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.
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.
Will look into them, thanks.
Excellent! Now plant native fruit trees, bushes, brambles, and herbs and make a multilayered food forest!
You might appreciate this: https://slrpnk.net/post/20138177
Very cool! I hope they’re planting nuts, legumes, and herbs as well as fruit
“fruit trees, native trees, and other beneficial vegetation”
Seems likely. Even just “native trees” would almost need to include Inga species, which are legumes, and there are native Amazon nuts like Caryodendron orinocense that might also grow wild in the area.
Is there a fucklawns lemmy community?
Yes of course there is. There is a community for all “fuck*”
I’ve been doing this for ages.
Now I’ve got an extra tree, and bunch of tall weeds with purple flowers on top. No idea what they are, but the bumblebees seem to like them.
I’d say I started doing this because I cared about nature, but really it’s because I’m a big lazy bastard.
Are the purple flowering weeds really prickly?
No, if they were I’d have probably pulled them up.
I can’t even get a good picture of the flowers because they’ve all died now.
Going from some online stuff, maybe Rosebay Willowherb? The leaves don’t seem as dense as a picture I just looked at, but I’m guessing there’s probably a lot of variations of it.
That looks nice, yeah prickly with purple flowers is Canada thistle and you don’t want that.
My landlord is old and as poor as I am so when trees fall she’ll have someone chop it up and they take what they want, but most of the large branches are left. It’s been a few years now that a couple of trees fell and since the branches are left there the landscaper just goes around them and the area has become an awesome natural growth spot. I hope she never gets it removed!
I can’t wait for this to some day turn into “Are Millennials Killing The Grass Industry?”
Fuck yes we are.
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 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 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.
My neighborhood is showing a transition into gardens and native plants. Its interesting that it seems to be happening with both older (retired) neighbors and newer (young children) neighbors. Its helps that the local garden centers have been doing lots of natives and grass replacements.
Quick shout out to Prairie Moon to buy your seeds. Fall seeding is great for natives
Yeah it seems like it’s not a generational thing anymore but rather just a cultural shift
Cultural shift for sure. What I have found is there have been decades of old hippies working on making things ready for millennials to jump on and convincing their friends to get to this point.
effing love it!
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!
Not all exotics (those not from the Americas) would be considered invasive (those that threaten an area). Most weeds are really good at conditioning the soil and if left to decompose on the locations they grew can be great at building the soil. Pulling anything without putting something to replace it is a fools errand. Also everything that is exotic isn’t bad. White clover is European in origin and a great grass replacement. Also note that some common weeds such as the dandelion are listed as European in origin but there is significant evidence it was all present in North America.
Also make sure you keep some exotics to support the exotic bees such as the honey bee which are from Europe. If you live in an urban or semi-urban environment this is basically a new biome and will need to be treated as such. a Nice mix of things that play well together and are function for you is the best method
Yes, that’s why I didn’t want to rip and tear everything out the first year. Unfortunately, the previous owner of my home allowed a lot of very invasive things to grow like the Japanese Honeysuckle and tree of heaven. There is also pokeweed, which is native to the Southern US but is a nightmare plant that the Spotted Lantern Flies (another invasive killing trees) absolutely love so I have to dig those out.
My previous post made it sound like I am removing everything that isn’t hyper local, but I don’t have the time or energy for that. Would just settle for the aggressive things to finally die.
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.
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
If it’s native now is the time to sow yellow rattle. It’s semi parasitic to grass and will allow other plants to establish where grass usually takes over.
