5 ms·

When I visited our friends/family in Toronto, I was walking through the community and noticed how the lawns had weeds everywhere. I was very intrigued. Don't th

by njx 8y ago

When I visited our friends/family in Toronto, I was walking through the community and noticed how the lawns had weeds everywhere. I was very intrigued. Don't they have laws, HOA etc. I talked about this to my friend and he said weed killers are prohibited for home use, only golf courses are allowed etc. That was an awesome news for me. I really wish weed killers are abandoned everywhere. Let nature grow, if you don't like it then just mow.

stronglikedan 8y ago
You can't mow the stickers away, and they are not fun to pick out of dog fur, or carpet, or couches, or...
jasongill 8y ago
Weeds choke out food crops - you can't just mow a soybean field. "Natural" alternatives like vinegar can be just as harmful to the soil & environment as commercial herbicides, and other methods can be economically unfeasible. Unfortunately, to sustain the growth of population and increasing consumer "appetite", herbicides are the only way (at this time). Nobody, including those who live in rural areas like I do, WANT to use herbicides (they aren't cheap) - it's just the only way to stay in business. There is no scaleable alternative at this time.
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  I read an article a few years ago but I cannot for the live of me remember even the larger context, so I don't even know what to ask Google to find it again. Might have been in the context of "The omnivores Dilemma" and the "grass farmer" he visited and described? Don't know if I got it form that book itself or something else I read. It mentioned that when they (don't remember who "they" was either) studied the productivity of rice production somewhere in Asia they found that traditionally worked land was much less productive than industrial-style rice agriculture. BUT - and there was a huge "but": They studied only rice, and that is how they came to that conclusion. Turned out they completely ignored that the traditional method produced not just rice but a long list of other stuff too. So yes, it was "inefficient in producing "just rice". Nature is a huge complex system. How about instead of continuing on a path that surely is not just sub-optimal, but probably even dangerous because it is counter to how nature works and you have to brute-force your way to "success" we give up the idea of gigantic monocultures, and instead go for complexity? That means fields that don't actually look like fields. Where lots of very different kinds of plants all grow together. Yes, that won't work with our current machinery, and not with current knowledge. But I think that you can create biological systems that are far more productive than anything we can get from monocultures, plus none of the dangers. That requires huge amounts of research, experiments - and IT!! Because all that knowledge is too complex to give to every farmer. We need to put that knowledge into systems that then are easy to use. I think trying to force our way to food victory won't work, over time you have to add more and more fixes for all the shortcomings that slowly accumulate in that system, from soil quality to side effects such as the wide distribution of poisons. With enough knowledge we might truly create the Garden of Eden on earth: We let nature do all the work (#) and only go in to grab our food. Like it used to be in hunter/gatherer times, but now managed by us based on the vast amounts of knowledge and "magic tools" (that contain lots of that accumulated knowledge and free the user from having to know even a fraction of it) we created so that it scales to the billions of people. It will also help us when we think about terraforming new planets :-) (#) Nature has trillions and trillions of little machines powered by sun energy working in unison. This is not far-fetched. We already know quite a bit about biological systems, and we have successfully created reasonably complex and large biological systems in some areas.
  - hcarvalhoalves 8y ago
    This is already done in some cases, cocoa is one example. Some decades ago a disease started spreading amongst cocoa crops, and no solution was known. It still menaces crops today. Turns out cocoa is less sensible to disease if you grow it inside the forest vs as monoculture, but because of the shade and density the production is smaller.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    But is there any actual evidence that the "complexity approach" can produce as much as the current model? I mean, I like the sound of the idea, but that's why I'm wary of it; sounds a bit too good to be true.
    - ItsMe000001 8y ago
      Not if you only measure "rice", as in the example. If you keep externalities out of it than it's hard to compete too. Do you know how highly subsidized current food production is? All that energy (actual energy) that goes into it, when stuff is supposed to be able to grow on its own? We don't even have to look at the unknown unknowns of all the poisons. We use up sun energy stored millions of years ago to get our current energy, and the cost for doing so is zero because nature does not know about money.
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    I mean, modern corn is fucking astounding from a productivity standpoint. Pre-industrialization corn and wheat yielded something like 10-20 bushels per acre. I have a book from the turn of the century I keep for the cover titled "How to Grow 100 Bushel Corn in Poor Soil" (spoiler: guano), and now corn harvests are something like 180 bushels an acre and wheat something like 60. There's a lot of reasons for this (mechanization, fertilizers, pesticides, selective breeding and genetic engineering) but the short story is when you talk "traditional" versus "modern" agriculture, you're talking an order of magnitude productivity increases on a per-acre basis, along with another order-of-magnitude increase on the acres worked per farmer.
    - 8y ago
neap24 8y ago
Letting your lawn grow more wild/naturally is catching on in some cities in the US whether through conviction or just apathy. But ironically, as you mention, many places have local laws or HOA rules preventing this on a large scale.
- njx 8y ago
  cannot wait to see this adopted in my community. The pressure of maintaining clean tidy lawns is simply not necessary
  - Trisell 8y ago
    I ripped my front yard out and put in raised beds with gravel in between each box. I have had several positive comments from neighbors who initially thought I was crazy but now see the positives of what I’ve done. Also I don’t have a HOA to contend with so the 8 months my yard was a dirt or mud lot wasn’t as much of an issue.
atomical 8y ago
What scientific proof is available that they are actually harmful?
- fenwick67 8y ago
  Uhh have you read the glyphosate warning label? http://www.roundup.ca/_uploads/documents/28486_Ultra2_All%20new%20uses_E_06Mar2014%20for%20CustomCare.pdf http://www.roundup.ca/_uploads/documents/28486_Ultra2_All%20... PRECAUTIONS KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN. HARMFUL IF SWALLOWED. HARMFUL IF INHALED.
  - atomical 8y ago
    That doesn't prove it's harmful. The poison makes the dose and in the case of glyphosate the FDA is pretty clear that low doses are not harmful.
gerbilly 8y ago
> Don't they have laws, HOA etc. Ha ha, no. Maybe Canada is land of the free?
Amezarak 8y ago
> Don't they have laws, HOA etc. Most homeowners in the US are also not impacted by any laws or HOA rules mandating they have perfectly manicured lawns, either. This seems to be something limited to upscale suburbia particularly in the west, where the arid conditions require you to actually care for your lawn if you want grass.
pasbesoin 8y ago
I was considering putting in a vegetable garden. Then I realized that my otherwise ideal location is downslope from my neighbor's yard. And the absence of weeds in his lawn. So, no vegetable garden for me. Unless I go to the trouble to put in an isolated raised bed with fresh soil imported from a safe source.
- insensible 8y ago
  This is one of many reasons why permaculturalists dig swales on contour. You can catch water, erosion, and pollutants uphill, plan a garden just beyond, and your garden benefits from the water catchment soaking the soil without much if any detriment from the pollutants.
  - pasbesoin 8y ago
    Interesting. I'm considering some significant landscaping, adding an additional, walled "tier" to that back slope -- it already has one, lower down. I wasn't aware that it could -- on its own, depending upon design -- provide significant filtration of such contaminants, although I am considering how it could also help divert rainwater to the side property lines, aiding its flow past the house to the front yard and sewer. However, the best place for the garden -- best sun, and out of the way of other activity -- would still catch a lot of runoff.
    - insensible 8y ago
      The permaculture slogan for handling water is "stop, spread, and soak". A contour is at a right angle to runoff, so by digging a swale with a downhill berm you bring it to a halt. And yes, you can deliver water elsewhere by putting it on a 1-2% grade. You can get some more context on what I'm describing from this article, though it sounds like your swale might be shallower. https://permaculturenews.org/2015/07/24/how-to-build-a-swale-on-contour-successfully/ https://permaculturenews.org/2015/07/24/how-to-build-a-swale... If you do it, you might consider filling yours with wood chips for appearance, easy maintenance, extra filtration, and to encourage soil building.
atomical 8y ago
This is off topic.
logfromblammo 8y ago
FYI, clover is absolutely wonderful for walking on barefoot. My yard goes green months before the Bermuda grass monoculture lawns in the neighborhood, and I have personally observed four different species of bees feeding in it, along with the Polistes carolina paper wasps, and the occasional Trypoxylon politum mud-pipe wasps. All of them are very docile, and we've never had any stings, despite frequent nest-building activity within 3m of our front door. Pollinators are important. There are a lot of people out there that let their yards grow plants other than glass for the express purpose of feeding pollinators between spring emergence and the flowering of commercially important crops, including the buzz pollinators like bumblebees. And we continually have to butt heads with HOA buttheads for whom "not grass" equals "weed". Those aren't "weeds"; they're "volunteers". If you can't identify it and find it on the state's official list of noxious and invasive species, go away and come back when you can. I think someone tried a guerilla application of herbicide a couple of years ago, because everything died. I'm glad it all came back. I simply don't understand the level of control-freakishness that would motivate a person to spray herbicide on someone else's yard. It makes me want to intentionally seed some dandelions. Dandelions seem to send that kind of person into fits, for some reason unknown to me.
- insensible 8y ago
  In my locality the legal definition of "weed" is literally anything that isn't a tree, shrub, or cultivated garden. You just have to keep the "weeds", which include grass, below 10 inches. So I planted dutch white clover, which doesn't grow above 10 inches tall, absolutely everywhere I could. It fixes nitrogen and is generally great stuff. And it is hard to kill with RoundUp...my neighbor applies quite a bit at his fence line.

by njx 8y ago

stronglikedan 8y ago

You can't mow the stickers away, and they are not fun to pick out of dog fur, or carpet, or couches, or...

jasongill 8y ago

Weeds choke out food crops - you can't just mow a soybean field. "Natural" alternatives like vinegar can be just as harmful to the soil & environment as commercial herbicides, and other methods can be economically unfeasible. Unfortunately, to sustain the growth of population and increasing consumer "appetite", herbicides are the only way (at this time). Nobody, including those who live in rural areas like I do, WANT to use herbicides (they aren't cheap) - it's just the only way to stay in business. There is no scaleable alternative at this time.

ItsMe000001 8y ago
I read an article a few years ago but I cannot for the live of me remember even the larger context, so I don't even know what to ask Google to find it again. Might have been in the context of "The omnivores Dilemma" and the "grass farmer" he visited and described? Don't know if I got it form that book itself or something else I read. It mentioned that when they (don't remember who "they" was either) studied the productivity of rice production somewhere in Asia they found that traditionally worked land was much less productive than industrial-style rice agriculture. BUT - and there was a huge "but": They studied only rice, and that is how they came to that conclusion. Turned out they completely ignored that the traditional method produced not just rice but a long list of other stuff too. So yes, it was "inefficient in producing "just rice". Nature is a huge complex system. How about instead of continuing on a path that surely is not just sub-optimal, but probably even dangerous because it is counter to how nature works and you have to brute-force your way to "success" we give up the idea of gigantic monocultures, and instead go for complexity? That means fields that don't actually look like fields. Where lots of very different kinds of plants all grow together. Yes, that won't work with our current machinery, and not with current knowledge. But I think that you can create biological systems that are far more productive than anything we can get from monocultures, plus none of the dangers. That requires huge amounts of research, experiments - and IT!! Because all that knowledge is too complex to give to every farmer. We need to put that knowledge into systems that then are easy to use. I think trying to force our way to food victory won't work, over time you have to add more and more fixes for all the shortcomings that slowly accumulate in that system, from soil quality to side effects such as the wide distribution of poisons. With enough knowledge we might truly create the Garden of Eden on earth: We let nature do all the work (#) and only go in to grab our food. Like it used to be in hunter/gatherer times, but now managed by us based on the vast amounts of knowledge and "magic tools" (that contain lots of that accumulated knowledge and free the user from having to know even a fraction of it) we created so that it scales to the billions of people. It will also help us when we think about terraforming new planets :-) (#) Nature has trillions and trillions of little machines powered by sun energy working in unison. This is not far-fetched. We already know quite a bit about biological systems, and we have successfully created reasonably complex and large biological systems in some areas.
- hcarvalhoalves 8y ago
  This is already done in some cases, cocoa is one example. Some decades ago a disease started spreading amongst cocoa crops, and no solution was known. It still menaces crops today. Turns out cocoa is less sensible to disease if you grow it inside the forest vs as monoculture, but because of the shade and density the production is smaller.
- icebraining 8y ago
  But is there any actual evidence that the "complexity approach" can produce as much as the current model? I mean, I like the sound of the idea, but that's why I'm wary of it; sounds a bit too good to be true.
  - ItsMe000001 8y ago
    Not if you only measure "rice", as in the example. If you keep externalities out of it than it's hard to compete too. Do you know how highly subsidized current food production is? All that energy (actual energy) that goes into it, when stuff is supposed to be able to grow on its own? We don't even have to look at the unknown unknowns of all the poisons. We use up sun energy stored millions of years ago to get our current energy, and the cost for doing so is zero because nature does not know about money.
- saalweachter 8y ago
  I mean, modern corn is fucking astounding from a productivity standpoint. Pre-industrialization corn and wheat yielded something like 10-20 bushels per acre. I have a book from the turn of the century I keep for the cover titled "How to Grow 100 Bushel Corn in Poor Soil" (spoiler: guano), and now corn harvests are something like 180 bushels an acre and wheat something like 60. There's a lot of reasons for this (mechanization, fertilizers, pesticides, selective breeding and genetic engineering) but the short story is when you talk "traditional" versus "modern" agriculture, you're talking an order of magnitude productivity increases on a per-acre basis, along with another order-of-magnitude increase on the acres worked per farmer.
  - 8y ago

neap24 8y ago

Letting your lawn grow more wild/naturally is catching on in some cities in the US whether through conviction or just apathy. But ironically, as you mention, many places have local laws or HOA rules preventing this on a large scale.

njx 8y ago
cannot wait to see this adopted in my community. The pressure of maintaining clean tidy lawns is simply not necessary
- Trisell 8y ago
  I ripped my front yard out and put in raised beds with gravel in between each box. I have had several positive comments from neighbors who initially thought I was crazy but now see the positives of what I’ve done. Also I don’t have a HOA to contend with so the 8 months my yard was a dirt or mud lot wasn’t as much of an issue.

atomical 8y ago

What scientific proof is available that they are actually harmful?

fenwick67 8y ago
Uhh have you read the glyphosate warning label? http://www.roundup.ca/_uploads/documents/28486_Ultra2_All%20new%20uses_E_06Mar2014%20for%20CustomCare.pdf http://www.roundup.ca/_uploads/documents/28486_Ultra2_All%20... PRECAUTIONS KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN. HARMFUL IF SWALLOWED. HARMFUL IF INHALED.
- atomical 8y ago
  That doesn't prove it's harmful. The poison makes the dose and in the case of glyphosate the FDA is pretty clear that low doses are not harmful.

gerbilly 8y ago

> Don't they have laws, HOA etc. Ha ha, no. Maybe Canada is land of the free?

Amezarak 8y ago

> Don't they have laws, HOA etc. Most homeowners in the US are also not impacted by any laws or HOA rules mandating they have perfectly manicured lawns, either. This seems to be something limited to upscale suburbia particularly in the west, where the arid conditions require you to actually care for your lawn if you want grass.

pasbesoin 8y ago

I was considering putting in a vegetable garden. Then I realized that my otherwise ideal location is downslope from my neighbor's yard. And the absence of weeds in his lawn. So, no vegetable garden for me. Unless I go to the trouble to put in an isolated raised bed with fresh soil imported from a safe source.

insensible 8y ago
This is one of many reasons why permaculturalists dig swales on contour. You can catch water, erosion, and pollutants uphill, plan a garden just beyond, and your garden benefits from the water catchment soaking the soil without much if any detriment from the pollutants.
- pasbesoin 8y ago
  Interesting. I'm considering some significant landscaping, adding an additional, walled "tier" to that back slope -- it already has one, lower down. I wasn't aware that it could -- on its own, depending upon design -- provide significant filtration of such contaminants, although I am considering how it could also help divert rainwater to the side property lines, aiding its flow past the house to the front yard and sewer. However, the best place for the garden -- best sun, and out of the way of other activity -- would still catch a lot of runoff.
  - insensible 8y ago
    The permaculture slogan for handling water is "stop, spread, and soak". A contour is at a right angle to runoff, so by digging a swale with a downhill berm you bring it to a halt. And yes, you can deliver water elsewhere by putting it on a 1-2% grade. You can get some more context on what I'm describing from this article, though it sounds like your swale might be shallower. https://permaculturenews.org/2015/07/24/how-to-build-a-swale-on-contour-successfully/ https://permaculturenews.org/2015/07/24/how-to-build-a-swale... If you do it, you might consider filling yours with wood chips for appearance, easy maintenance, extra filtration, and to encourage soil building.

atomical 8y ago

This is off topic.

logfromblammo 8y ago

FYI, clover is absolutely wonderful for walking on barefoot. My yard goes green months before the Bermuda grass monoculture lawns in the neighborhood, and I have personally observed four different species of bees feeding in it, along with the Polistes carolina paper wasps, and the occasional Trypoxylon politum mud-pipe wasps. All of them are very docile, and we've never had any stings, despite frequent nest-building activity within 3m of our front door. Pollinators are important. There are a lot of people out there that let their yards grow plants other than glass for the express purpose of feeding pollinators between spring emergence and the flowering of commercially important crops, including the buzz pollinators like bumblebees. And we continually have to butt heads with HOA buttheads for whom "not grass" equals "weed". Those aren't "weeds"; they're "volunteers". If you can't identify it and find it on the state's official list of noxious and invasive species, go away and come back when you can. I think someone tried a guerilla application of herbicide a couple of years ago, because everything died. I'm glad it all came back. I simply don't understand the level of control-freakishness that would motivate a person to spray herbicide on someone else's yard. It makes me want to intentionally seed some dandelions. Dandelions seem to send that kind of person into fits, for some reason unknown to me.

insensible 8y ago
In my locality the legal definition of "weed" is literally anything that isn't a tree, shrub, or cultivated garden. You just have to keep the "weeds", which include grass, below 10 inches. So I planted dutch white clover, which doesn't grow above 10 inches tall, absolutely everywhere I could. It fixes nitrogen and is generally great stuff. And it is hard to kill with RoundUp...my neighbor applies quite a bit at his fence line.