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We replaced about 60-70% of our backyard with native plants, trees, and shrubs. It was a shit ton of work but I saw a hummingbird for the first time in my life! And moths mimicking hummingbirds. And friendly bees. And weird beetles. And other birds galore. I rarely have to water.
Now our preschooler has room to roam and so so much to explore (and weird bugs to chase mom around with).
What all did you do to replace it? I’m starting to reclaim my yards in my new place (finally getting dandelions!!) and my initial attempt at clover didn’t take as much as I wanted it to. Really want to get my yard to as close as native and wildlife friendly as my city will allow.
Not op but I grow pollinator gardens in my community garden which typically attracts bees, hummingbirds etc.; check with your local nursery because there should be a native plant seed mix you can buy.
You may be a little late in the season (assuming northern hemisphere) for most seed mixes because I’ve mostly seen suggested sowing in fall or late spring
For what it’s worth, it’s perfect planting time where I am, still another week of potential frost in southern Alberta, Canada.
(finally getting dandelions!!)
My friend they grow in the film of construction dust that has built up in the gutter of my shed
We’re only getting them in the edge of the yard, and it took a bit over a year to get that. Given how quickly the crab grass returned, I’m guessing the previous owners used A LOT of chemicals to keep their yard pristine.
DM me with your location and I can pass you some resources. :)
Dandelions are the best. I try to harvest them when I can get a bunch for lotion and things. They’re nitrogen affixers. They help heal the soil.
There’s a guy on youtube that talks about bringing back native plants to an area and all the benefits that come with it.
He usually just does a controlled burn and comes back a while later and it’s back to native plants. Dude has a lot of cool knowledge but it’s funny to me the format is basically explain-burn-check back later.
Don’t know the channel, but wouldn’t that result in a bunch of invasive species creeping in, too?
One of the things with natural lawns is you can’t just let your yard do its thing. Lots of the plants you’ll get with that are invasive. You do have to do some kind of planning and maintenance.
He’s almost certainly in America, where a lot of the ecological systems are supposed to burn every once in a while. It’s also common that the invasive species can’t handle it. We’ve messed up a lot of our ecosystems by suppressing wildfires, and it’s causing multiple kinds of problems.
My husband and I tried so hard to just let our lawn be what it wanted to be. All the clover, dandelions, wild strawberry, wild onion and ginger absolutely took over. In the back, it’s completely fine. We get a lot of brown spots and mud during winter when it dies back, but come spring it’s back to thriving. In our front yard though, enough of it died back that a heavy rain washed a lot of our yard into our driveway. We tried to manage it for a year before giving in.
So now, our front yard is an ugly but pristine monoculture grass hellscape. The back though is much larger, and still full of the awesome native plant goodness. I know nature is thriving back there because I pretty much cannot use my yard during summer due to the insane amount of bugs. There is a thriving ecosystem with all sorts of wildlife, from bunnies, squirrels and chipmunks to cardinals, robins and owls. Occasionally even a stray fox or mallard can be seen around the creek. And I live in the suburbs of a major metro area, and can hear I-35 from my house. It really is quite remarkable how natural ecosystems can thrive with just a tiny bit of encouragement.
Down with monoculture! Down with monoculture!
Just scalp it and you have more native weeds than you want
Fun fact, naturally growing grass in Midwest is generally of the phalaris species, you can extract a very powerful hallucinogenic drug called DMT from it in three very simple steps. All you need is a lawnmower with a mulch bag and some pool cleaning supplies.
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Saw a man watering his yard the other day omw home from work. I drive through a ridiculously bougie area on my commute and see so much weird and out of touch shit
Ridiculously bougie in the US means “no meth zombies running up to your car when you stop at a red light”, correct?
No, bougier. Like mansions and supercars and garages the size of my house and gigantic yards with topiaries. Absolutely crazy shit that screams “We have fuck you levels of money”
It’s honestly kind of disgusting, tbh.
Bugs don’t care what type of green you have in your lawn. You can even mow.
Just don’t spray insecticide on your lawn.
Edit: also, why the fuck would you remove existing lawn to replace it with new growth? That’s like indiscriminately bulldozing every home in a city to rebuild them with whatever is the current trend in sustainable housing. Where do people live in the mean time? Please don’t let this person, or me for that matter, inform your opinion.
That’s just simply vastly and easily proved to be untrue.
Insecticide is a lot of it but lack of variety, lack of height, lack of pollinators, lack of pollinating plants and light pollution are all compound factors.
I’ve seen a lot of opinion pieces about the matter, but they never cite any research that definitely pins substantive loss of biodiversity on lawns. It’s an issue globally, but as usual the individual is the scape goat instead of the exponentially greater impact of corporations.
Because there doesn’t need to be a study. We know reduction of habitat has a direct relation to population, it would be exceptionally weird if it weren’t.
We knew dinosaurs were scaly, too. Everything deserves further study, and it’s foolhardy to advise everyone to rip up their lawns and plant…what, exactly? White clover, another invasive species.
I’m sure I can find a study but do you need a study for common sense?
Ed:
Oh, you didn’t need to do that. You won’t find a study supporting your argument, I’ve looked thoroughly before. Case in point, the study you shared. It actually opposes your argument, by finding suburban lawns support a diverse and abundant bee community. Of the three mowing frequencies they studied (one, two, and three week intervals), they actually found every two weeks was optimal for the bees.
Like I said to begin with, I just don’t think what species of green you plant in your lawn matters nearly as much as not using insecticide.
It doesn’t but do go on.
We suggest a ‘lazy lawnmower’ approach as an additional option for managing yards for wildlife. The recommendation to mow lawns less frequently to help promote bee conservation might garner broad public support (potentially compared with lawn reduction or replacement) because it more closely aligns with current single-family homeowner motivations for adopting lawn-dominated yardscapes. A New England study on lawn care attitudes and behaviors found that householders were concerned about water quality and thus were willing to try al- ternative lawn care approaches that were more environmentally friendly (e.g., higher mowing height, reduced fertilizer application). However, the authors also noted significant barriers to changing be- haviors including concerns that the alternative lawn care would not be as aesthetically pleasing, would incur additional financial burdens, and would require more time for upkeep (Eisenhauer et al., 2016). Likewise, in a multi-city survey, respondents ranked various landscaping deci- sions in which aesthetically pleasing, weed-free, and ease of main- tenance topped the list, while provisioning for wildlife ranked fifth out of eight choices (Larson et al., 2015). These studies suggest that wild- life-friendly landscaping has some support, but the acceptance of weeds and the inclusion of more native plants (which are not as showy as their non-native congeners; Frankie et al., 2005) might be at odds with more preferred management goals of aesthetics and ease of maintenance (Lerman et al., 2012b; van Heezik et al., 2012). Based on our interac- tions with participating households and their neighbors, our treatment of a three-week mowing frequency appeared unkempt and exceeded the tolerance of many homeowners and their neighbors, and thus the two- week regime might reconcile homeowner ideals with pollinator habitat. Moving towards a mechanistic approach when studying urban biodiversity (Shochat et al., 2006) increases our ability to directly link management with ecological outcomes, and ultimately lead to effective action. Our experimental approach demonstrated how altering lawn management decisions influences bee abundance despite the inherent variability present in suburban yards. Manipulating lawn mowing be- haviors also demonstrates a new and creative approach for supporting urban biodiversity by rethinking the role lawns play towards enriching urban areas. Mowing less frequently is practical, economical, environ- mental and a timesaving alternative to lawn replacement or even planting pollinator gardens, that has the potential to be widely adopted if it can overcome barriers to social acceptance. Most importantly, our research shows that individual households can contribute to urban conservation.
I don’t know where you live but where I’m at you will be eaten alive unless you are literally wet with deet spray(in areas that have all native plants and grasses). I don’t mind visiting but as far as my backyard, I’ll pass.
Yet you won’t. You will just post memes about it on the internet.
I literally just planted a bunch of native seed bombs yesterday to catch the rain lol.
