The days of the perfect-looking yard – often lawns that guzzle copious amounts of water to stay green – may soon be gone.
Homeowners are increasingly opting to “re-wilding” their homes, incorporating native plants and decreasing the amount of lawn care to make their properties more sustainable and encourage natural ecosystems to recover, according to Plan It Wild, a New York-based native landscape design company.
About 30% of the water an average American family consumes is used for the outdoors, including activities such as watering lawns and gardens, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In the West, where water is absorbed almost immediately by the sun or thirsty vegetation, outdoor water usage can increase to an average of 60% for the average family.
As concerns for the environment – as well as increasing utility bills – grow, so do homeowners’ preferences for how they decorate their yards.
Good first step is just seeding clover where grass is struggling.
Clover isn’t a normal part of lawns anymore because broadleaf herbicide kills clover too. But there is zero reason to use herbicide on a fucking lawn anyways.
But you barely need to mow clover if it’s dominant in an area. It “learns” the height you mow at, and just stops growing taller than that.
Like a 1/4 of my backyard only gets mowed once or twice a season, and it looks green as fuck because it’s denser. That ground covers helps retain moisture in the ground, feeds bees and bunnies, and with all the bunnies, I even get foxes.
Plus clover produces nitrogen, so it naturally spreads to the poor soil and improves it because it can out compete grass and even weeds. Insisting on an “all grass, only grass” lawn is some boomer shit.
Clover is so beneficial that pre-WW2, grass seed mixes almost always explicitly advertised clover content. If you look up 19th or early 20th century catalogs, etc, listings for grass seed will nearly always not only mention that they contain a clover mix, but tout its benefits.
As you note, it was only post-war with the creation of modern herbicides that clover stopped being the norm. There was more or less a DeBeers-style PR campaign to convince people that clover is a “weed” since it can’t survive weed killers.
We’ve already done our whole front yard in native plants, but we still have grass in the back, which is struggling because we live in CO and Kentucky bluegrass was never meant to grow in a desert with clay soil. My mom finally said I can have most/all of it removed and plant a native grass mix with clover next year. I’m so happy.
I mean, don’t remove it…
Just start using that stuff for bare spots. Plants spread on their own bro, you just got to establish a population first. Maybe it’ll cross pollinate and you’ll get some crazy new bluegrass that’s hardy.
Or it just gets replaced.
Let nature do it’s thing.
Eh, it was already a victory getting my mom to agree to this at all. She wouldn’t be able to handle the “chaos” of it happening gradually. She’s extremely anxious about anything she perceives as messy (and that would definitely meet her criteria), and we have a non-profit here that removes lawns pretty inexpensively, so I’m taking my wins where I can get them and doing it in a way that won’t stress her out more.
Let nature do it’s thing.
Where I live invasive Tree of Heaven will take over in no time. Nature needs some help!
This is something the wife and I have looked at doing for our next house but is clover less resilient to dogs than grass? We were figuring on natural stuff for the front yard but keeping grass in the majority of the backyard because of our pets
I’ve let the clover from the easement behind our house take over most of our backyard. We’ve got 2 very rambunctious dogs, and the constant trails we’ve always had back there are gone…filled in by either clover or some more robust grass variety that handles it better (. It took a few years for them to fill in completely, but it was worth the wait to not have to try and overseed and pamper them every year.
Clover is better, it grows along the ground instead of straight up like grass So does a couple other kinds of broadleafs that will show up.
With grass if they dig in hard in one place it can kill the grass and then it’s bare, and likely going to stay that way for a while if you mow often. With clover the nearby strands just grow in to the empty space.
Like, if you got some huge dogs in a small yard that pace, it probably won’t matter. But just letting them run around in an open area you’ll be fine.
There will be bunnies back there tho. Even if you have a good fence, they’ll break in for the clover.
That’s the 1 downside. This is the first year I’ve ever had to deal with the dogs bringing me bunnies as presents.
The spots that our dogs have destroyed clover, they had destroyed the grass anyway. And that’s under an old magnolia tree where everything struggles anyway. The rest of the back yard is fine.
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Only problem is most of it’s bermuda, which is a fucking PAIN to get rid of by hand
Get yourself an Action Hoe, you basically run it back and forth and it digs/cuts the roots out. It’s very upsetting how easy it makes weeding the first time you use it, turns an hour long job to something you can do in 15 min.
Do you mind sharing pictures of what this looks like?
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That’s really freaking cool! Thanks for sharing! What was the work effort for this amount of progress? I’d like to do this with my next house.
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What kinda shrub is housing the rabbits?
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Awesome, might follow suit! Although they will go to town on my veggies lol.
I neglect my yard so much that appealing natural plants started growing on aestheticly pleasing spots, so I just left them.
This past spring I found out that the squirrels planted someone else’s crocuses in my yard. I don’t mind letting nature do the work for me.
I wish this would happen to me, it seems like every time I look away the seeds of some invasive vine are taking root in my yard. I’ve tried planting natives, but for me at least they have taken some work to cultivate and maintain despite trying to find natives that are appropriate for my soil and sun situation. I’m hoping every year the natives will be able to strengthen and outcompete the invasives, but for now I am stuck digging up roots and tearing down whatever non natives I find.
There’s natives and then there’s “aggressive natives”. The whole problem with invasive plants is that they outcompete in their niche so you need the big guns. Very specific to your location.
I can’t wait for this to some day turn into “Are Millennials Killing The Grass Industry?”
Fuck yes we are.
Excellent! Now plant native fruit trees, bushes, brambles, and herbs and make a multilayered food forest!
We keep spreading clover seeds. Waiting for it to take over. Fuck grass lol
I heard there are species of thyme that are basically a weed that you never need to mow and needs much less care than grass. Maybe look into that if clover doesn’t seem to work.
Creeping thyme. Never got it to take.
Oh shit. This is great news. I love thyme lol
I live in Texas, we had a big beautiful St. Augustin yard. Thick, green, very nice. 3 years ago I quit watering it. Last year I seeded it with a mix of Buffalo Grass, Curly Mesquite Grass, and Blue Gamma. It’s almost taken over. It uses zero water, I only mowed it once the year before and twice this year because we got a boatload of rain this year unlike the year before. I stopped mowing the backyard and just removed all the wax and China berry shoots. I have all sorts of native flowers and Chili Pequin plants all over the place. The flowers are great and the birds are everywhere. Best decision I have made since I got this place.
I’ve spent the past few summers desperately trying to claw my lawn back from invasives. When we first bought our house I didn’t want to remove anything until after a year to see what everything was, because I knew nothing about plants. I planted some natives in bare locations, but didn’t realize just how crazy some of the vines and invasive species would be in claiming space.
I have an app on my phone for identifying plants. A few years ago, every ID said invasive from Asia or Europe. I cannot tell you how satisfying it is to see some native grasses and wildflowers finally taking hold in the areas that used to be Japanese Honeysuckle or pokeweed. But it was backbreaking, miserable work and I commend anyone who is fighting this fight.
What app do you use? I’ve been getting by with Google Lens but I’d love a more focused option.
iNaturalist, as far as I know it is free or at least I have the free version and haven’t been limited in the number of IDs I can request. They also have a feature where the IDs can be verified by other users to get more specific than the automated photo identification. And let me tell you, there are some plant/bug nerds that browse the app!
Yep I’m doing it. I bought the parcel beside/behind my house and am letting those 3 acres 90% go back to natural.
You could add an animal to graze it a little… will reinforce some plants usually.
I spend more time ripping thistles than anything, but at least I don’t have to water them!
On a serious note, I am working on overseeding clover in half of my yard, and it’s worked well in patches so far. Will probably take a couple seasons to get full results, just time consuming. Almost as much as my war against those goddamned thistles.
I got rid of my very small front yard grass this year. Instead: some natural tall decorative grasses under the downspouts, but also some Dutch tulips, hyacinth, peony, daffodil. Cottage garden style. I got some good comments from the neighbors. And I don’t have to mow one freaking pass around the front of the house 😂 I ran drip irrigation to get it started and put down cardboard and mulch. I haven’t had any of the former grass try and poke up, thankfully. I’ve heard the best thing to do is just fill it with plants you want, so that plants you don’t want don’t have room to grow. Some of the tulips I got were bigger than my head!
I’ve wanted to do this, but just don’t know where to start… House is very complicated (teirs down three times on the side, up three times in the back), a lot of invasive weeds always intruding in from neighbor’s property and just too much area to cover…
I follow this youtuber for planning landscaping projects. I have no idea about their paid course, as I’ve only seen their free content, but I found it helpful to start my journey. There isn’t as much focus on native plants, but on planning your projects and things to watch out for.
https://youtube.com/@gardenprojectacademy?si=BY8rwO2FMkFE5cpU
Will look into them, thanks.
1/3rd of our backyard is native plants, and other 2/3rd is concrete. We have a table in the back that we normally like to hang during the day instead of staying inside. Sometimes reading, playing games on laptops, chatting, eating, etc.
We decided to let our backyard grow wild for a few months. Now we keep getting a lot of ten-lined June beetles, moths (lots of morning-glory plume moths), bees, blister beetles, lacewings, katydid, stink bugs, earwigs, among other bugs.
Never seen a ten lined June beetle until we did this. Their hissing freaked me out the 1st time I saw them. And their grips are so strong when trying to get them off our backyard curtain that we use to block the sun. They are pretty cool looking though, and huge!
We haven’t sat outside really in a couple months now because it isn’t that enjoyable when there are so many bugs around you, sometimes crawling on you, and sometimes ending up in my teacup or on my food plate. We’re probably going to cut it back again and maintain it more so that we can actually use our backyard again
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