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“No Mow May“ Won't Fix Our Biodiversity Problems
- bradley13 2y agoReduce the amount of lawn you have. Replant with whatever is native to your area. At least half of our land is native meadow that we mow once in August and again just before Winter. Haul off the mowings, and never fertilize. If you are starting from scratch, the land may take a few years to reach a balance.
- cpursley 2y agoWhy not compost the mowings? Or use it as mulch to help reduce water evaporation?
- justincormack 2y agoYou need to get it off the grass, as wildflowers do better and grass worse in less fertile ground. You can compost snd yse elsewhere.
- coldcode 2y agoNot if you live in an HOA. When I had a house, you couldn't change your lawn to anything but grass or let it die or go wild, and where I lived, during the summer two weeks of not mowing was almost beyond what a riding mower could tackle, the grass would be 6 inches high or more. At least my lawn was watered from an aquifer well that was still close to the surface after nearly 40 years. Sold the house and now live in an apartment with barely any grass (but trees and plants).
- jimberlage 2y agoI do this - I mow half and have given the rest to native plants. Benefits: - My lawn is prettier (native wildflowers are really nice) - Deeper roots around my house has slowed/stopped the basement water that the previous owners had to deal with - Biodiversity is nice, we get lots of animals that neighbors don’t get Things I thought would be problems that aren’t: - Kids don’t have as much space to run in the yard. We go to the park more and there are other kids there, so on the whole they’ve made more friends than if they just stayed in our yard. - Biodiversity increases the number of critters trying to get into the house. The native plants are more attractive to the ecosystem than my house is, and now there’s enough predators of the bugs in the garden that there are less bugs to try and get into the house. Problems: - I have to clear brush 1x/2x a year to remove flammable material
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoOne of the things I appreciate greatly about living in a Finnish "concrete suburb" (a decades old, concrete-walled apartment complex) is that actual nature is always a 5 minute walk away in every direction. I can walk from my living room to deep in the quiet of the forest faster than I can listen to the median Dream Theater song. I have to say I like this much better than lawns, or frankly having a yard at all, although actually owning a patch of forest someday would be the ideal.
- cpursley 2y agoBuilding up instead of out preserves nature (and vital farmland).
- surgical_fire 2y agoLast thing I want in my yard is biodiversity. I'm surprised that is even a thing.
- saagarjha 2y agoYou think "I feel a square of grass is boring" is an unusual opinion for people to have?
- ghaff 2y agoIt’s probably atypical of at least suburban US homeowner opinion and perhaps town/HOA bylaws. Personally I keep a fairly small lawn and let the fields grow though they need to be knocked down once a year or so by tractor so they’re not totally out of control. Things like wildflower lawns and meadows are certainly a thing even if they’re not common. Many highway departments have also started putting wildflowers in medians.
- surgical_fire 2y agoIn fact, yes. Much in the same way that a house is "boring" in comparison to a mud hut. Are these people also living in mud huts for increased biodiversity? I would be surprised that people are alright with deadly nature crawling, flying and nesting next to where they sleep.
- sakjur 2y agoThat’s a whole new perspective for me, thank you for sharing your point of view. I am much more scared of people, cars, and buildings than anything in nature. Nature is where I go to recover, and I’d want as much of it as possible in my yard. Some of it will inevitably make it indoors too, and that might not be ideal, but ohwell, it’s a whole lot better for me to have a bee in my house than constantly feel stressed by traffic and the artificality of my daily life. And mud huts sounds pretty cool, if I get to deck it out like a hobbit hole.
- surgical_fire 2y ago
- Havoc 2y agoPeople don't care about it. If they did we wouldn't have stuff like this: >In November 2023, glyphosate received 10 year renewed authorization for use in the EU ...and that's the EU, which usually plays it safer than other regions
- zimzam 2y agoI think that’s because glyphosate is used agriculturally not because people were mad about weed control for their lawns.
- Angostura 2y agoGlyphosate is relatively safe.
- jeksicjjdjisos 2y agohttps://youtu.be/ovKw6YjqSfM?si=VhpoejVpF-GIon0s https://youtu.be/ovKw6YjqSfM?si=VhpoejVpF-GIon0s
- Havoc 2y agoNot if you're a bee
- beardyw 2y agoThis is ridiculous. Even if it isn't useful, what is the harm? Is there some political thing going on?
- Hendrikto 2y ago> Over the course of the one-month study, unmowed plots of Kentucky bluegrass did not substantially support more flowers compared to plots mowed at two-and-a-half inches. Who mows at 2.5 inches though?
- __s 2y agoMe. Set blade to highest & leave a few patches. Avoids dead grass in Summer even without watering lawn Granted, I wouldn't mow if it wasn't for letters city sends me if weeds grow over 18cm tall (they wouldn't define what a weed was for me)
- zbrozek 2y agoI grew up in Kentucky and our house had a lawn which we never fertilized, never seeded, and never watered. We cut it to about 4 inches high.
- twobitshifter 2y agoThis is the recommended height for bluegrass.
- WillAdams 2y agoI wish localities would issue the same kind of citations for invasive species as they do for an uncut, weedy lawn --- that might start to be a fix, but would require education, something we seem to be short on right now.
- bell-cot 2y agoAdmitting that I know a fair number of older women who take care of their yards... If you called 'em "Dandelion Laws", limited them to invasives that easily spread to neighbors' yards and were a PITA for those neighbors to keep under control, and cultivated a group of older ladies who were willing to show up and complain loudly at the occasional City Council meeting - then it might be surprisingly easy to do. At least in upscale and wanna-be-upscale areas.
- goda90 2y agoI would note that dandelions are not considered invasive in most of the United States. They're non-invasive exotics instead. Considered beneficial actually. I see native bumblebees feeding on a lot of what busybodies would label as weeds and try to regulate away. This approach would just be asking for heavy use of pesticides to maintain monoculture grass.
- conductr 2y agoAs an owner of and neighbor to many of the standard protagonist monoculture lawns being discussed here, I would also caution against this concept due to how it will be managed; copious amounts of pesticides more than is already being used is what will happen. I try to handle weeds by mowing frequently enough they never get to maturity and so my neighbors are sending dandelions into my yard, I don’t fight it, I just make sure they never get tall enough to bloom or cast seeds from my area. They’re so hard to keep away, I would have to put down full coverage pesticide if I was trying to fight their very existence on my property. My neighbors aren’t even that neglectful. Yet you see it ever. If I had to guess the largest producer of dandelion diaspora are schools and parks and some of the medians in my city along with random patches of “low maintenance”/ vacant land. It’s also windy where I live so it just travels far.
- andrewstuart 2y agoIt should be in November and be called “No Mowvember”.
- kevindamm 2y agomaybe for the Southern hemisphere..
- locallost 2y ago> Still, the institute’s research has some potentially useful findings. Jackson’s research on seeding milkweed (the host plant for monarch caterpillars) in road ditches with existing vegetation showed abysmal results without applying herbicides, such as Roundup, prior to planting. “You get precisely no plants,” Jackson said. “You use Roundup once, you get a few more, and, if you round it up a couple of times, you get a few more.” Yeah right. People are doing no dig gardening now by simply putting a layer of cardboard over grass or whatever below you want to get rid off, and placing a layer of compost on top and guess what it works fairly well. But sure, we need Roundup for everything so spray it liberally for "nature". And it's "science" based. Horrific.
- numbsafari 2y agoNote that she was talking about roadside plantings. As in along the ditches next to highways. There’s a scale problem. I’m not saying roundup is the way, but you can’t scale up cardboard to that level. For one thing, most at home gardeners are recycling their pile of Amazon boxes. For the highway system, you’d need to start manufacturing cardboard for that purpose, which would have its own consequences. Personally, I’m a fan of using those roadsides to do grazing. Intensive grazing. It has its own downsides, but using an animal system to manage a plant system can be very effective. See also the bison on the plains. Ed: fixed missing sentence break.
- goda90 2y agoYou could mow the roadside really low, then till it and immediately put down seeds. Machinery would let that scale up more.
- locallost 2y agoThat's like saying we can't build Empire State Building because techniques to build dog houses don't scale. Sure you need different methods to scale, but if something should be a future epitaph on societies worldwide it should be that we messed everything up because it was the easiest thing to do. I mentioned the cardboard method simply because it's the most primitive thing people do and it still works.
- bitwize 2y agoWhat will fix our biodiversity problems are the 3 Ps: powerdown, permaculture, and population control. A much smaller human population living at preindustrial levels, with strong taboos against building too large or becoming too advanced. And no, mass murder is not necessary for the needed population reduction. It's simply a matter of incentivizing not having children at a global scale. The best time to do this was a few generations ago; the second best time is now.
- hooverd 2y agoHey man as someone who appreciates modern medicine this sucks. You can try to empty out the cities though!
- Angostura 2y ago> Lawns represent one of the largest, fastest growing landscapes in the US. These ecosystems—water-hungry, energy-intensive monocultures… That’s the issue. I recently planted a new lawn in the UK and last year seeded it with some small-leaved clover. This year I bought some vetch seeds, I might add some native daisy seed next year. The result is a nice lawn that is still nice to sit on or play some games, but has attractive flowers.
- scaryclam 2y agoI recently moved into a new home with a lawn that seems to have been semi-recently laid. I want to add some daisy's as I think they're pretty in a lawn. I didn't think of clover though, so wanted to ask, how prolific is it? The grass is taking some work to get thickened up, so I don't want to make it harder to keep some grass, but clover would probably help it get there.
- dopylitty 2y agoThis seems a bit like nuance trolling[0] to me. The upshot of articles like this is essentially "so we should stick with the status quo" whether it says that outright or not. 0: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-201-the-conservative-faux-erudite-rise-of-nuancetrolling https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-201-the-conservat...