Even though winter has been hanging tough this year, spring will inevitably arrive, and, with it, the annual question of what to do about the lawn. I am not a fan of lawns, and not just because I am a lazy bastard, either. The American obsession with lawn care rates very high as a significant source of pollution: all those fucking chemicals people dump on their grass to keep it looking like the 7th Hole at Pebble Beach account for 90% of the chemical runoff that destroys rivers, ponds, and other watersheds, while the exhaust from an hour of using your gas-powered lawn mower is equivalent to driving 650 miles in a 1992-vintage automobile. Weed killer products contribute to undermining biodiversity in local plant life, allowing aggressive invader species like purple loosestrife to flourish and crowd out even more plants. All in all, kiddies, that fine manicured lawn is an environmental disaster, an advertisement for everything that is bad about our insistence on our unsustainable lifestyles.
Via Slashdot, of all places, I ran across this L.A. Times story this morning about a couple in the Southern California city of Orange, who are being sued by the city itself because they converted their lawn into a landscaped yard using bark and drought-tolerant plants. The couple say that their motivation was to use less water (the city has very tough watering restrictions in the first place) and they succeeded in reducing their water consumption by 75%, but the city also has an ordinance requiring homes to have at least 40% of their yard covered by living plants (e.g. grass). Even adding more plants did not assuage the officials. One would think that in Southern California, of all places, anything that contributed to lowering municipal water usage would be seen as beneficial, but once again the overarching short-sightedness of the value of grass overtakes common sense.
I have been trying to convince husband for years to do that with our front lawn. I don’t water so it inevitably dies every July and my landscaper neighbor who does my lawn and I might ad has his own well so doesn’t pay the crazy high rates I pay for being close the harbor, is always moidering me in his thick Italian accent to water…WATER.
One of these years I’m going to just hire someone to come in and make it happen.
I don’t water and hardly ever fertilize our lawn. Where we live the soil is predominantly clay, so it retains moisture well, and when it dries out it’s hard as bricks and doesn’t absorb water very well anyway. Last year I don’t think I mowed more than half a dozen times, and have significantly reduced the area I do mow from about an acre and a half to maybe an acre. I reduced the size of our lawn and let part of it go back to being the field it once was, both because of the time it took (three to four hours with a large riding mower) and the gas when it was $4 a gallon. Better get used to a smaller lawn now.