The Problem with Lawns

THE PROBLEM WITH LAWNS

Contents:
1. Does a typical yard or backyard garden work like Nature?
2. Why do we think lawns are a good idea?
3. Three ways to get rid of your lawn.
4. What if you need to keep some of your lawn?
5. Your Lawn is Gone- Now What?

1. Does a typical yard or backyard garden work like Nature?

Lawn vs. biodiverse garden

Now that you've read the 3 Principles of Ecosystems, you may realize that yards and traditional vegetables gardens are like immature ecosystems. They are dominated by pioneer plants, which include most grasses, flowers, and annual vegetables. If we want to keep our yards in this immature state, we must constantly work against Nature’s natural order to keep our lawns from turning into forests.

Typical vegetable gardens:

have bare soil between neat rows of vegetables that Nature will fill with plants in order to protect from soil erosion. This forces us to weed often.
Because we plant gardens with only one type of crop, the lack of biodiversity can allow insects to devastate that crop and force us to use unhealthy pesticides to control them.

When I see lawns, I see ecological deserts that could be producing food and creating habitat.

They are a monoculture with no biodiversity.
When we water and fertilize the lawn, it will naturally want to begin growing into a mature ecosystem (forest).
Nature will send weeds to colonize it and start the succession to a mature forest.
We are forced to mow and use herbicides to keep it in its immature state.

2. Why do we think lawns are a good idea?

Lawns started in Britain as a sign of wealth and prestige. Having a lawn meant that you owned enough land that you didn't have to plant all of it in crops. You could afford to keep some of it out of production. It also meant that you owned a large enough herd of sheep to graze the lawn and keep it “mowed.”

Today in America, our lawns are still a sign of prestige. We waste large amounts of land in front of our houses growing lawns that are meant to fleetingly impress the people driving by. In suburbs where the property is deed-restricted (when you buy the property you agree to follow certain rules) home owners are often forced to have lawns, because that is what is believed to create a “nice” neighborhood. Wildflower gardens are forbidden and vegetable gardens, if allowed, must be hidden in the back yard.

The lawn on the left is sprayed regularly to keep it a monoculture. The yard on the right is natural and "weedy," with a beautiful Spring display of edible dandelions and violets.

We seem to think that lawns are easier to care for than gardens. Initially, this seems true. It’s easy to spread grass seed, as compared to designing a garden and digging a lot of large holes to plant flowers and shrubs. However, the mowing, watering, aerating, weeding, and fertilizing that you must do to maintain a lawn in its ecologically immature state takes a considerable amount of time each week. Permaculture gardens need a lot of work at first, but once they have achieved maturity, they become very self-sustaining. A lawn will always need to be mowed, forever. That's not how I want to spend my weekend.

Lawns hurt Mother Earth:

Many people use pesticides & herbicides to keep their lawns looking “acceptable.” It's legal for your neighbors to do this, even though the unhealthy chemicals blow or leach into their neighbor's lawns.
Good drinking water is wasted to water lawns in order to keep them green all Summer.
Lawn mowers contribute significantly to greenhouse gases and climate change, not to mention the noise pollution they create.

3. Three Ways To Get Rid of Your Lawn

Hopefully, you're thinking that maybe you'd like to remove some of your unsustainable lawn, and replace it with a more natural garden habitat. Our entire yard was lawn when we moved in, and we've been slowly removing a bit more of it each year. We've used three methods:

DIG IT UP

This requires a shovel and brute strength, but it is the fastest method.
Dig up the grass & all its roots and shake or scrape as much of the nutrient rich top soil as you can back onto the ground.
You can compost the sod.
If you just turn over the sod, the grass will grow back.
Don’t dig up the grass until you are ready to plant something else instead, or weeds will just take over.

Bear digging up lawn in the side yard, 2011.

SHEET MULCH IT

This is less labor intensive, and the mulch nourishes the soil while it rots, but it takes months to completely decompose.

HOW TO:

The night before, mow the grass and soak the area with water.
The next day, put down a layer of corrugated cardboard (with any staples or tape removed) and wet it well with the hose. (The organisms that decompose your mulch can’t work without water and the water holds the cardboard down while you’re working.)
Cover the cardboard with organic matter, as much as you can find (try for a foot deep). Organic matter can include: straw (not hay, which has seeds), leaves, sawdust, pine needles, compost, manure, soil amendments. The final layer in the pile to left is straw.
Water again until damp.

Many books recommend creating your sheet mulch in the Fall so it will be ready for planting in the Spring, but in Wisconsin the mulch will just be frozen all Winter and will pretty much look the same in the Spring.

You can cut small holes in the cardboard and plant seedlings directly into them, like we've done to the left. This is the same sheet mulched area, although we expanded it by digging up around it by hand.

USE PLASTIC SHEET MULCH

This is the most unnatural and unattractive technique (which the neighbors might not appreciate), but it is very effective.
Put down sheets of black plastic, and weigh it down with stones, bricks, logs, or whatever is available.
The sun will heat up the ground under the plastic and kill the grass.
In a season (or you can check it earlier) you will have nothing but hard soil left.

Plastic mulch (covered by leaves) on the large area that would become our labyrinth, 2009.

After removing the plastic mulch, 2010

4. What if you need to keep some of your lawn?

Sometimes you need some lawn. We're planning to keep a stretch of it outside our back door, where we sometimes put up tables to have guests over for outside dinner parties. You might need room for your kids to play. If you have good reason to keep some lawn, there are ways that you can keep it more ecologically friendly:

Grow more ecological plants. Nichols Garden Nursery (see Resources) sells some ecology lawn seed mixtures that include grass and non-grass plants to create more biodiversity.
Plant a lawn of clover. Grass seed mixes used to include clover seed because it is good for the lawn. Clover is nitrogen-fixing, meaning that it puts nitrogen, which plants need to grow, into the ground. Essentially, it fertilizes the plants around it, without any work on your part.

A more biodiverse Spring lawn. The yellow dandelions and purple violets make a beautiful contrast and are edible.

Nichols Garden Nursery also sells a hybrid microclover (Trifolium repens “Pipolina”) that doesn’t get too tall, doesn’t flower as much, and doesn’t need to be mowed. Note that if you want the kids to be able to run on the lawn barefoot, bees love clover blossoms and will be attracted to the clover flowers in your lawn. You may get stung by bees if you're running around. I remember this happening in our yard as a child, though, and I still love bees.
Mow your lawn with a manual push mower, so it doesn’t use any gas or electricity and doesn’t create any pollution. Using one is great exercise. You can still buy them where powered mowers are sold. They cost $100+ when we bought ours in 2005.

5. Your Lawn is Gone- Now What?

When you get rid of your lawn, you'll need to replace it with something. Here are two design principles that have helped me tremendously in creating our gardens:

PLAN GARDEN ROOMS:

Think of each section/area of your yard as its own “room” e.g., the front yard vs. the side yard, vs. the area behind the shed.
Don’t try to do the whole yard at once. Work with one or two “garden rooms” at a time so you don’t get overwhelmed.
You can see how we divided our tiny yard into separate garden rooms in the before and after photos of our gardens.

INCLUDE SEATING:

Each garden room should include space for humans.
If you don’t have lots of comfortable seating, you won’t spend time in the garden.
Seats allow you to stop, connect with each area, and view the small scales things that happen there.
Our small yard (60’x140’) currently has 9 seating areas and one hammock stand.

This is one of our garden rooms- the shade garden on one side of the hose that I've planted with native flowers and ferns. It's full of blooms in the Spring.

This is the seating area next to what started as our annual vegetable patch. We like to sit here at dusk watching the bats swoop over the field behind our house.

Bear makes himself comfortable in the back yard.