Clip dragonfly models to wire rods. Scares the ever living crap out of anything that flies. https://www.getyourbug.com/
That's fair, but you don't gotta invite them in. And I will remind you that "outside" is kind of their domain, not ours 😉
All that said though, a rock or sand yard is still vastly better than a manicured lawn which serves basically no purpose other than to take in resources (mostly water) with no real output. Hell, even if you paved over your lawn with one big slab of concrete that would still probably be ecologically better than the waste involved in maintaining a manicured grass lawn!
Slabbing is much worse, holds heat and cold and prevent groundwater absorption. Crushed lava rock over sand and gravel would be a good idea though, nice and solid to walk on but drains out no problem.
Listen to this person, not to me, as it sounds like they actually know what they're talking about 👍
I gotta disagree there. My yard even when mowed is a haven for all sortsa critters. Lizards, squirrels, and birds prance around by day, and at night you can find hundreds of varying spiders and wasps hunting smaller insects. Rocks might afford some of that but just about nothing would be happy with plain sand backyard. Then again, I live in an area with lots of rain and no shortage on water.
I try to mow pretty high and I let it grow for a few weeks between, but unfortunately I cant just leave it be due to my hoa.
I have spaces in my yard that look like that, but it takes soooo many hours of meticulous hand weeding to encourage and protect the wildflowers and discourage the goat head burr, fox tails, storks bill and burr clover. And forget hiring anyone to help, professionals call them all weeds will only eradicate the whole lot (which would start it back to the beginning since those nasty ones are the first to take over when the earth is bared). Every year there are few more flowers and friendly "weeds" and few less horrible thorny noxious weeds, but it's been a process over about 8 years and it's not finished and probably never will be.
The easiest to maintain part of my yard is my "no mow" native fescue lawn, that would never be allowed in an HOA and you can't really walk on it, but it houses a billion bugs and the birds and spiders and cats love it.
Yes! The anti mow people don't understand that your yard doesn't turn into a wildflower meadow if you stop mowing.
I spent hundreds of dollars on wildflower seeds and tiller rentals to get a wildflower meadow started.
5 years later and it's just weeds. And not nice weeds- It's 1/2" long thornbush weeds- perfect for spreading tics onto the local deer population.
As an anti-mow person, I don't care, if it's a wildflower meadow. I don't call random plants "weeds", they're all cool with me. Like, alright, if you've got a super-invasive foreign species that's actively killing the local ecosystem, then I'm on board with doing something against that. But it can hardly be worse than mowing the local ecosystem.
That’s the thing, the super invasive weeds are what establish the best. I’ve got a broader definition of “wildflower” than anyone I know, but if you’re encouraging foxtails and goat head burrs in your yard, you’re a dick.
I live in an area where a lot of people raise sheep and you can check out x rays of storks bill seeds that burrow down through the fleece, skin And fat, into the poor bastards muscles. Being all “Look at me! I don’t judge plants, they’re all welcome!” is going to cause a lot of pain and suffering and punctured tires and shoe soles.
You're right. I used to be "no mow" when I lived in the city and the burbs, but now that I have a rural acreage, I've realized that you have to use every trick in the book to even have a chance against invasives.
Tomorrow I'm renting a brush mower to take out an acre of 8 foot tall Himalayan blackberry that's completely choked out a meadow. It's flowered, but hasn't set fruit, so I need to get it now. I'll have to follow that up with herbicide application in late summer because it has vigorous root energy storage. That'll be year one of at least three years of restoration. This is on top of wineberry, tree of heaven, stilt grass, japanese honeysuckle, and autumn olive. It physically blocks animals, consumes all the sunlight, and none of this shit supports native lepidoptera so it totally fucks up the food chain.
I wish I could just let it be and it would be fine, but that ship sailed a hundred years ago. The upside is in areas where there's been active remediation the forest looks fucking fantastic.
I still let it grow despite the weeds. But weeds is an understatement. As I said, it's thornbushes and they grow into impassible thicket. I have enough acres that I'm fine with it. But it's not something the average homeowner could allow to happen. It isn't child safe.
The weeding is insanity. It felt like that's all we did last summer. I'm now paying some teenagers $40/hr to hand weed it because all the professionals just want to spray everything, and the kids are willing to be really meticulous because they don't want to jeopardize a really well-paying job.
One of my biggest disappointments with my neighborhood is that the otherwise effectively non-existant HOA came down on someone with a beautiful "cottage garden" style space in their front yard. It was traditionally wild local flowers and it wasn't unkempt by any stretch.
I think they just disliked that so much of the person's front yard wasn't grass. Or there was some petty personal beef going on.
It's even more ridiculous when we have a "community beekeeper" with hives in the back of some of the community open spaces. We have people with vegetable gardens in their back yards (hell fucking yes) when it's explicitly against the HOA rules (I ain't no snitch). But god forbid someone have well kept local wildflowers and mulch as half of their front yard.
With my yard layout I had hoped to do the same with my front and side yard.
I think I got quite lucky with mine. I've barely touched it in 15 years, and it's mostly free of anything with spikes on.
Could do with a bit more variety in it, as most of it is this big green stalky thing that grows quite tall.
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That's how I feel every time I have to mow the lawn even though I'm renting from them.
Free labor for them.
Is it in your lease that you need to mow the lawn? Here, it's the landlord's responsibility unless you specifically agree to it.
My lease has two things. Mow the lawn AND abide by any HOA shit, so I had to mow the lawn to their standards and do the random bullshit they came up with. My garbage cans were in front of my house for 9 months and then all of a sudden it was a problem. Fuck HOA's and land bastards
That second one is the real killer.
Well defined and constrained responsibility: No problem.
Open-ended obligation to people you don't know: Bottomless pit of potential despair.
Well, if you decide to move out you can be a prick your last few months there and a violate every HOA rule imaginable. Might try to take away your deposit but could be worth it.
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In my case yeah. Sucks but me mowing the lawn is still cheaper than hiring a company to do it.
So I pretend to be Hank Hill once a week.
"Who needs drugs when you could mow a lawn?"
Hank Hill has such a small mind... He could do both, and still refer to both as "grass" if he wanted!
check with local state and native plant groups – there’s several cases where native plant species are protected even from HOAs
Peppermint Candy Flower (Claytonia sibirica)
(Intentionally, in places where they're beneficial)
Ooh I wonder if there are regional versions of this. Would love to do some guerilla seeding down here
Every year, we dump wildflowers in three spots on our property, and every spring, I spread clover seeds the entirety of my lawn.
Each year, the clover takes over more and more, and with that, you get a short lawn that is drought resistant and bee friendly.
If you’re in the US, I have gotten good results/ seeds from ptlawnseed.com. They have a bunch of different options and tell you what works well in your climate zone!
I just looked up what type of clover grows well in my climate, then every spring, I order a 5 lb bag and just walk around throwing that everywhere. Add some water and let it go nuts. Once clover is established, it starts to spread on its own, but I like to give it more friends to speed up the process. Plus, bunnies love it, and with bunnies comes bunny poop. It's one of the best fertilizers you'll find. It's a work in progress, but once it's completed, I'll have to mow like 2 times a season, I won't have to worry about weeds, and it doesn't need fertilizer. Clover is an incredible plant and I can't wait until it's completed.
i think it would be funny to start and HOA, and give it one rule.
The rule would that a total majority would need to agree in order for something to be passed. That way nothing gets passed ever.
We're on step 3 for the back and 4 for the front (kind of, it's not really wild but it's all native xeric plants) and I gotta say, highly recommend it. We have so many pollinators. I have to gently shoo them out of the catmint before I prune it because there are so many in there.
Legit, we've got about an acre in the back yard, and I was working toward this for most of it. Can't do the work required now, so it's gotten less native than it used to be, but at one point, it was all plants native to my region, and they are still dominant. The rest of the yard is better set up for my crippled ass to handle, so I can pull out invasive species as needed. There's a section maybe twenty feet in a rough circle plus a corner where it's "grass", but it's mostly random clover with dandelions I can't be bothered to remove every year. The chickens have been keeping anything else from setting in compared to yard B.C. (before chickens).
It'll eventually get taken over by random plants, I'm sure. It'll be as I age out and cripple out of the work involved, since getting my kid to do a damn thing ain't happening lol. But for now, me and the chickens have a nice area to walk around and putter.
I had a fairly large yard backing up on forest on three sides in the back, two in the front. I decided at some point that mowing was just stupid and gave up on it. I was thrilled with what happened in the back - it was just like this. Flowers started growing, including some I'd never seen before there or since. Birds came and started nesting in the middle of the long grass. The front, I gave in and mowed it a few times.
I lived across the street from this retired military guy who literally mowed his lawn every single day, riding mower on like half an acre. You couldn't even tell the difference between where he had mowed and where he hadn't gotten to yet. This guy had a bumper sticker "Never seen a FLAG burned at a GUN SHOW!!", whatever that meant. They invited me over to their backyard a time or two where they drank Busch Lite and grilled hot dogs over old furniture (seriously). Nice, but well, hmm. Anyway, he drove his mower over and mowed my front yard a time or two when I was out of town.
A lawnmower
Edit - I'll stop trying to be funny. It's a manual cylinder lawnmower https://www.argos.co.uk/product/5818675?clickSR=slp:term:cylinder%20lawnmower:2:56:1
When you realize that most of what you're looking at around you is invasive species: 눈_눈
The vast majority of invasives take a foothold in already disturbed land. Natural ecosystems tend to be more resistant.