With April’s showers now securely behind us, May ushers in a season of flowers, gardening, and outdoorsy activities of all sizes and shapes. For some, May means lawn season. Today’s Green Tip is for you lawn enthusiasts this year, take a new approach to your lawn, and you can lighten your ecological footstep in a big way.
The lawn is the perfect symbol of humanity’s insatiable quest for dominion over nature: an enormous, impractical monoculture, requiring lots of work for little return and the bigger the better. A lawn offers aesthetic pleasure characterized by sharp lines and uniformity these are human concepts, nothing to do with nature. A perfect lawn is an attempt to turn plants into asphalt. Let it go.
Lawn maintenance is arguably the largest single contributor to sales of dubious products like pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers. It’s also responsible for a huge quantity of wasted water. Anything that requires this much tinkering is evidently struggling to survive and the reasons are obvious. A lawn is a monoculture, a single species living off the food-chain grid, rendering it easy prey for parasites and predators, like grubs, and making it a quick victim in drought or flood conditions.
Just about anything is greener than the grass on your lawn. This summer, let your lawn grow wild. Allowing natural “weeds” and other grasses to grow will foster a healthier, stronger ecosystem. So will eliminating the use of herbicides and pesticides, which destroy plant and insect populations indiscriminately.
Or consider replacing your grass with a diverse garden.
If you feel the need to cut your lawn, use a hand-mower instead of an electric mower, and certainly instead of a ride-on tractor. But don’t cut it too short. Your perfectly trimmed lawn causes problems just by being so flat on a sloped waterfront lawn, for example, rain water will slide across the tips of your grass, pouring into your lake or river along with whatever chemicals, toxins, or animal waste it’s picked up along the way. A thick, naturally diverse lawn will soak up the rain and return much of it to the ground.
