religiously rakes and burns her leaves, goes after it like it’s her fucking job. We got a max of 2" of topsoil in NW Florida, max. Her entire lot is nearly all sand.
Bro if ur using a leaf blower to remove leaves from your lawn and not from your driveway you gotta be extra special
A lot of people love their lawn toys (and hate municipal workers and well draining streets I guess).
I lived in Massachusetts for a while and the city I lived in directed people to blow/rake their leaves into the road so a giant vacuum truck could collect them.
Yeah that’s true. There are a ton of arbitrary defined and applied lawn laws in the states. The “no weeds” ones are always funny too, bc more often then not the grass you imported from Asia is more a weed than the native flowers
plus the soil can carry invasive weeds, and diseases, or pests too. and ornamental plants often come from places like asia,etc. people are still growing latana camara in some places.
There was a little old black lady in Tulsa many years ago whose entire front yard was a mix of native plants and garden. It was very nice and organized, nothing tacky at all. City rolled up and razed it flat. She was crying on TV, I was some mix of enraged and crying.
One winter I lost every plant I owned, and that loss kept me away from houseplants for over a decade. I cannot imagine her pain.
Anyway, where I’m at now I’m basically free to treat our house like white trash. No one can say jack about how I’m keeping it and I’ve shared some ecosystem success stories in this thread.
Where i grew up you could have an edible native plant that mosquitoes hate, fixing nitrogen as your ground cover, but no the hoa says grass not mint. I wanted to do guerrilla gardening with wild strawberries there too, but never got around to it.
That said, one non native plant belonged there, the earth made the dandelion one of her greatest and most beloved children, and who am I to disagree.
I was taught as child to hate and fight dandelions. Learned in college that “weeds” like that pull nutrients up from deep in the soil. When they die and rot, those deep roots turn into channels for water.
In the same sense that nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd, a little bit of killing goes a long way towards making a desert.
Yeah they aren’t native here but they’re good at playing nice with native plants. If you notice them outcompeting native taproot plants then go after them, but they’re pretty, they pull water from deep while helping keep deeper soil nice and soily, pollinators often like them, and they’re not only edible but good for you.
They don’t want the leaves covering up the unnaturally green grass, and if they clog up the storm system that’s someone downhill’s problem.
That’s why I love my twin blade mower. Turns all yard trimmings into basically powder that feeds the lawn and even helps prevent moisture from evaporating out of the soil.
I also use controlled natural selection so that only shit that can survive our brutal summers grows, so I don’t even need to water.
Was just saying, we got a max of 2" of topsoil in NW Florida. I’m throwing everything back in the yard. Every weed we pull we chunk on the ground. Don’t care if it looks the shit, I’ll hit it with the mower eventually.
It’s impossible to overstate how long topsoil takes to form and how easy it is to trash. At 54, I honestly don’t think I’ll live long enough to add .25" of good soil to this yard. But I’m fuckin’ trying!
Relevant Climate Town-video which just dropped: https://nebula.tv/videos/climatetown-americas-dumbest-crop/ / https://youtu.be/KLYMjPNppRQ
