Faced with some lawn repair, I once joined the lawncare subreddit. It was an intense echo chamber of lawn adjacent neuroticism - stress over chemicals, mowing heights, quite a few people angry at their neighbours for foolishly trying to do them a favour by cutting some of their grass (inevitably too short or tall), and a fetishisation of the "perfect" lawn - cut short with visible stripes and no other vegetation.
I definitely like lawns - they're great for running about on, playing games, having a picnic. But other vegetation is nice too. The beauty of a slightly wild garden is the abundance of nature - insects, birds, the scent of flowers. Lawns are a monoculture with none of that.
It would be unwise to take Reddit as illustrative about how normal people feel about anything. The platform is designed to falsify the appearance of strong consensus.
More than just an an echo chamber, a pressure cooker designed to ratchet up over time. It rewards extreme opinions, normalizes them, then cyclically rewards even more extreme options that break the new norm.
Imagine what Reddit could have been if they went with tags instead of subcommunities. Posts could have different communities interacting instead of having mutually exclusive circlejerks.
Which is exactly what most people want. They want to find people with similar interests and share ideas. Don't go to the anime subreddit expecting to find anyone who's interested in a negative critique about anime.
That problem with Reddit also applies to HN and every other "moderated with a light hand" discussion forums today. Don't go to Hacker News to speak positively about 'System Integrity Protection' or 'Sealed System Volume' on Apple computers, or to consider how the GPL might be harming open source, for example. The comments will be a tire fire of people repeating the same handful of hostile viewpoints as top-level threads (rather than upvoting that which they agree with), drowning out rational discussion and driving away anyone who doesn't agree with their viewpoint. The conversational warfare tactics are exactly the same as those used on Reddits about anime, video games, and all other topic people feel strongly enough about to create a forum for and allow participation of this nature.
They were like email, except to the forum's address instead of someone else's personal address. Lots of RE: RE: RE: just like in email, lots of third-party 'forum' clients that parsed QWKmail packet downloads from the BBS and displayed threaded conversations. Moderators could remove posts from the forum, unlike usenet.
Structurally different. Take a look at the many Discourse groups around today. There's none of the same pile-on tendencies that Upvote based sites like HN, Reddit, and Lobste.rs has. There's nothing to gain by piling on usually, since there's no karma-with-the-crowd.
this threaded view so much better though. maybe sort by time instead of votes would be better. once you got through a few pages message boards got unreadable
In the Portland metro area for the most part we just let our lawns go brown in the dry summer. It generally doesn't rain much from mid-June through mid-September and now the lawns look tawny like lion fur - I kind of like it, actually.
My sister & BiL visted from out of state last week and they were like "why does everyone let their lawns die here?" and I actually hadn't even thought about it much before - the fish doesn't see the water, I guess. I think it's because it's going to cost a lot if you want to keep your lawn green through the summer - mostly sewer costs as they're based on water usage. That and we don't have to worry about mowing in July, August and September which is nice. And we know it won't take much for the lawns to green back up when the rains start in October.
+1 from Seattle. Coming from the Midwest, the brown PNW lawns annoyed me. They still do (it's a dust bowl here for months), but 90% of lawns are dormant like mine. No watering, no mowing, no big deal.
When the rain comes back (very soon!), we'll green up and all will be right again.
It's also not that common to have a sprinkler system here, and watering the lawn is kind of a PITA, especially if you want to avoid dirty looks for watering the sidewalk.
To be fair, that's every single subreddit that is about a relatively mundane topics. There is only so much to talk about and eventually leads to intense optimization, especially considering the population is going to be full of people who willing look to join a lawn care community. And it should be noted that the name of a subreddit does not necessarily best represent what it is. For the same reason that there are at least 6 different personal finance subreddits I am aware of.
I own a fair amount of land, mostly forest, but I grew up in a city and have lived in suburbs as well, so I understand why lawns confuse people.
The answer is that it's really low maintenance and it prevents erosion while also lowering the complexity of putting in adequate drainage. It's also very efficient to maintain large swaths of grass with uniform equipment, whether it's with push mowers, riding mowers, or tractors.
Maintaining forest is challenging, dangerous, and more labor intensive than you might think. It's real easy to die doing forest work: trees really wanna kill you. Trees are always getting sick and grody. It's easy to accidentally kill healthy trees when you are culling dying/dead trees and, at least for me, making mistakes makes me feel sad and guilty about it. Chainsaws are easy to use and you really have to be not paying attention or not using protective equipment to hurt yourself with them -- it's the trees that are dangerous. This is one of the reasons why suburban developers don't go out of their way to plant forests even if it would make the area look nicer. There's also the question of who would maintain the forest in an area where everything is subdivided into small private plots, but any living forest requires a lot of space to grow.
It is also more intellectually challenging to maintain forest. This is reflected by the difference in wage rates between forestry workers and normal landscapers. Stump removal when you have to do it is also its own set of challenges.
The other reason why uniform lawns are easier to work with is something that only dawned on me after years of letting the weeds grow amidst the normal grass. Weeds grow at different rates and have different impacts on the soil. It's a lot easier to maintain a uniform lawn. A weedy lawn can look cool at some parts of the year with lots of wildflowers and then look crappy at other times when the flowers all die and it's just some weird scratchy bunch of weeds that creates a weird erosion pattern, which is a problem that is more expensive/difficult to fix than just never having it happen in the first place.
I understand the intellectual perspective in this article but the explanation is very silly in light of the practical considerations that become apparent when you are responsible for land yourself. The labor-hour estimate in this article is also totally delusional, or based on some absurd standard that no one actually keeps their tiny lawn to.
I mean, how would you even spent 150 hours a year maintaining a tiny suburban lawn? Are you cutting it with a toenail clipper? Huh? That's almost 3 hours a week, dude.
I think that depends on your frame of reference. Sure in comparison with maintaining a forest the way you describe it's low (though note that there's always the option of not maintaining a forest at all, except for paths through it). But compared to maintaining a meadow (even mown piecewise to strive for max biodiversity) where you'd mow max 2 times a year, it's rather high.
It's a lot easier to maintain a uniform lawn
Depends. I don't consider mowing a piece of grass 2 times a year a lot harder than doing all of it every 2 weeks, on the contrary. You need the correct tool for the job though.
when the flowers all die
That doesn't have to be like that, e.g. in my Western-European climate that is only so in the middle of winter; for the rest my grassland has flowering species about 9 months a year. Does require some insight into ecology of grasslands to get such situation though. What you talk about is typically what one gets when not mowing 'correctly'. I.e. wrong time of year, or too much or too little, or not removing the vegetation after mowing it, etc.
that creates a weird erosion pattern
Can you explain that? I'm pretty sure I've seen studies where old grasslands are better for erosion than short lawns.
> I mean, how would you even spent 150 hours a year maintaining a tiny suburban lawn? Are you cutting it with a toenail clipper? Huh? That's almost 3 hours a week, dude.
A quarter acre of St Augustine grass in Georgia produces about 5-10 of those 30 gallon yard waste bags full of grass clippings each week at the height of the growing season. The clippings cannot remain on the grass or they will kill it. It takes approximately 5 hours a week to maintain such a yard.
Similarly in the fall, the trees will produce similar amounts of leaves each week that also cannot remain on the grass or they will kill it.
Growing grass in the Midwest is easy compared to the transition zone, which Georgia is a part of. I’m not used to the difficulty here in Virginia, having come from Ohio.
I really struggle to believe that people in Georgia with a lawn are spending 5 hours a week maintaining it. That's basically an entire weekend day. Why can't you mulch it, or use the clipping bag?
My grass grows quickly in Spring and Fall, but it takes about 20 minutes to mow it. I don't usually bother to pick up the clippings unless it's really long.
It's routine here to see people spending an hour every day maintaining their lawns. Over the course of a week they're pulling weeds, fertilizing, watering and patching their grass.
They have to or else it dies/gets overrun almost immediately. They get crispy after 2-3 days w/o water. Start dying in a week. Lawns here are a freaking nightmare to keep up.
Can't they use a robot mower? I'm in a northern climate, so lawns only grow from late April until late September, but around here more and more are getting robot mowers. They are completely silent and are continously cutting the grass. The clippings are so short that they can just stay on the lawn and functions as nutrient for the grass. So less fertilizer is needed, weeds will be cut constantly. So in theory you just need to water it if there's no rain.
Most people think of a lawn as rectangle of grass on a flat surface but most are not. In all but the southern parts of Georgia it's very hilly with most properties flowing down hill to a washout, creek, or pond. There's also a dense tree canopy over most properties older than 20 years which means lots of roots, acorns, pine cones, leaves, and pine needles.
Electric mowers and robots have fragile little blades designed to weight as little as possible because they're running on batteries. They'll be damaged or break entirely if they strike a root or rock.
I had to use a self propelled dual blade mulching power to handle the terrain and so I didn't have to spend an hour or more walking the property gathering all the pine codes and other crap that might stall out a lesser mower.
Robot mowers work on most lawns. If it's very bumpy or hilly you just need to go up in price. This summer I visited a farm with a huuuge lawn with trees, hills, rocks and what not. They had two Husquarna 4WD robot mowers and the lawn looked pretty nice.
In GA, with .25 acre of centipede, I'd say it's about 2 hrs/wk with heavy rain & sun (like recently). Less rain, 2 hrs / 3 wks. Push mower, slow & steady pace (it grows so thick, I can't just power walk it). Maybe St Augustine is very different from centipede.
Mulching seems to be fine if you cut along the rule of third (cut less than 1/3 of the thing at a time). Even side discharge seems ok, especially as you spiral over the discharge, re-mowing it.
I used to let it grow out, but thatch became an issue. Which is why raking them up makes sense (or dethatching).
Now I cut slightly on the short side, more often, which seems to naturally favor centipede over dandelions almost anywhere there's good sun & water & drainage. Nothing really beats mowed centipede, for me; letting it grow wild invites snakes et al, and paving it would be hot.
Anyone who would spend five hours clipping and dumping grass per week would spend hundreds of hours a year on a more challenging environment of the same size. You would have to move pretty slowly to accomplish that.
It's naive to think maintaining a yard is just walking your property once a week with a push mower.
If you have a tree canopy, as most older homes in Georgia do, then you have to contend with the debris from the trees (e.g. fallen limbs, leaves, pine needles, pine cones, acorns, etc). If you want the lawn to look nice you need to do edging, weeding, watering and fertilizer=. In Georgia most homes have "pine islands" that have some sort of ground covering like mulch or pine straw and contain plants ans shrubs you need to maintain.
I don’t think it’s naive. I don’t live in Georgia but I have mowed, trimmed and maintained yards of similar size and obstacle count many times. That list of additional chores doesn’t take long, especially if in the yard weekly so only incremental upkeep is required and no rarely done parts are difficult (large thorns, lots of sticks or walnuts, difficult edging etc.)
I don’t doubt a slow person or a meticulous lawnhead could fill the time, to be clear, but that same level of effort and speed should be applied to measuring the difficulty of maintaining a forested plot in order to make a useful comparison.
Doing a halfassed slap job in a half an hour each week while your property slowly deteriorates is not the same thing as maintenance. Also mowing a lawn at full sprint is going to quickly deteriorate your equipment.
Of course it will if you cut and cart the future nutrients away each week while creating 'greenery' that is a monoculture entirely unattractive to animal life.
As long as you've got a water source, you can easily create a tiny patch of green that can survive for decades unattended - even in the midst of a desert.
Agreed, it's a struggle. We apply milorganite or similar biosolid product every third month to ensure the grass gets the nutrients it needs. Otherwise we get a spotty lawn, which in turn results in poor water retention and pooling.
There's a balance between how fast the grass grows and how often you cut it. If you want to cut your grass less often then you need to bag otherwise the large volume of clippings pile up on the grass and don't decompose.
In my case, my last lawn was St. Augustine which is a drought tolerant variety of grass typically planted in Florida or on golf courses because it requires less watering. In Georgia however there's no shortage of water so it thrived and during the peak growing season it would easily grow five or six inches a week.
So I could either mow twice a week, mow once week and bag, or rip up and re-sod the whole thing. None of which was really desirable.
As someone who lives in the UK - yes, not me personally, but I have neighbours(very elderly) who I see every week literally on the knees, clipping the grass with what effectively looks like nail scissors. I mean, they are retired, they can do whatever they want with their time, but it is a little bit nuts.
Another benefit of regularly cut lawns is that they keep critters away. Having tall grass, shrubs, bushes, or other cover grow right up to your house means that mice, snakes, squirrels, and other wild animals will find their way into your home.
this is a really interesting take that I surprisingly have never seen anywhere, thank you for sharing. would love to learn more about this perspective and body of knowledge, thought not sure where or what to google or what resources might exist. for example, what mitigation can or should be done if one did want wild grass and flowers but wanted to prevent erosion, and what happens if you don't prevent that erosion. is this still a concern on a completely flat piece of land?
I really want/wanted to get rid of my lawn when I first bought my house, until I realized how easy to maintain it is, especially if you don't care if it's looks nice. Bushes need to be trimmed, garden beds need to be weeded, annuals need to be re-planted, etc. But mow your lawn once a week (20-30 minutes) and that's all you need to do.
I'm in Oregon, so it rains enough through most of the year that the lawn keeps itself going. It goes dormant from lack of water in the summer, but that's fine with me. Doesn't seem to need anything else so far, except mowing.
Trees don't care about you one iota. I guarantee, humans are much more deadly to trees than trees are to humans.
>This is one of the reasons why suburban developers don't go out of their way to plant forests
The main reason is that it is hard (read expensive) to route plumbing around roots and what not, so it's much easier to just tear them down and work from a flat area. It's typical WASP mentality to move into a space, kill off all of the original inhabitants, and then claim it as your own.
>The other reason why uniform lawns
Yes, grass lawns help keep the soil from erroding away from the foundation. Once the lawn is established, it defintely makes it more difficult for foreign grass to grow.
> That's almost 3 hours a week, dude.
Lawn care doesn't have to be a race. I enjoy my weekly lawncare routine. It's a nice moderate outdoor workout pushing a mower, raking, trimming, etc. When you get done, you get to sit on the patio, enjoy a tasty beverage, and feel good about what you accomplished. Then again, I grew up outdoors more than I was indoors back when kids did that kind of thing.
If you despise outdoors, heat, sweat, physical work, then of course you'll hate yard work.
I love in the pacific northwest. We have untold square miles of forest here. The idea of having to keep a forest "nice" kind of blows my mind. The best forests we have are the ones that are completely untouched.
I could be wrong, but I think that "untouched" forest is not really going to be so nice unless you let natural wildfires come by every decade and clear out the undergrowth, or you have a lot of big animals naturally making trails, or you have forestry employees keeping up the forest.
So, if you have a few acres of forest yourself, none of the above things are going to be happening, you actually have to build trails through it and then maintain them. And, you will constantly have fallen branches and fallen trees that need to be cleared. It's a lot of work. I have a few acres of forest in the PNW.
I hear this a lot from a West Coast perspective, but I don't understand it.
Northern New England is almost entirely forested, and it isn't managed or maintained to anything like the same degree as West Coast forests, and yet we don't have the problems with giant segments going up in smoke every year. We don't even really have suburbs. We just have towns that are mostly forests, separated from each other by areas that are completely forests with one road going through.
I'm (obviously) no expert in this, but it seems that our largely untouched forests do a lot better than the ones that are so intensively managed. I have to imagine this has been studied and state maintenance of forests isn't just some giant government boondoggle that leads to massive fires and no one's noticed, but that's how it looks from several thousand miles away!
Part of it is just different climate. The west coast is mostly what is called Mediterranean, which means we have almost no rain during the summer months. By August everything is dry as a bone and ready to burn. Don't you guys get rain pretty much year round?
There's just so much moisture in the plants that fires don't do that much under most normal circumstances in New England. Storm damage is a bigger concern but that just makes trees ugly/dead or has them falling on power lines and houses. Rotted trees are just wet, gross, and full of bugs -- they're not necessarily fire hazards.
In the northeast we don't have wildfires like that. It's just too wet especially in the river valley in which I live. And 'winter' is basically 6 months long.
The undergrowth just uh, under-grows unless you expressly clear it out to make it more pleasant to walk around in.
Speaking as someone who was nearly killed twice by trees (in a car and out walking), I'd say either trees just don't like me or they really are dangerous. Though a lot of people think I'm a bit of a jerk, my money is on the latter.
For me, its about invasive weeds, mosquitoes, ticks and other non-desireable bugs as well as rodents. But I live near a field! So the lawn serves as a buffer and lawns are very good at suppressing weeds. I could go with clover though which we are cultivating on the small hill next to us to buffer us from the field instead of grass though.
A lot of my neighbors have had their lawns overridden by crab grass anyway so is that still a lawn at that point?
In my opinion, a lawn should be a space where vegetation covers all of the ground, and is kept under a few inches tall. As long as that's not thistles or poison ivy, then you can play on that all you want. My lawn has all sorts of grasses, clover, dandelions and wood violets in it. I get to see frogs and fireflies in the evening because I don't spray chemicals to kill them off. Mosquitos are inevitable. If you spray for them, you're also killing their predators like spiders and dragonflies, but not their food supply(you) so they bounce back really fast, way before their predators can recover.
They live next to a field and mentioned using the lawn as a buffer, twice, in what is assumedly a sort of rural area. Not as the red carpet for a wildlife oasis in paved over suburbia which this sort of advice is inevitably geared towards.
You don’t need to spray for mosquitoes and ticks and ruin the local ecosystem when they’re happy in their field at a healthy distance with a nice, clean lawn in between you.
At least here in the DC area, the natural predators are not up to the task of controlling the mosquitos. We don't spray and we don't have any nearby bodies of standing water and our yards are still unbearable with tiny tiger mosquitos every summer. Luckily, it's also just plain too hot and humid to bother with outside in the summer, so yeah, fuck summer.
I actually enjoy a well kept lawn. I feel it helps the house appears tidy from the outside. It strokes my pride of home vibe. But, I pay for it all and it probably averages me $400/month all said (water, seasonal stuff, mowing, etc). It's stupid, sure. But I've never installed a lawn. I've bought houses with lawns. I couldn't justify ripping it out for some zeroscaping style landscape that is aesthetically worse (to me), has less functionality (kids+pets like grass), and comes with a price tag of $30k or more AND it still grows weeds. Most zeroscaping I've seen in my area appears to get zero attention and is completely overgrown in year 2. Also, tree care won't go away so best case I reduce my monthly spend by 50%. I don't really know what is best. I think if I were building a new home, I'd look into artificial turf. So, while interesting, what is the actionable now that we all have these horrible money pit lawns? Is there an alternative?
My family lives on a 1/3 acre lot in a neighborhood that was built around 1960. Thankfully, there is no social pressure in our locale to maintain a "perfect" lawn. Each house does its own thing, ranging from fully wooded lots, to "perfect" lawns, and everything in between. I'm using the term "perfect" for the kind of lawn described in the article, more or less.
Our house is in between. What I can tell you is that there are portions of our lot that we mow. Everything else is left to chance. We don't fertilize or use weed killers. We don't water. (Fertilizer increases the need for water). The lawn is grass plus maybe a dozen other species.
The grass grows in the spring, we mow a couple times, then it goes dormant as the weather gets more dry. The weeds keep it green. Through the remainder of the summer and fall, we mow maybe 3-4 times at most. I rake the leaves from the trees, use the mower to shred them, and use them for compost in the vegetable garden.
The vegetable garden is growing by a few square feet per year. I bought an ancient roto-tiller off the Craig, and gradually expand the garden at the expense of the lawn. I would also be happy to let other kinds of brush grow, but it hasn't begun to happen yet.
The kids were fine in our back yard. They didn't care about the weeds. The neighbors have not complained.
By and large, the people in our 'hood with "perfect" lawns, are retired, and have the time to work on their lawns and gardens, plus, no kids.
When I travel to the neighborhood where I grew up, in another state, it's a totally different world. Every single lawn is "perfect," with no weeds. My parents told me that a couple of their neighbors had large trees cut down because the trees were shading their grass! The difference is so stark that it's almost creepy. There's also one or two full size pickup trucks in front of every house, that almost completely obscure the lawns from the street. Bizarre.
Interesting. This sounds exactly like my house & neighborhood but not climate/upkeep. I have to mow weekly 7-8 months of the year. I don't water much unless it's over 100F out and hasn't rained in a week (typical in June-August). I basically do the minimum to keep it alive. I keep mowing in place in the winter because it's so short and they mulch the leaves (they continue falling most of the winter here because it's a mild winter) which fertilize and keeps things tidy, and it probably needs mowing every 2-3 weeks anyways. Some grasses here go dormant, mine always grows unless it's <40F (which is seldom here even in winter). I don't care if a patch dies or whatever, it will fill back in in a few weeks. Weeds can't pop up because it's constantly being cut, etc.
Since it's a weekly chore, and hot/long summer, I outsource the mowing. If it was 3-4 times a year I would totally DIY.
I've lived in the places like your parents neighborhood. My neighbor a couple doors down had a flawless lawn. But he also had a guy come over every day for ~4 hours to piddle around in the yard, hedges, trimming things, pool; he was a full stack grounds keeper. Imagine what that cost, lol.
We definitely live in different climates. I lived in Fort Worth, Texas for a few years, and an indelible memory is seeing a guy mowing his lawn on Christmas. Our grass was generally dormant until we had one of those big thunderstorms. Then it would just go nuts and I'd have to mow it. So my mowing occurred at more or less random intervals. Also, I have a hunch that a portion of our yard was being gratuitously fertilized by runoff from the neighboring lawn.
Well, I mow twice a year, don’t water except for young trees, put the leaves of my 30 trees in compost in automn, and that’s it. Just let it grow.
You can use clover or any kind of cover instead of “grass”, and plant trees to keep it in the shade so it doesn’t burn. You can also grow 20-40cm high flowers as well if you like.
There is, but note that I write from a particularly rural perspective here, so it might not jive well with the more suburban sensibilities I've read from your comment. Your mileage may vary.
That said, you can look into growing grasses°, sedges, hostas, and wildflowers that are indigenous to your geographic region. Become good friends with the folks at your local nursery, and they'll be glad to help you out.
°: not things like Kentucky bluegrass (which isn't indigenous to North America) or the various types of fescue (many of which are native to Europe); more like buffalograss and Canada wild rye
I’ve done a significant amount of landscaping projects both diy and paid. I have rental properties and have flipped homes regularly. All to say I’m confident on $30k number localized to me. Probably $15k of material for my lot plus tool rental if done diy. Also I usually hire laborers if I do this so there’s some labor in there. I’d spend more than $500 just trying to dispose of trash on a project this big.
Lawns were a display of high status in England, since only the wealthy had so much land that they could show off that they don't have to use all it for growing food and could afford the person taking care of it. Another trend set by british aristocracy would be the white wedding gown, first worn by a british queen. Flushed toilets where only for the super rich too in the beginning. Innovation trickling downi guess. There is a parallel how Tesla started with expensive cars to scale the technology down into the more affordable Model 3. The Mainframe -> Minicomputer -> Personal Computer -> Smartphone -> SBC development would be another example.
English gardens are quite famous, I think the lawn is the most plain element. They have a large amount of different flowers and plants mixed together connected by a lawn. I wonder why only the lawn part made it to america.
It takes a lot of effort (and a bit of money) to care for an abundance of flowers and plants. Besides watering you have hedging and mulching and weeding and spreading preemergent, etc. where I live many people have professional landscapers come by weekly to mow and also take care of everything else and many people have beautiful yards. I’ve been doing it myself but I do hire a few guys in the spring and autumn to clean things up, lay new mulch (9 cubic yards!) and plant annuals of which I usually need about 120 plants. It usually takes a team of 3 guys an entire day to do everything.
I take care of the rest of the maintenance in the summer but that’s a few hours per week sometimes depending on weather. Luckily this summer we’ve had ample rain so watering has mainly been cut out but weeds have thrived.
You also have taste and fashion. Chelsea flower show each year for example is not so different to london fashion week. Highlighting the latest trends in plant species and how to assemble them in your garden to make it look just like that of your favourite celebrity.
The lawn is the black dress of garden fasion; reliable and timeless.
Go ahead and try and make a vegetable garden in your front lawn. City inspector will probably cite you in many places in the US. We have the front lawn because we made everything else illegal.
It depends on the city. In the city I grew up with having a kept up front lawn was on the books as an ordinance. Vegetable gardens incure fines. No HOA but this is how it goes for a lot of smaller municipalities where it might as well be like living in an HOA. Not cutting your grass actually lead to the city coming out and cutting it for you on top of fines, but it worked out for some slumlords that this fine and mow job by the city was cheaper than hiring a landscaper so they would just do that and never cut their grass themselves on their properties.
It is not necessarily a choice people make. I mean, as with everything, people make choices that lead to risks that you can uncharitably blame them for, but people don't necessarily directly make the choice to live with an HOA.
Common sense should tell you every organization has a beginning.
I moved to where I am now, a couple of years ago, with the understanding there was no HOA.
However, it turns out there was what I'll call a "shadow" HOA - an informal group of people that would like to be one but don't have official standing (yet).
Due to some recent events, they are trying to make it official, have instituted a mailing list, have mentioned possibly having voluntary donations to support the legal costs, etc.
I don't think real estate agents selling homes in the neighborhood are necessarily telling people what's going on either.
As painful as it will be, pay attention. When you are not looking the organizers will file with your county and say an HOA was voted in. If no one challenges, and the county files the paperwork it will be very expensive to prove they faked a vote.
A choice of one isn't much of a choice. HOA neighborhoods are also populated with people who live there because it was the only place they could get into or was least awful choice they had.
Source: just escaped an HOA after 10 years. wound up there because it was the only choice we had at the time. years of misfortune kept us there.
I don't think there is any conspiracy here. Lawn/Gardens have been popular for hundreds of years, at least, for the wealthy. For example, the Gardens of Versailles in France. [1] The United States has more space to person ratio than Europe too. Suburbia is just people spreading out, wanting more privacy, and being able to indulge in those garden like experiences, on a smaller scale.
So I guess my point is, gardens aren't new, and many US residents have the space and the disposable income.
It's not a natural expression of preferences by any means. It's mandated by many HOAs throughout the US. I have friends who can't even put plants in their lawns because of their HOA, let alone get rid of them. It's the reason why so many West Coast governments have to place lawn watering restrictions during drought conditions, to override local HOAs.
Prior to industrialization a manicured lawn had to be mowed by scythe. They weren't common because only the wealthy could indulge in them. It has only been 100 years since mechanization was sufficiently cheap for ordinary people to be pretend Louis'.
Ironically this thread contains a lot of people discussing their local experience with lawns, then other people from thousands of miles away in different climates saying "no you're wrong, my lawn is nothing like that".
The problems we have trying to maintain a monoculture!
I can totally see why people have a problem with huge, unused monoculture patches of grass in dry areas, but I can't understand why people think it's a universal problem.
Lawns are only a problem in areas where water is scarce. Sure, you can think of other problems with it that are "bad" for the environment, but so is literally every human activity. In my area lawns are heavily used and surrounded by flower beds, especially by families with kids, like mine.
Drought tolerant cultivars have been in development for awhile. They’re mainly targeted at golf courses and things like that but I’d expect to see them packaged for homes in the near future.
It’s really neat to see how they optimize certain grasses this way and how many years of breeding and selection it takes.
> Using a gas-powered leaf blower for half an hour creates as many polluting hydrocarbon emissions as driving a car seventy-seven hundred miles at a speed of thirty miles per hour.
Battery-powered leaf blowers are so incredibly good that I have a hard time understanding why anyone buys a new gas-powered leaf blower.
I have both. My 80v leaf blower is pretty decent for about 15 minutes, and with two batteries there isnt a ton of downtime.
However, we also have three massive cottonwood trees among plenty of other maple and crap that amounts to feet of fallen leaves to clean up.
On a whim I got a backpack style gas leaf blower, and now we only use the battery one for "maintenance" blowing. There simply isn't a good analogy to describe the difference.
That said, at my previous house in the suburbs, the battery powered one was plenty sufficient, so YMMV.
I have a gas blower. After trying two plug-in and two battery blowers. There’s no battery mower with the volume of air that a top commercial gas blower has. (At least none that I found and I’ve looked multiple times.)
If you’re trying to move some dry oak leaves, electrics work fine. Wet leaves and acorns in new grass are a different story IME.
I’ll know electrics are better when the crews are using them.
That aside, "polluting hydrocarbon emissions" is doing a lot of work there. It creates perhaps a thousandth as much CO2, which is the most worrying exhaust pollutant these days.
I'd argue the opposite. Gas-powered leaf blowers are insanely pollutant. Running a gas leaf blower for an hour is equivalent to driving a car for 100 miles [1]
Nope. What the study actually says [0] is that it's equivalent in production of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. PAH is a category of emission at which two-stroke oil-burning engines are disproportionately bad, and modern cars are reasonably good. If we measured on another axis (say, rubber particles), we could write a headline that cars are 1000 times worse polluters than leaf blowers.
Like, leaf blowers aren't great for the environment, and maybe mandating catalytic converters for them would improve air quality, but these specific claims are all made in bad intellectual faith.
I'm not sure how you can call a criticism of two-stroke engine PAH emissions in "intellectual bad faith". Is the title hyperbolic? Yes. But in bad faith? Against what? Few other uses of two-strokes are as popular by Americans by far.
I can’t find a citation there for an hour of gas leaf blowing being 100 miles of car driving.
What I can find there is an hour of lawn mowing being comparable to 100 miles of car travel. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/05/010529234907.h... an hour of leaf blowing is probably worse, but that study is silent on the topic. (It’s also likely that far more hours of lawn mowing than leaf blowing is done in aggregate.)
I don't mind plugging mine in (it's corded). I even use it to clean the gutters every fall. Even better than batteries unless you really need that mobility.
Some people just really like lawns for their own sake. My grandfather had a huge green lawn in rural Ohio. He didn't really use it for much, but it looked nice and mowing it with his riding lawnmower was one of his favorite activities in retirement.
Perhaps there should be more emphasis on sustainable lawns? That is: don't force it. Don't water it, don't use toxic pesticides, don't fertilize, and for smaller lots don't use gas powered lawn equipment. If the lawn doesn't grow in those conditions then it wasn't meant to be.
I've never seen the fringe lawn fanaticism from the article in person, my experience growing up was much closer to Levitt's feelings or the middle class nostalgia: the lawn is something children mow on the weekend. I live in a richer neighborhood now, which means more lawn services, and I really do despise them for the noise. But online culture would have me believe there's a sizeable portion of the nation fixated on lawncare as a hobby. What I see is the opposite, people want a clean looking yard and find it easy to pay for it to be watered, mowed, fertilized, weeded, sprayed, edged, blown, aerated, and whatever else gets bundles together for an affordable price.
Do we only think that Americans are obsessed with lawns because of how large the lawncare industry is? Or maybe the culture really is different in places where effort is required for anything close to green 12 months a year?
I'm building a community of people to replace lawns with food growing systems, using high moral ethics regarding inputs, process, and outputs and using permaculture principles collected scientifically though analysis and observation.
The industrial lawn is a monoculture which doesn't exist in nature, as such it is inherently less efficient because it doesn't stack functions or yields.
I'm talking small scale food systems you may set into motion on a plot of land 1/3 or less!
The best thing you can do right now is to raise your mower blade deck up as high as possible and only mow one or twice per quarter.
My channel nickname is "unturf", and ill give you hundreds of ways and reasons to build a natural food producing systems at your house!
I look to a future of one guided by permaculture, using technology as a means to increase yield of natural systems. Let's build a solar punk future together, one where we build systems which not only sustain but regenerate!
You should reach out to this permaculture community! When I was working with them there was talk about opensourcing some of the work they did to help other similar communities.
Lots of valid points in that article regarding the cumulative envronmental impact, but I'm baffled by some things....
I've never seen the fringe lawn fanaticism from the article in
person, my experience growing up was much closer to Levitt's
feelings or the middle class nostalgia: the lawn is something
children mow on the weekend [...] But online culture would have
me believe there's a sizeable portion of the nation fixated
on lawncare as a hobby.
Yeah, absolutely. I don't understand it. Movies and TV portray it that way as well -- they have you believe that all subarbanites are positively obsessed with their lawns.
I've lived in middle class American suburbs nearly all my life, child and adult.
Nobody obsesses over their lawns. Just never seen it.
I mean, sure, if you have a lawn... you spend a certain amount of time and/or money on your lawn and while you're at it, you like to do it right. Just like literally anything else. Laundry, vacuuming, whatever. Everybody likes their home and their person to look nice if they're lucky enough to be that far up the ladder on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The lawn thing may be somewhat unique to America but wanting one's home to look nice most definitely is not.
To put it in somewhat objective terms I live on a 1/4 acre lot and I spend less than 30 minutes a week mowing and edging, for approximately 7 months per year.
Lawn fertilizer is about, I don't know, $30 a year. If you buy a decent lawn mower and edger that $200-$300 and they should last 10-15 years. So I guess you can amortize that out to an additional ~$20 per year. Oh, and $10 worth of gasoline for the mower. (I was gifted an ICE mower; would have chosen electric myself)
Everyone in the country consumes the same media, but that media is not produced by everyone. Most mass media is developed by urbanites in large urban centers (LA and NYC). They have a very sheltered lifestyle that leads to anything outside of it looking alien and absurd.
Folks in rural and suburban areas having lawns and needing to spend an hour a week on lawncare is already infinitely more time than folk in urban centers spend on such tasks. To the urbanite, what the rest of the country considers "lawn obsessed" is only a difference of degree, not kind. For the media producer--who, again, is almost universally an urbanite--to communicate this feeling to the rest of the country, they have to exaggerate the effort spent.
This is all true, and is definitely a primary factor.
It's also true that LA and NY draw people from all over the country. Have you ever been to LA or Manhattan? Nobody that lives there is from there. Those places are alternate-reality bubbles, for sure, but lots (most?) of those people were born somewhere else and likely grew up in a more representative part of the country.
So, I think there's also an element of "artist" types rebelling against what they felt were stifling suburban upbringings?
Totally unproveable of course. Just a feeling I've always gotten.
Also, give up on that gifted ICE mower and go but an electric mower. It's so nice to not smell like gasoline, or have my ears ringing, or have my carpal tunnel exacerbated from vibrations. I was skeptical at first, but I made sure to get a weed wacker that takes the same batteries and it's so nice.
After I got mine, half the neighborhood eventually replaced their mowers with electrics and the drop in neighborhood nose has also been great.
They offer a clear line of sight, look "clean", and keep rodents and other pests at bay.
Personally, only about a quarter of my property is grass, and I am amazed at the acres of grass I see in the country, but I don't think I would want less than half an acre's worth around the house otherwise (barring some decorative plants).
One of my favorite things about St. Petersburg is that there are no lawns - specifically the parks. They are weeds and wildflowers and let to grow (I have a friend who picks some she knows for teas and gives them to me) and then, before it gets too bad mowed down a bit. In North America when I walk my tiny dog I'm always afraid to let her go on the perfect lawns for fear of what is on there. Here we both walk freely.
My instinctual reaction to the title was that it represents the total submission of nature.
so this seemingly innocuous and joy bringing landscape motif becomes a symbol of modernity's incessant terraforming.
A plain bland green field. Never bothered anyone. Considered this way it becomes somehow obscene. an abstract, banal terror. Sort of like a race of orcs using human skin mats to adorn their living rooms.
My lawn is the second lowest maintenance feature in my yard and one of the most used. The trees are the the lowest maintenance feature. The vegetable garden is the most used.
I never water my lawn and it always comes back to life when the dry season ends.
My other plants have to be watered or they'll die.
Maintaining a bunch of vegetables in your front yard isn’t miraculously easier than a lawn, it may even require more work, keeping more pests away and watering. Just do what you like
There are no-mow grasses that are not mentioned in this article. I'm interested in switching the lawn over to one of them, but reviews are mixed. Another boring season of mowing awaits.
Americans fetishize wealth and often discriminate based on signals of wealth from others, so it makes perfect sense that we fetishize a social signal of wealth that cannot be faked effectively. That's why we still have lawns, even when a third (or whatever) of our drinking water gets poured into them each year, because it's more important to signal wealth here than it is to conserve water. Unfortunately, we also have lawns because they are a sign of "cleanliness", as our racists often label their desire to exclude non-whites, and they too prioritize exclusion over conservation.
In the 1950s, when perfect lawn 'suddenly' became popular (as per the article), both wealthy Americans and racist Americans (there's a lot of overlap) moving to and driving the creation of suburbs were trying to find ways to exclude both poor people and non-white people. This was implemented more and less blatantly to varying degrees, and lawns are one outcome of that exclusionary desire. Wealthy whites realized that lawns were a perfect signal of wealth, and racist whites realized that lawns were a reliable and deniable signal of "cleanliness", which is code for "whiteness". They both enforced those signals with codes and laws (and later HOAs) that require a tidily-kept lawn, in order to exclude anyone unable to afford the time and money to maintain one, and both groups benefited from each other's efforts.
Those laws continue to be enforced today in many neighborhoods, against people without the resources to maintain a lawn, and against people who voluntarily choose not to. That's why police are called on someone who grows a garden in their front yard: if anyone can just not grow a lawn, then the exclusionary groups think the neighborhood will decline into poverty and crime, because it will no longer be restricted to wealthy and/or white residents only.
> Americans fetishize wealth and often discriminate based on signals of wealth from others, so it makes perfect sense that we fetishize a social signal of wealth that cannot be faked effectively.
This is not particular to America, and is known as conspicuous consumption, which is also what the article covers.
> both wealthy Americans and racist Americans (there's a lot of overlap) moving to and driving the creation of suburbs were trying to find ways to exclude both poor people and non-white people.
Were wealthy Americans more or less racist than less wealthy Americans in this time?
Since you mentioned lawns were a status symbol as part of a hierarchy, why is it not sufficient that they were maintaining lawns out of a desire for status i.e. "keeping up with the Joneses"?
Indeed, this is what the article said was an anxiety of the time.
> A 1959 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the psychosomatic effects of suburban development and “conspicuous consumption” explicitly mentioned the lawn as a source of psychological tension. “Many of our patients are overconcerned about keeping up appearances: ... there cannot be a blade of crabgrass in the lawn.”
There was evidently a hierarchy, but I don't think you can so easily call its primary motivation as racism, or classism.
Do you have any citations pointing to where "police are called on someone who grows a garden in their front yard"? Unkempt lawns are definitely a matter of civil penalties in some jurisdiction, but I've never heard of (and frankly would be shocked if there was) a municipality that actually criminalized having an unkempt lawn.
As a kindness, I checked the first page of search results for the unquoted search phrase "arrested for unkempt lawn" for you, which provides several results about several people in several states on the first page; I stopped after the four below, and noted in passing how most of them seem to be regions where classism and/or racism remain prevalent today.
None of these seem to reflect what I was asking about.
#1: Woman was arrested for contempt of court
#2: Man was arrested for violating terms of probation
#3: This seems to fit the narrative, but, I quote: "The judge admitted that [unkempt-lawn-haver] is not a criminal and it was not a criminal case." It appears that a judge gave her the option of community service or 6 hours in jail to waive a (civil) fine?
#4: Appears to be about police arresting someone who shot lawnmowers with a gun
I would normally engage with someone and take apart each of the examples and demonstrate how they all do in fact stem directly from lawn maintenance laws. However, I can't come up with any way to give you the benefit the doubt for your series of replies here. You seem to have refused to perform your own research and draw conclusions from the results you find on your own, and I'm not interested in trying to argue with someone who simultaneously demands research from others (on an internet web forum, no less) while not performing even the most basic work themselves. With apologies, you'll have to move forward without further input from me.
The question isn't whether the events in each of these examples you highlighted 'stem directly from lawn maintenance laws' - they all unquestionably do. But none of them seem to be cases where the act of keeping an unkempt lawn itself was a criminal act, which seemed to be what your original claim was.
It very quickly goes into criminality. A lot of non-criminal punishments are things like fines, or withdrawing your drivers license, and after that you run into things that do actually make you a criminal, like repeatedly driving without a license or repeatedly failing to pay a court ordered bill.
That reminds me of some AI ethicist who have as a "policy" to never give a platform to their opponents. ie, never respond to their arguments and just keep mobbing.
I notice that you've now tried twice to attack my character in this thread rather than participate in the discussion of the topic; once by claiming an outrageous belief that I don't believe, and once by claiming that I'm refusing to discuss the topic with anyone who disagrees with me. See also the reply to your other attempt where your question evidences either a failure to read my original comment, as instead of contradicting the argument presented (which answers the question you asked) or an attempt to water down my original post by asking my to repeat myself for no relevant purpose to the discussion except to take up my time and grant implied validity to your framing.
As my history represents, I do quite often spend an unusually high amount of time in discussions on the site, sometimes farther into the weeds than the site generally has good UI for, when people are engaging with a conscious desire to converse, even when we disagree. I rarely choose to end participation in a thread before the other persons tires of replying, but I make a special exception for threads about gender and race, because in those areas there are known conversational tactics that involve draining time and credibility through sealioning.
As your history represents, you have on multiple occasions attempted to change the course of conversations about race and racism from race and racism to anything but race and racism, which does not suggest that it's productive to engage with you at length on the topic of racism that I'm discussing here today. Whether or not we'd end up agreeing, it's not useful to others for me to enable that for you, and it's not the conversation I'm here to have today. You are of course welcome to start your own thread with your beliefs, but I'm not required to help you do so. I understand this will feed into whatever conspiracy theory you're trying to promote, but I have dessert waiting in the kitchen and that's more important to me right now than your opinion of me.
I encourage you to email any complaints you have about my behavior here to the mods directly to the address in the footer contact link, but I must also advise that you'll find that HN guidelines are not compatible with implied accusations of bad faith behavior in the manner you're doing here. As the guidelines indicate, if you feel that I am participating in bad faith on HN, email the mods.
#1-3 are still on point, in areas of the country these petty charges are used as ways to get you "into the system" so they can take more money out of you.
Also there is worse happening, like where a city in I think MO was using yard upkeep fines and their nonpayment to put people in jail and then condemn their house so that it could be seized for property development.
The quote from the judge in 3 makes it clear that the woman in question was never charged with a criminal offense, and in fact chose to sit in a jail for 6 hours in lieu of paying a civil fine.
As for the other two cases - the issues started with the lawn upkeep, yes, but the criminal aspect slips in for unrelated reasons. In #1, it's not clear exactly why contempt charges came into play, and it's quite unusual (and in many jurisdictions, not legal) to charge someone with criminal contempt for simple refusal to pay a civil fine...which leads me to believe there's something key being omitted here. In #2, it seems like the guy would have been fine keeping an unkempt lawn had he not explicitly violated a previous probation agreement; this isn't a situation that applies to the average person.
When an individual steadfastly refuses to do something the government demands, one of two things happens:
1. A rich, or legally crafty individual can get a court to invalidate the demand, or tie up the issue in legal process for years or indefinitely.
2. The government will escalate until the individual is in jail.
Jail isn't the first step in the enforcement process, but it's on the list, and fair to say that people were jailed because they didn't maintain their lawns to government standards following other enforcement efforts.
I encourage revisiting #4 and considering the question "Why was that lawn being mowed?". Unexpectedly, it's Florida rather than Texas, where such a shooting would have been considered lawful and just (in Texas).
I agree that #4 counts. If they finish you get a bill. I would probably shoot at them too, but if you avoid killing anyone it's not likely to turn out good for you. Typically you get more sympathy if you end up killing someone.
Before someone notes this is extremely bloodthirsty, it's not just about a lawn being cut, it's about the state arbitrarily demanding your money.
Well-trimmed lawns give me the creeps, as if I was suddenly dropped in a terrifyingly dystopian Εdward Scissorhands town. What is the point of growing ugly, nondescript grasses next to your home? Freely growing vegetation with flowers and fruits is better in all cases.
Forbidding your plants to flourish is akin to cutting the tails and ears of your dogs.
Some people have lawns for other reasons. I like to play soccer with my kids several times per week, and have barbecue parties with bounce houses for the whole family several times per year. To me it looks nice for when it's unused and it's very practical for those activities.
I definitely like lawns - they're great for running about on, playing games, having a picnic. But other vegetation is nice too. The beauty of a slightly wild garden is the abundance of nature - insects, birds, the scent of flowers. Lawns are a monoculture with none of that.