Wherever the actual origin of the perfectly manicured lawn began, the reason for it seems to be the same: to display the wealth of the homeowner by showing that they do not need the space for growing food or supporting livestock. Today, the lawn is still a source of pride. Its bright, even color, its perfect height, crisp edges, and a uniform thickness still invoke a sense of pride in the homeowner and admiration from the passerby. But why? What is this lawn doing for us other than providing eye candy and perhaps a surface for a child to play on? Absolutely nothing. Literally. It is not feeding bees or butterflies. It is definitely not feeding humans. Studies show that it creates more air pollution each time it is mowed than a car driving one hundred miles. Yes, air pollution, from the litany of lawnmowers and weed whackers and leaf blowers that are used to maintain that lush carpet. Now multiply that across the millions of lawns that are mowed across this country and that’s a lot of nasty sh*t we are spewing into our atmosphere. All for our eyes and egos. I’m not here to lecture though. I still find it visually pleasing to see a nicely manicured lawn but lately I have been seeing it less so.
We all know that global warming is happening and some of us are trying to figure out what we can do to prevent it from worsening, even if its little things like mowing the lawn less often. Being stuck at home during quarantine in 2020, I found my ears being assailed almost daily with the high powered riding mowers and other fuel sucking equipment being used by the landscaping crews on my neighbors’ lawns. I noticed that the lawns were still short and wondered why they needed to be mowed again so soon. We loathe mowing the lawn here and only get to ours every other week, mostly out of necessity because “its starting to look messy”. We also didn’t want the township to put us on notice that the height didn’t comply with local laws. Lawn laws. There are actual laws that mandate the height of the grass in your yard.
One of the first things we did when my husband and I moved into this house was to create some raised bed gardens in the backyard for growing vegetables. Every spring our kitchen bay window is overflowing with plastic takeout containers full of little seed starting pods and various vegetable and flower sprouts beginning to grow. We enjoy growing some food for ourselves, in particular tomatoes as my husband likes to make tomato sauce for his homemade pizzas, and I like growing plants that you wouldn’t find at the local big box store. I had noticed shortly after we moved into the neighborhood that there was a neighbor a few houses away who had done away with most of their lawn. Carefully arranged around the yard are various flowering perennials where grass would normally be found, along with small paths and cute little garden decorations. I remember thinking how pretty it was. My husband wondered how nice it must be to mow just a tiny plot of lawn.
Some time later, I had also received a free subscription to Better Homes and Gardens magazine (not a magazine I would have normally read but the cashier suckered me into it with some other freebies when I was shopping for maternity clothes awhile back so why not?) I started to flip through each issue out of boredom as quarantine became monotonous. I noticed a new article every month about the beautiful perennial gardens that people had created and how they designed them. They were all amazing and low maintenance and I knew that I wanted this for us too. I began googling for perennial garden ideas and native plants when I stumbled onto permaculture and then homesteading and the ideologies behind both. These also inspired me to get rid of the wasteful, polluting lawn and convert it to useful garden area where we can grow food for both us and for our dwindling population of pollinators. Growing our own food would also help to minimize our carbon footprint by reducing the number of trips to the grocery store which has the side benefit of keeping us away from potential Covid-19 carrying customers (pandemic garden for the win!)
As a nearly lifelong American suburbanite, the idea of getting rid of the grass is scary. The wide open lawn was just always there, its normal, its expected. I worry that doing this could make it more difficult to sell our home if one day we decide to move. What if a potential homebuyer doesn’t see their beloved lawn everywhere? As a civil engineer, the idea of getting rid of those perfect grass edges is nagging at my need for order. However, I find myself wondering more often how we are going to keep this planet livable for our kids and grandkids and so on if we keep living the unsustainable lifestyles that we have decided are our right to live. The original reason I started this blog was to be brave (insert inspiring music here) and to keep me from backing out and giving into that societal norm of lawn life but then (replace that inspirational crap with something a little more doomsday-like now) I think about the future of this planet that we seem hell bent on destroying and my fear disappears. In the end, if it even inspires one person to be brave and dump their lawn for food and/or flowers, then I will feel accomplished. Just come back and tell me you did it!
I have little background in gardening except for throwing some seeds into dirt each spring and crossing my fingers, as well as planting a few flowering plants to make the garden look nice. This will be my adventure as a permaculture/homesteading novice, successes and mistakes alike, to show anyone who is still sitting here reading this that they can do it too.
I plan to show and discuss all the steps I take to make this happen as well as ways to maintain it (I’ve read that it should be much less than a normal lawn with pristine flower beds), ways to preserve the abundance of food we hope to grow, recipes that we like to use up some of that abundance (simple recipes, there are no 5 star chefs over here! Only working parents), ideas for how to go more sustainable in our every day lives, and anything else that seems even somewhat relevant to this topic.
So welcome to the adventure, its time to break the lawn!
