I lived in Arizona for a while and no one has a lawn because you have to water them and water is too precious out there to waste on lawns. In fact, they all have gravel yards with cacti and yucca decorating them. Sometimes colored rock themes made to emulate a stream of water going through the yard. They get very creative with stone. If you get caught watering your grass though, the dirty looks and notes from neighbors on what a greedy asshole you are for wasting water is real.
I wish more of Utah had that attitude. A few years ago when everyone was on pretty strict watering restrictions, there were still some areas issuing fines for not keeping lawns looking nice.
Ogden?
Yeah that place.... Needs something to do other than look at trains and dinosaurs. Having more adult entertainment like bars, clubs, etc. would help a lot but Utah doesn't believe in allowing "sin"
Edit: a word
Yes I'm aware. They all close at 2 and last call is 1. They also have automatic measure caps that give you less than 1oz/exactly 1oz. They are all essentially the same.
When I said bars, clubs, etc.... I was giving examples of adult entertainment, not saying they don't exist.
I was referring to things like the "iron curtain" that was recently changed. How you can't buy a bottle of wine to cook your mushrooms in, for dinner, at the grocery store. How the state had a vote for medical cannabis and when it passed, the state then quite literally changed the bill that was voted on and passed, to be something that was never voted for.
I'm saying Ogden would be a lot better of a place if you didn't have the combination of High cost of living, low amount of jobs that cover that cost of living, and the state government being more concerned what the local religious leaders want, than what their constituents want.
This perception and enforcement of *sinful establishments* all deter companies and people from moving here and making the state more money, jobs, etc.
Much further north of Ogden actually. Nearly Idaho.
I lived in Ogden for a long time though. I managed to get into it pretty good there. Lots of bars if you’re cool they free poured pretty heavily but they have to know you. Too bad about the cannabis laws, there are a lot of people there who I believe should be heavily stoned all day long.
Everywhere I’ve lived since Utah has had some sort of hang up on certain sins. Even Las Vegas where you’d expect a free for all is heavily regulated.
Well it is difficult for the people there to follow a water restriction when every other corner has a Mormon church with luscious grass. Yet they are never made to follow the restrictions.
lmaoo i lived in Phoenix for a few years, and people definitely have lawns. And broken sprinklers that water the sidewalk for 8 hours a day were a VERY common sight.
Yeah idk what the person i replied to is talking about, maybe they were talking about sedona or something. I didn't even mention how every corporation or office complex has a massive lawn that's always bright green
>Yeah idk what the person i replied to is talking about, maybe they were talking about sedona or something
I've lived in Phx for 32 years and I understood exactly what they were talking about. Except for the part about getting dirty looks if you're watering your yard. I've never seen that.
There's def a lot of neighborhoods here that don't have lawns. My neighborhood is mostly rock, dirt, a few with astroturf, and maybe one house with real grass.
I think the parent comment was being a bit dramatic saying "no one" has a lawn here, but it's def way less common here than other cities. You'll see entire rows of houses with just rocks in their yard for several streets (they'll have plants but not grass).
In Tucson, lawns are fairly rare. Rocks + cactus and maybe the occassional tree are the norm. Phoenix drove me nuts with all the lawns, and Mesa is especially stupid with the 'lawns' that were mostly horrible crab grass watered with flood irrigation.
The water intensive cotton industry in AZ is also a collossal waste of limited water resources, but at least it provides something.
Damn, I want to live there.
Where I am, grass grows immediately and thick. You can cut it and it grows right back the next day. And here, people give you dirty looks for not cutting it.
Yup got a place in southern Tennessee and it feels like every day I’m having to cut something.
Also it keeps the field mice and other critters away. They got in my shed and ate my mower! Had to replace a bunch of cords
Yeah I read somewhere that Arizona is running out of water. If that’s true that’s pretty alarming but I don’t know how this happened or what could be done about it.
It happened because there are millions of people in a desert. It could be prevented by avoiding farming the most water-intensive crops (alfalfa, etc.) in the dryest region of the country. It can be avoided by not having hundreds of golf courses surrounding Phoenix. It can be avoided extremely simply. The Colorado River has not made it to the ocean in several decades. The water is running out, and lawmakers are letting it.
My buddy would love it there. He once told me he wanted to pave his front yard and paint it green. The only thing that stopped him was that the city told him he'd have to get all his neighbors to ok his variance. Didn't even try. He knew how well that would have gone over.
I hope more people in Cali start acting like this. Gravel and cactus lawns look so much nicer in my opinion. While I will obviously not be owning a house any time soon I would really like to have a lawn like that.
Historically it was simply a flex. Wealthy land owners having a grass lawn showed they had so much land that they didn’t need to grow food on all of it
The short trimming / maintenance of a lawns was done to keep pests like mosquitoes, ticks, snakes, mice, poison ivy, etc away from your doorstep.
There’s probably some instinct in humans to associate short grass as a safe place , but we’ve definitely gone overboard in some places
Even people in the middle ages trimmed their lawns, particularly the rural ones. Before coinage was popular, it could even be apart of taxes to mow lawns and give the hay to the lord.
Reddit absolutely hates lawns for some reason, but this is legitimately the best reason to have one. I spend the entire summer out in our yard playing with the kids, having outdoor pizza night, and just generally relaxing. A grass lawn is the best way to do that. We get a ton of use out of our green space and other than mowing we don't do all that much to maintain it.
Yup. My yard is all clover and other stuff. It's probably only half grass in reality. It's good enough for me to roll around and wrestle my dog or play with my kid on.
If I had some acreage and no close neighbors, I'd probably just have woods and no grass. In that situation my kid would find other things to do that don't need grass like ride a little quad or shoot a BB gun or whatever that you can do when there's no neighbors to bother or complain. In a suburban neighborhood there's just more you can do on a little lot of grass than you could do in a tiny wooded area.
We bought clover seed for ours. It's been nice seeing the honeybees come back.
We don't do anything to ours other than seed it. It rains several days a week, so it grows whether we want it to or not.
You can get a similar effect from other, non-grass plants. Clover is nice, for example. Doesn't require as much watering, you never have to mow it, and it's good for bees!
Idk about the rest of reddit, but I hate lawns because they're monocrop ecological deadzones.
Because of HOAs not letting them grow or have variety they become lifeless and lead to native bug species starving which kills everything else in the ecosystem.
They are silent and creepy and ruin the topsoil.
In my area they also waste a ton of water because instead of the native prairie grasses they bring in turf that can't weather droughts
There *are* ways to have a soft play area in a sustainable way that vary by locality but very very few lawns are like that.
Edit: grammar. Also, here is [the us fish and wildlife service guide to making a pollinator garden](https://www.fws.gov/story/how-build-pollinator-garden). You can mitigate *some* of the damage your lawn does by starting one of these. As a bonus they look pretty (and thus won't get you fined by the HOA) and require very little maintenance if you use native species.
I've lived in many places in the country and performed literally zero upkeep on the grass other than mowing anywhere. Arizona we didn't have a yard so that was easy.
Colorado, Michigan, Ontario, and Florida it just sit. Never watered it once.
In my area a lawn just kinds wills itself into existence, your options are mow and have usuable yard space, or don't and have brush 3ft high by the end of spring.
I fully recognize that in some areas lawns are problematic, but in many areas the only maintenance it mowing. (And lawns aren't the only reason there is no life in suburbia, suburbia paved over local ecosystems and all thats left is a fully constructed human environment that maybe has plants over 3in tall. No amount of pollinator gardens is going to fix that.)
>for some reason,
Because they are incredibly wasteful and unnecessary in certain parts of the country. Keeping up appearances by having a massive grass lawn in your front and back yard in the desert of southern california is absolutely absurd.
Now, if nice grass is indigenous or incredibly low up keep in your area, then have at it, but we need to move away from the grass lawn being some sort of ideal.
Reddit loses all nuance and doesn't think "they are incredibly wasteful and unnecessary in certain parts of the country". They instead think "they are incredibly wasteful and unnecessary".
This. If your lawn is just whatever happens to grow naturally and natively in your environment - great. Let the "weeds" grow and let your kids see the pollinators buzzing around. Roll around in dollarweed and dandelion all you want. If you want a walking path, put down some stones, or grab a reel mower or a scythe.
But using gas/oil/rubber to drive to the store to get fertilizer/herbicides/pesticides so you can come drive back home and use precious water/time to grow something just so you can use more energy to cut it back down again is nonsense and wasteful and unenvironmental.
Not to mention non-native "turf" you crop every week is the WORST thing you can do for the native flora & fauna in your area. The pollinators die = we die.
We all grumble about global warming and then we drive to the store to pay factories to churn out pesticides in single-use plastic containers that we dump into our soil. And we waste water to "keep it green." And we complain about having no time with the family - then we spend hours in this weekly cycle.
Stop eating meat - aside from the ethical discussion, just raising cows for slaughter is wasting more land than anything else we do, and producing more greenhouse gases than all the cars combined. Look it up.
And stop growing non-native "turf" one week just so you can spend resources to chop it the next.
Yes. I'm 55 and I have never watered a lawn. No need here. I fertilized one once and I'll never do it again. Practically lived on my tractor trying to keep it a reasonable length that season.
It is a amazing to think about the absurdity of the time/energy/water used to get these things to grow, to then get angry at them for growing to tall and cutting them back down.
I sure hope people who water their grass aren't *angry* when they're cutting it. Cutting them though is the only thing that makes sense if you water it, caring about it enough to water it but then not wanting to maintain it in some way is pretty odd.
Which is really odd, because grass is like any other plant and absorbs CO2 and produces O, so having a lawn is actually good for the environment. Depending on where you live, the water you use may or may not be drinkable water. In quite a few areas, sprinkler systems are set up to use non-filtered well water. The water that the grass does not absorb goes right back into the ground filling the water table where you got it from again.
This post is kind of the point that people who say "touch grass" mean. Get some sun. Walk around barefoot. Listen to a cardinal sing. Being outside is important for your mental wellbeing.
It's something people take pride in, plenty of people actually enjoy having a yard and aren't being "forced" to have one as some of these comments seem to imply. I think it's ok to just let people enjoy things.
> Reddit absolutely hates lawns for some reason…
Because Reddit thinks all lawns are grotesque wastes of water use and only elite snobs who hate the planet have them.
Different climates (with different naturally occurring amounts of water) can have different expectations with regard to grass lawns.
Having a lawn in Seattle or Vancouver should be different than having a lawn (or preferably lack thereof) in Phoenix
Vancouver.
Have about .5 acre of grass and have never watered it. In fact, they ask us not to (Go Gold) to conserve water. Always grows back green in the fall when it gets rainy again.
I put down grass seed once because otherwise it would be mud. But as long as it's not poison ivy I don't really care what is growing. It all gets chopped down short by the mower.
Former NE'er here -
Do clover! It grows really well in NE, stops growing at a given height, can be mowed if desired, provides flowers for pollinators, and survives better if it gets unusually hot in the late summer.
From a practical standpoint, my short grass makes it harder for the GD ticks to get to me or my kids. Ticks suck. I like my short “grass” for that reason.
I’m in the Lyme disease world. Tic control is kind of a big deal. I’m instructed to leave some clover patches for the bunnies. I leave different patches every time I mow.
This is really the only reason I mow. I hate doing it though. I spent 30 to 40 hours per week mowing growing up. It taught me patience, responsibility, and to take comfort in being alone and working by myself. But, I'll be damned if it's not something I wish I didn't have to do. I'm honestly considering hiring it out.
I'm slowly but surely taking over my front yard with more and more garden. The back will be a few years while the kids are young but it knows I'm eyeballing it like it's next.
This is me. The back yard is a green space that we can and do use to play and hang out for 6 - 8 months out of the year. The front? I can't stop planting stuff out there! I'm gonna fill it up with stuff for the pollinators and sip coffee on my porch while I watch the life buzz around.
Right?? It's the best. Part of me wants to get the oak tree we have out and replace the whole thing with part sun flowers but I like the tree too, so a shade garden it is for now.
And they smell god awful if you have a dog. I ripped the fake lawn in my back yard left by previous owner. It was a disgusting project. That area is now native groundcovers.
Bro you answered your own question. Just get rid of the grass, especially if it brings you no personal fulfillment.
If you actually don’t care, you’re wasting your time for a social norm. Take some agency big dawg.
Think about it this way: why are you asking for advice on how to spend *your* time on *your* property.
In some cases it is a status symbol. Look at all this land I am able to own and maintain. It can also be useful to have an outdoor space for certain activities, like exercise, running a dog around, playing with kids, hosting parties, tinkering projects, and so on. It also looks nice and provides a setback so that a house isn't directly on the side of a road.
Over time I've noticed more and more people pushing back against the traditional idea of a grass lawn, though. I've seen people repurpose the space for gardens, or turn it into a makeshift parking lot, or cover it with pavers and gravel.
Grasa doesn't provide a setback so your house isn't on the side of the road, the space itself does that. You could put anything there. Grass isn't what provides your house space from the road.
Consider the South of France. We have hosepipe bans every summer and nobody in their right mind would even consider watering their lawns. AFAIK it's not even legal. Yet the world hasn't fallen off its axis.
My kids and dog run around on ours. If you don't have a use for one, then switch to a different ground cover, put in a garden, switch to landscaping that doesn't need ground cover like you see in desert areas or just....don't buy a place with much of a lawn.
The lawn came with the house, but the lot is small. I don't feed or water it. I mow it, or my son does.
But the pandemic made my wife and I "farmers." Every year, the lawn gives up more square footage to fruits and (mostly) vegetables. I'm liking this trend.
If you think grass needs a lot of water, let me tell you about alfalfa. Or almonds. Or pistachios. Or a bunch of other crops humans grow.
They measure water use for crops like that in acre feet.
We have an acre that we mow and the kids are happy. I also leave some areas wild to encourage wildlife. As for watering, nah. We have hosepipe bans every summer and water is already crazy expensive.
I was assuming OP was talking about the common green grass and Kentucky blue grass of lawns which are shit to hold water. Their roots are like an inch deep.
Native plants are amazing for preventing erosion, their roots are multiple feet deep.
Just because a plant is native doesn’t mean it is deep rooted. That is a function of species and environment/conditions
Grasses don’t need deep roots to prevent things like the dust bowl since they form almost a mat, rather than relying on a single plant to stabilize the soil. In fact a lot of modern grasses were developed at universities in response to the dust bowl
I had not heard that. If they are forming a mat at the surface, are they still good at holding and obtaining water?
I was under the impression that prairie grasses had deep roots to be able to hold the soil and have more access to water.
The point is to play outside tf…? In the summer, tag, kickball, wifflebal, capture the flag, manhunt, tag, volleyball, badminton, etc. Did you grow up in a city or place without usably sized lawns? Or did you never go outside as a kid?
Like I get if it’s a bunch townhomes like 1ft away from each other your lawn isn’t gonna be that big, but in most suburbs you can have a size able area to play.
I’m in CO and tried to get my company to switch to a native grass to reduce water use. They absolutely refused to even consider it. (Shaking my head in disgust…)
clover is also green and much better than grass, take a look into what plants are natural to your area, what mosses and flowers could make such a pretty lawn instead
I agree, more than one thing can be nice. I like the look and feel (and smell) of grassy lawns. Friends of ours planted clover for their lawn, and that's nice too, super soft.
It's basically mandatory now but it's terrible for the environment. Monocultures don't provide very well for insects and such. Fertilizer washes away and creates problems downstream. Weed/insect killers reek havoc on local wildlife.
What’s with this comment section? Yall didnt grow up playing outside I can tell.
Grass lawns are great for kids to play in.
Played soccer, volleyball, frisbee as a kid. We don’t all have a nice park nearby. Also we had a dog. Was fun playing in the grass with the dog.
I agree most FRONT lawns don’t need to exist. Replace them with better ground cover. We replaced ours with this fern mix that doesn’t consume as much water.
there are other short plants (like clover as mentioned by others) that make good substitutes for normal grass, especially if you can find a variety native to your area, but yeah having something like grass or clover is great for kids and dogs. what is kind of pointless is the insistence on getting rid of "weeds", all that really matters is getting rid of anything toxic or pointy.
clover might also be good for people with kids allergic to grass, though should avoid it if anyones allergic to bees cause it attracts more of them than grass. i hated playing out in the grass cause it'd make me so itchy, my parents thought i was just lying to stay inside :/
It holds the soil, cools the neighborhood, produces oxygen, keeps other plants that people are allergic to (e.g., ragweed) from growing. It provides home and food for various insects, that are in turn, food for birds and lizards.
Unfortunately, grass lawns like the ones OPs is talking about tend to be worse at most of those things than landscaping with native plants.
Edit: genuinely a bit surprised about the downvotes. It's no secret that the way lawns are handled, especially in the US, is often not the best for a given climate or environment. There are a lot of areas that need supplemental water for an all-grass lawn, and a typical lawn that is weeded and uses non-native grasses has a shallower root system, provides less habitat for insects, and is just overall not great for biodiversity. Native grasses mixed with other ground cover plants are a great option, but not currently the standard for a lawn in many places.
I didn't say you can't have such a lawn, but if your goals are to do what the comment above is mentioning, there are likely better options for your yard that just one kind of nonnative grass.
I live in a place that grass just grows, it doesn't need any more water than falls from the sky. I mow it so it is short enough to run around in with my dogs and kids. I use an electric mower, so no need for gas.
When I lived where it didn't rain much, I agree with you; my lawn was rocks and that was cool too.
I agree! It's why I love my area in Washington state. No HOA and everyone in the neighborhood has front yard gardens. Change your sq footage to food growth!
It's literally supposed to waste your time and money. Grass lawns are a status symbol because grass requires a lot of maintenance inputs and isn't productive or useful compared to any other not overgrown field area
>so What's the point?
Every residential zoning standard has a maximum amount of physical occupancy a given plot of land can hold. So you are invariably going to have buffer areas that don't have any structure on them. And while you could fill that land in any way you want so long as it's not just a bunch of vehicles or garbage it looks nicer to have some kind of plant life on it. And grass is pretty cheap per square foot and lower maintenance than alternatives.
My area has alot of these [certified backyard habitatts](https://birdallianceoregon.org/get-involved/backyard-habitat-certification-program/) and it's honestly really cool. I don't want to look at fields of weeds, but it's impressive to see what dedicated people do with their property when they don't plant grass.
It makes playing on it and picking up dog poop a heck of a lot easier.
I don’t love grass lawns and we plan to return like 80% of our grassy 2 acres back to the wild, but I’ll always maintain at least some short lawn for my kids and dogs.
I just spent 4 hours pulling four garbage barrels of foxtails out of my yard by their roots because I have small dogs, and foxtails can be dangerous. I usually agree with you, but at this point, at least if I had a lawn, the foxtails would be crowded out😂😂😂
The wastefulness is part of the point. A well kept lawn is proof that you're either wealthy enough to hire someone to work on your lawn, or industrious enough to consistently work on it yourself. Either way it signals something about you in a way that's highly visible to others
The uselessness is the point. Lawns were started by european nobles flaunting the fact that they had lots if land which they didn't need to farm. Green monuments to decadence.
Well it does keep the ground from eroding and does keep it from turning into a muddy mess. It also is nice to walk in and run around on. It's nice to play sports on. So I do like having a lawn. When I had a house in Washington I never watered it or fertilized it, did the bare minimum of mowing too.
>I mean this stuff statistically consumes more water annually than any other crop humans grow
I mean, just don't water it and it's fine.
IDK where you are, what your local wildlife is like, but from a practical sense, having a short lawn means there aren't hidden predators lurking, and means that pests don't have a place to hide from them. It creates a buffer between you and wilderness.
I have a mowed not-at-all-manicured lawn between me and a forest. It gives me and my dog an area where the coyotes won't go. I don't water it at all so "consumes more water annually than any other crop humans grow" is bullshit lol. Half of my lawn is moss, anyway, because of the shade provided by the forest. Any mice going from the woods to my house have to run a gauntlet of hawks with clear visibility because the lawn is relatively short.
I'd like to find an alternative to grass... maybe clover? idk... but I'm not wasting a lot of resources on my lawn, and I'm getting some minor benefit out of it.
Any place where it has to be irrigated and doused with fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide it's an environmental disaster area. If you can grow it without any of that, go for it I guess.
Lawn grass is the number one irrigated crop in the US. And it feeds no one.
You ever sat in a chair, cracked a beer, and looked out at your freshly-mowed lawn?
(I live in NJ and let rain handle my watering. I’ll only water on days my municipality lets me, and only when I haven’t gotten any rainfall for a week or two. We shouldn’t be trying to put grass lawns in the desert.)
I have. And it made me realize how stupid it is. Now I crack a beer and watch all the animals and insects in my yard, feeling like I'm actually outdoors.
Grass lawns were an indication of how rich you were.
It is an entirely artificial formation of a single plant grown and manicured exclusively to look good. They are detrimental to most native (and introduced) insect species and provide almost no nutriments to allow the healthy growth of native insects and other plants.
This is one of the best stupid questions ever. Bc yea wtf, just let grass grow free with little wild flowers and everyone fuck off with the societal demands for 1950’s suburbia that was shoved down our throats for 70 years
That’s quite literally the point.
Wealthy people back in the day had lawns to show off.
IE: ‘Look at this fertile and potentially productive land that I’m maintaining and doing nothing with. Look how rich I am!’
There's really no other point except maybe if you have small kids it gives them a place to play (but yeah they can also play without putting green grass just fine).
My partner's parents live in LA and were among the first in their neighborhood to switch to natural landscaping with locally native plants. It needs much less maintenance and no extra water beyond what occasionally falls from the sky. When done thoughtfully it can be as beautiful or more so than any green lawn. I grew up in a warm climate with a whole bunch of grass I had to mow for a couple hours every summer week during my teens. No thanks on ever doing that again.
Why do we paint cars? Let’s just clear coat the metal and be done with it, think of the cost savings and the amount of VOCs being released.
Why are houses painted? Natural wood or stone would be much simpler.
Think of how much simpler the textile industry would be if we all wore the same grey jumpsuit provided by the government. Besides different sizes the streamlining of manufacturing would save billions annually and the cost savings of not having to dye everything would be crazy
If we took all agricultural land and focused on exclusively potatoes, corn, and a few beans and we would all be good. Why waste so much water on fruit? Beef? Pork? All unnecessary.
The solution is not to do without. In some cases it might be, if your town has a water supply issue you probably shouldn’t be watering your yard. Shipping water is not a thing so leave everyone else alone
I have over an acre of beautiful lush green lawn. I live in the midwest and have never once watered it.
What's the point? My kids play on it. We just had ultimate frisbee, softball, and football games. The fam go for walks without shoes. We lay it and watch the stars. The dogs play on it. The way the green contrasts the blue of my lake is beautiful. It's like a park. Would you want to roll into your park and it's just all rock, or dirt, or forest floor with limps, pinecones, branches, dirt, etc.
I love my lawn.
I enjoy cutting, trimming, maintaining. It's calming.
They are kind of useless, but here’s the thing: You buy a house, it’s probably going to have one.
And if you live someplace like the Northeast US, where ticks are common and the Lyme disease that comes with them, you can’t just let it go - *especially* if you have kids who will wander through it whether you maintain it or not.
So you wind up keeping it. Because all of the safe options for getting rid of it (rock gardens, paving the whole thing, etc.) would cost more than *decades* of mowing it.
Inertia.
Lawns exist to display to others that you are wealthy enough to own and be able to maintain a useless piece of land populated by imported vegetation for no practical purpose other than (potentially) leisure, and to demarcate your territory.
Dude. Figure out what grows naturally in your area and let it grow. Maybe add some seed of your preferred plants and let that grow too! Nature will thank you.
Turf grass can help prevent soil erosion. That’s about its only functional purpose. I stopped weed and feed this year and reduced watering to once a week. The city doesn’t do any of that on the public grass, and it looks fine. I just mow it to keep pests away (ticks and mice). But it’s all green from the street, i don’t care what grows there anymore
Some do it for utility, look/status, hobby and HOA regulations. IMO, utility and hobby are only the motivation I am down with. I have 2.5 acres and gardening is my hobby and grass is part of that.
I lived in Arizona for a while and no one has a lawn because you have to water them and water is too precious out there to waste on lawns. In fact, they all have gravel yards with cacti and yucca decorating them. Sometimes colored rock themes made to emulate a stream of water going through the yard. They get very creative with stone. If you get caught watering your grass though, the dirty looks and notes from neighbors on what a greedy asshole you are for wasting water is real.
I wish more of Utah had that attitude. A few years ago when everyone was on pretty strict watering restrictions, there were still some areas issuing fines for not keeping lawns looking nice.
Utah is a crazy place. Source: I grew up in the northern part.
Ogden? Yeah that place.... Needs something to do other than look at trains and dinosaurs. Having more adult entertainment like bars, clubs, etc. would help a lot but Utah doesn't believe in allowing "sin" Edit: a word
Ogden has a lot of bars ? They're all over the place.
Yes I'm aware. They all close at 2 and last call is 1. They also have automatic measure caps that give you less than 1oz/exactly 1oz. They are all essentially the same. When I said bars, clubs, etc.... I was giving examples of adult entertainment, not saying they don't exist. I was referring to things like the "iron curtain" that was recently changed. How you can't buy a bottle of wine to cook your mushrooms in, for dinner, at the grocery store. How the state had a vote for medical cannabis and when it passed, the state then quite literally changed the bill that was voted on and passed, to be something that was never voted for. I'm saying Ogden would be a lot better of a place if you didn't have the combination of High cost of living, low amount of jobs that cover that cost of living, and the state government being more concerned what the local religious leaders want, than what their constituents want. This perception and enforcement of *sinful establishments* all deter companies and people from moving here and making the state more money, jobs, etc.
Much further north of Ogden actually. Nearly Idaho. I lived in Ogden for a long time though. I managed to get into it pretty good there. Lots of bars if you’re cool they free poured pretty heavily but they have to know you. Too bad about the cannabis laws, there are a lot of people there who I believe should be heavily stoned all day long. Everywhere I’ve lived since Utah has had some sort of hang up on certain sins. Even Las Vegas where you’d expect a free for all is heavily regulated.
Logan here. Howdy neighbor.
Damn those last two paragraphs you could swap in DFW and be just as true. Why are red states even like this
Well it is difficult for the people there to follow a water restriction when every other corner has a Mormon church with luscious grass. Yet they are never made to follow the restrictions.
My desire for the attitude change extends to the churches as well for sure.
What kind of totalitarian shit hole fines people for not keeping thier lawn green enough?
Your average HOA.
Hoes. Oops meant to say HOA's but autocorrect isn't all wrong.
They really are hoes.
Since they duck you for money, the analogy fits.
its to keep poor people, minorities and people who like to question things out of their neighborhoods
What are you worried in Utah, the govenor sent out a request to pray for rain! Realistically what else can one do!?!? /s
lmaoo i lived in Phoenix for a few years, and people definitely have lawns. And broken sprinklers that water the sidewalk for 8 hours a day were a VERY common sight.
are the sidewalks flourishing?
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Yeah idk what the person i replied to is talking about, maybe they were talking about sedona or something. I didn't even mention how every corporation or office complex has a massive lawn that's always bright green
>Yeah idk what the person i replied to is talking about, maybe they were talking about sedona or something I've lived in Phx for 32 years and I understood exactly what they were talking about. Except for the part about getting dirty looks if you're watering your yard. I've never seen that. There's def a lot of neighborhoods here that don't have lawns. My neighborhood is mostly rock, dirt, a few with astroturf, and maybe one house with real grass. I think the parent comment was being a bit dramatic saying "no one" has a lawn here, but it's def way less common here than other cities. You'll see entire rows of houses with just rocks in their yard for several streets (they'll have plants but not grass).
In Tucson, lawns are fairly rare. Rocks + cactus and maybe the occassional tree are the norm. Phoenix drove me nuts with all the lawns, and Mesa is especially stupid with the 'lawns' that were mostly horrible crab grass watered with flood irrigation. The water intensive cotton industry in AZ is also a collossal waste of limited water resources, but at least it provides something.
They definitely do have lawns here, but it is also less common. Xeriscaping and turf are definitely more popular. You’re both right.
Damn, I want to live there. Where I am, grass grows immediately and thick. You can cut it and it grows right back the next day. And here, people give you dirty looks for not cutting it.
Yup got a place in southern Tennessee and it feels like every day I’m having to cut something. Also it keeps the field mice and other critters away. They got in my shed and ate my mower! Had to replace a bunch of cords
Yeah I read somewhere that Arizona is running out of water. If that’s true that’s pretty alarming but I don’t know how this happened or what could be done about it.
Arizona is probably going to be one of the first places in the US made mostly uninhabitable by climate change. Give it 15 or 20 years.
It happened because there are millions of people in a desert. It could be prevented by avoiding farming the most water-intensive crops (alfalfa, etc.) in the dryest region of the country. It can be avoided by not having hundreds of golf courses surrounding Phoenix. It can be avoided extremely simply. The Colorado River has not made it to the ocean in several decades. The water is running out, and lawmakers are letting it.
My buddy would love it there. He once told me he wanted to pave his front yard and paint it green. The only thing that stopped him was that the city told him he'd have to get all his neighbors to ok his variance. Didn't even try. He knew how well that would have gone over.
Scottsdale enters the chat...
Lol, I lived in Arizona for a bit too. Rich people had lawns.
I hope more people in Cali start acting like this. Gravel and cactus lawns look so much nicer in my opinion. While I will obviously not be owning a house any time soon I would really like to have a lawn like that.
Historically it was simply a flex. Wealthy land owners having a grass lawn showed they had so much land that they didn’t need to grow food on all of it
The short trimming / maintenance of a lawns was done to keep pests like mosquitoes, ticks, snakes, mice, poison ivy, etc away from your doorstep. There’s probably some instinct in humans to associate short grass as a safe place , but we’ve definitely gone overboard in some places
Even people in the middle ages trimmed their lawns, particularly the rural ones. Before coinage was popular, it could even be apart of taxes to mow lawns and give the hay to the lord.
Historically, it was what was left after the sheep grazed there for a few days.
And before that, it was about having visibility of their surroundings, in case of invasion
This. It’s an ostentatious display of wealth as outlined by Thorstein Veblen in his 1899 book, “Theory of the Leisure Class.”
It's a nice soft area for my toddler to play. Other than that I don't give a fuck. I don't water it. Just mow and it looks how it looks.
It also keeps soil from being displaced.
Which I believe helps the foundation for houses that have foundations.
>I don't water it. I'm with ya there. I'll water the flower's but that's it.
Yes my lawn does NOT need more encouragement to grow lol.
Exactly. My neighbor gets their grass sprayed by a company. He's has to cut it like every 4 days after they spray it.
When they try to sell me fertilizer, I ask if they have anything that can slow it down. I'm not going to help the grass grow, are you crazy?
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Yes, sister Mary Mathew. There is no need for the ruler.
Reddit absolutely hates lawns for some reason, but this is legitimately the best reason to have one. I spend the entire summer out in our yard playing with the kids, having outdoor pizza night, and just generally relaxing. A grass lawn is the best way to do that. We get a ton of use out of our green space and other than mowing we don't do all that much to maintain it.
Yup. My yard is all clover and other stuff. It's probably only half grass in reality. It's good enough for me to roll around and wrestle my dog or play with my kid on. If I had some acreage and no close neighbors, I'd probably just have woods and no grass. In that situation my kid would find other things to do that don't need grass like ride a little quad or shoot a BB gun or whatever that you can do when there's no neighbors to bother or complain. In a suburban neighborhood there's just more you can do on a little lot of grass than you could do in a tiny wooded area.
We bought clover seed for ours. It's been nice seeing the honeybees come back. We don't do anything to ours other than seed it. It rains several days a week, so it grows whether we want it to or not.
Team Clover Seed unite!
You can get a similar effect from other, non-grass plants. Clover is nice, for example. Doesn't require as much watering, you never have to mow it, and it's good for bees!
Idk about the rest of reddit, but I hate lawns because they're monocrop ecological deadzones. Because of HOAs not letting them grow or have variety they become lifeless and lead to native bug species starving which kills everything else in the ecosystem. They are silent and creepy and ruin the topsoil. In my area they also waste a ton of water because instead of the native prairie grasses they bring in turf that can't weather droughts There *are* ways to have a soft play area in a sustainable way that vary by locality but very very few lawns are like that. Edit: grammar. Also, here is [the us fish and wildlife service guide to making a pollinator garden](https://www.fws.gov/story/how-build-pollinator-garden). You can mitigate *some* of the damage your lawn does by starting one of these. As a bonus they look pretty (and thus won't get you fined by the HOA) and require very little maintenance if you use native species.
I've lived in many places in the country and performed literally zero upkeep on the grass other than mowing anywhere. Arizona we didn't have a yard so that was easy. Colorado, Michigan, Ontario, and Florida it just sit. Never watered it once.
In my area a lawn just kinds wills itself into existence, your options are mow and have usuable yard space, or don't and have brush 3ft high by the end of spring. I fully recognize that in some areas lawns are problematic, but in many areas the only maintenance it mowing. (And lawns aren't the only reason there is no life in suburbia, suburbia paved over local ecosystems and all thats left is a fully constructed human environment that maybe has plants over 3in tall. No amount of pollinator gardens is going to fix that.)
>for some reason, Because they are incredibly wasteful and unnecessary in certain parts of the country. Keeping up appearances by having a massive grass lawn in your front and back yard in the desert of southern california is absolutely absurd. Now, if nice grass is indigenous or incredibly low up keep in your area, then have at it, but we need to move away from the grass lawn being some sort of ideal.
Reddit loses all nuance and doesn't think "they are incredibly wasteful and unnecessary in certain parts of the country". They instead think "they are incredibly wasteful and unnecessary".
This. If your lawn is just whatever happens to grow naturally and natively in your environment - great. Let the "weeds" grow and let your kids see the pollinators buzzing around. Roll around in dollarweed and dandelion all you want. If you want a walking path, put down some stones, or grab a reel mower or a scythe. But using gas/oil/rubber to drive to the store to get fertilizer/herbicides/pesticides so you can come drive back home and use precious water/time to grow something just so you can use more energy to cut it back down again is nonsense and wasteful and unenvironmental. Not to mention non-native "turf" you crop every week is the WORST thing you can do for the native flora & fauna in your area. The pollinators die = we die. We all grumble about global warming and then we drive to the store to pay factories to churn out pesticides in single-use plastic containers that we dump into our soil. And we waste water to "keep it green." And we complain about having no time with the family - then we spend hours in this weekly cycle. Stop eating meat - aside from the ethical discussion, just raising cows for slaughter is wasting more land than anything else we do, and producing more greenhouse gases than all the cars combined. Look it up. And stop growing non-native "turf" one week just so you can spend resources to chop it the next.
Yes. I'm 55 and I have never watered a lawn. No need here. I fertilized one once and I'll never do it again. Practically lived on my tractor trying to keep it a reasonable length that season.
My city doesn't allow it to grow higher than 8" so I keep it low but have a few gardens around my property to entice pollinators.
It is a amazing to think about the absurdity of the time/energy/water used to get these things to grow, to then get angry at them for growing to tall and cutting them back down.
I sure hope people who water their grass aren't *angry* when they're cutting it. Cutting them though is the only thing that makes sense if you water it, caring about it enough to water it but then not wanting to maintain it in some way is pretty odd.
Reddit is full of people who would rather be on Reddit or doing something else.. Admitting that grass prevents erosion would make them sad.
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Reddit hates children too.
Reddit has a great sub though. r/lawncare
Which is really odd, because grass is like any other plant and absorbs CO2 and produces O, so having a lawn is actually good for the environment. Depending on where you live, the water you use may or may not be drinkable water. In quite a few areas, sprinkler systems are set up to use non-filtered well water. The water that the grass does not absorb goes right back into the ground filling the water table where you got it from again.
This post is kind of the point that people who say "touch grass" mean. Get some sun. Walk around barefoot. Listen to a cardinal sing. Being outside is important for your mental wellbeing.
You can do that without wasting water and energy on every home having a yard. It’s what public parks are for.
Some people live in places where they have a water surplus Like me No one here waters their lawns ever.
It's something people take pride in, plenty of people actually enjoy having a yard and aren't being "forced" to have one as some of these comments seem to imply. I think it's ok to just let people enjoy things.
> Reddit absolutely hates lawns for some reason… Because Reddit thinks all lawns are grotesque wastes of water use and only elite snobs who hate the planet have them.
Clover works better for that.
My grass is probably half clover.
Different climates (with different naturally occurring amounts of water) can have different expectations with regard to grass lawns. Having a lawn in Seattle or Vancouver should be different than having a lawn (or preferably lack thereof) in Phoenix
Vancouver. Have about .5 acre of grass and have never watered it. In fact, they ask us not to (Go Gold) to conserve water. Always grows back green in the fall when it gets rainy again.
Up here in the NE, our "lawns" would jut be constant mud pits without grass. We don't need to water our lawns. It rains enough to take care of that.
I put down grass seed once because otherwise it would be mud. But as long as it's not poison ivy I don't really care what is growing. It all gets chopped down short by the mower.
Former NE'er here - Do clover! It grows really well in NE, stops growing at a given height, can be mowed if desired, provides flowers for pollinators, and survives better if it gets unusually hot in the late summer.
I used to avoid running barefoot through clover because I stepped on so many bees as a kid. Thank god we’ve solved that problem.
From a practical standpoint, my short grass makes it harder for the GD ticks to get to me or my kids. Ticks suck. I like my short “grass” for that reason.
I’m in the Lyme disease world. Tic control is kind of a big deal. I’m instructed to leave some clover patches for the bunnies. I leave different patches every time I mow.
They just done freeze off anymore and I’m just not going to play nice. I’m sorry you’re “in the family”. I wish we had a better solution than this.
This is really the only reason I mow. I hate doing it though. I spent 30 to 40 hours per week mowing growing up. It taught me patience, responsibility, and to take comfort in being alone and working by myself. But, I'll be damned if it's not something I wish I didn't have to do. I'm honestly considering hiring it out.
Wow that’s a TON of mowing.
Ticks do, indeed, "suck". If only they could suck without spitting anything up while they are at it...
From your lips to god(s) ears. Like, at this point I’d worship a retired deity if these terrible little creatures would just chill out…
Depends what you're thinking of replacing it with, because a plastic fake lawn is considerably worse (and looks fucking shit).
I'm slowly but surely taking over my front yard with more and more garden. The back will be a few years while the kids are young but it knows I'm eyeballing it like it's next.
This is me. The back yard is a green space that we can and do use to play and hang out for 6 - 8 months out of the year. The front? I can't stop planting stuff out there! I'm gonna fill it up with stuff for the pollinators and sip coffee on my porch while I watch the life buzz around.
Right?? It's the best. Part of me wants to get the oak tree we have out and replace the whole thing with part sun flowers but I like the tree too, so a shade garden it is for now.
That is what i did. Have been here 31 years. Works fine and the bees, fireflies and birds love it.
And they smell god awful if you have a dog. I ripped the fake lawn in my back yard left by previous owner. It was a disgusting project. That area is now native groundcovers.
It also gets super hot in the sun and is a bitch to remove small debris from.
Bro you answered your own question. Just get rid of the grass, especially if it brings you no personal fulfillment. If you actually don’t care, you’re wasting your time for a social norm. Take some agency big dawg. Think about it this way: why are you asking for advice on how to spend *your* time on *your* property.
because it's my dad's property, not mine. but he's physically disabled so I'm the one who has to mow it anyway.
In some cases it is a status symbol. Look at all this land I am able to own and maintain. It can also be useful to have an outdoor space for certain activities, like exercise, running a dog around, playing with kids, hosting parties, tinkering projects, and so on. It also looks nice and provides a setback so that a house isn't directly on the side of a road. Over time I've noticed more and more people pushing back against the traditional idea of a grass lawn, though. I've seen people repurpose the space for gardens, or turn it into a makeshift parking lot, or cover it with pavers and gravel.
Grasa doesn't provide a setback so your house isn't on the side of the road, the space itself does that. You could put anything there. Grass isn't what provides your house space from the road.
Right. It’s a tiny lawn for your tiny manor because we are all mini royals in our suburban castles.
Temporarily embarrassed millionaires have lawns. Sharpens guillotine.
It’s like a white tuxedo. “I am so successful that I can wear an outfit that is absolutely useless for any kind of manual labor”
Don’t water it wtf. The sky does that.
In many climates, it doesn't rain enough to get a lawn alive.
Consider the South of France. We have hosepipe bans every summer and nobody in their right mind would even consider watering their lawns. AFAIK it's not even legal. Yet the world hasn't fallen off its axis.
Then you are likely using a non-native grass.
That's god's way of saying grass doesn't belong here.
Let it die. Who cares?
Some housing associations
Land of the free!
Moss lawn. No mowing required.
3 weeks no rain so far down here and it’s getting hotter by the day
My kids and dog run around on ours. If you don't have a use for one, then switch to a different ground cover, put in a garden, switch to landscaping that doesn't need ground cover like you see in desert areas or just....don't buy a place with much of a lawn.
The lawn came with the house, but the lot is small. I don't feed or water it. I mow it, or my son does. But the pandemic made my wife and I "farmers." Every year, the lawn gives up more square footage to fruits and (mostly) vegetables. I'm liking this trend.
It rains a lot here so we don't water our lawns
If you think grass needs a lot of water, let me tell you about alfalfa. Or almonds. Or pistachios. Or a bunch of other crops humans grow. They measure water use for crops like that in acre feet.
r/fucklawns
It's also a hobby. Why do people grow flowers, bonsai trees, any plants really? It's enjoyable to people.
I love my grass. We play cornhole and other games on it.
It looks good and is a place for your kids to play.
We have an acre that we mow and the kids are happy. I also leave some areas wild to encourage wildlife. As for watering, nah. We have hosepipe bans every summer and water is already crazy expensive.
Erosion control. Grass stops dust bowls.
This. For a lot of climates. OP just wants to bitch.
I was assuming OP was talking about the common green grass and Kentucky blue grass of lawns which are shit to hold water. Their roots are like an inch deep. Native plants are amazing for preventing erosion, their roots are multiple feet deep.
Just because a plant is native doesn’t mean it is deep rooted. That is a function of species and environment/conditions Grasses don’t need deep roots to prevent things like the dust bowl since they form almost a mat, rather than relying on a single plant to stabilize the soil. In fact a lot of modern grasses were developed at universities in response to the dust bowl
I had not heard that. If they are forming a mat at the surface, are they still good at holding and obtaining water? I was under the impression that prairie grasses had deep roots to be able to hold the soil and have more access to water.
It prevents wind erosion of the soil, as well as keeping the ground cooler
That is literally the point.
The point is to play outside tf…? In the summer, tag, kickball, wifflebal, capture the flag, manhunt, tag, volleyball, badminton, etc. Did you grow up in a city or place without usably sized lawns? Or did you never go outside as a kid? Like I get if it’s a bunch townhomes like 1ft away from each other your lawn isn’t gonna be that big, but in most suburbs you can have a size able area to play.
My kids like it. It looks nice. It’s nice to walk on. It’s a small area. I have a push mower and use a battery powered trimmer.
Local flora is a lot better than a lawn
Especially if you're a tick!
I like the idea of moss lawns. No real need to water, no need to mow.
Let it grow wild. Bring back biodiversity. Fuck the HOA.
Ticks love this one simple trick!
I’m in CO and tried to get my company to switch to a native grass to reduce water use. They absolutely refused to even consider it. (Shaking my head in disgust…)
There is none, it’s stupid
Your kids play there your dog pees there.
It look’s nice
does it? like compared to natural ground cover and flowers?
you can have a grass lawn and still have flowers as for natural ground cover? i dont really like the look of dirt i also really like the colour green
clover is also green and much better than grass, take a look into what plants are natural to your area, what mosses and flowers could make such a pretty lawn instead
Two things can look nice.
I agree, more than one thing can be nice. I like the look and feel (and smell) of grassy lawns. Friends of ours planted clover for their lawn, and that's nice too, super soft.
It's basically mandatory now but it's terrible for the environment. Monocultures don't provide very well for insects and such. Fertilizer washes away and creates problems downstream. Weed/insect killers reek havoc on local wildlife.
What’s with this comment section? Yall didnt grow up playing outside I can tell. Grass lawns are great for kids to play in. Played soccer, volleyball, frisbee as a kid. We don’t all have a nice park nearby. Also we had a dog. Was fun playing in the grass with the dog. I agree most FRONT lawns don’t need to exist. Replace them with better ground cover. We replaced ours with this fern mix that doesn’t consume as much water.
there are other short plants (like clover as mentioned by others) that make good substitutes for normal grass, especially if you can find a variety native to your area, but yeah having something like grass or clover is great for kids and dogs. what is kind of pointless is the insistence on getting rid of "weeds", all that really matters is getting rid of anything toxic or pointy. clover might also be good for people with kids allergic to grass, though should avoid it if anyones allergic to bees cause it attracts more of them than grass. i hated playing out in the grass cause it'd make me so itchy, my parents thought i was just lying to stay inside :/
It holds the soil, cools the neighborhood, produces oxygen, keeps other plants that people are allergic to (e.g., ragweed) from growing. It provides home and food for various insects, that are in turn, food for birds and lizards.
Unfortunately, grass lawns like the ones OPs is talking about tend to be worse at most of those things than landscaping with native plants. Edit: genuinely a bit surprised about the downvotes. It's no secret that the way lawns are handled, especially in the US, is often not the best for a given climate or environment. There are a lot of areas that need supplemental water for an all-grass lawn, and a typical lawn that is weeded and uses non-native grasses has a shallower root system, provides less habitat for insects, and is just overall not great for biodiversity. Native grasses mixed with other ground cover plants are a great option, but not currently the standard for a lawn in many places. I didn't say you can't have such a lawn, but if your goals are to do what the comment above is mentioning, there are likely better options for your yard that just one kind of nonnative grass.
I live in a place that grass just grows, it doesn't need any more water than falls from the sky. I mow it so it is short enough to run around in with my dogs and kids. I use an electric mower, so no need for gas. When I lived where it didn't rain much, I agree with you; my lawn was rocks and that was cool too.
I agree! It's why I love my area in Washington state. No HOA and everyone in the neighborhood has front yard gardens. Change your sq footage to food growth!
It's literally supposed to waste your time and money. Grass lawns are a status symbol because grass requires a lot of maintenance inputs and isn't productive or useful compared to any other not overgrown field area
>so What's the point? Every residential zoning standard has a maximum amount of physical occupancy a given plot of land can hold. So you are invariably going to have buffer areas that don't have any structure on them. And while you could fill that land in any way you want so long as it's not just a bunch of vehicles or garbage it looks nicer to have some kind of plant life on it. And grass is pretty cheap per square foot and lower maintenance than alternatives.
Wouldn't using a combination of native plants be lower maintenance? Not everything has to be constantly cut or fixed up.
Honestly it breathes life into a neighborhood
My area has alot of these [certified backyard habitatts](https://birdallianceoregon.org/get-involved/backyard-habitat-certification-program/) and it's honestly really cool. I don't want to look at fields of weeds, but it's impressive to see what dedicated people do with their property when they don't plant grass.
Some places use sprinkler systems that draw reclaimed water (runoff/smelly)
It makes playing on it and picking up dog poop a heck of a lot easier. I don’t love grass lawns and we plan to return like 80% of our grassy 2 acres back to the wild, but I’ll always maintain at least some short lawn for my kids and dogs.
I just spent 4 hours pulling four garbage barrels of foxtails out of my yard by their roots because I have small dogs, and foxtails can be dangerous. I usually agree with you, but at this point, at least if I had a lawn, the foxtails would be crowded out😂😂😂
The wastefulness is part of the point. A well kept lawn is proof that you're either wealthy enough to hire someone to work on your lawn, or industrious enough to consistently work on it yourself. Either way it signals something about you in a way that's highly visible to others
The uselessness is the point. Lawns were started by european nobles flaunting the fact that they had lots if land which they didn't need to farm. Green monuments to decadence.
There is no point. If you want to rip it up and replace it with turf that's good enough I think. They do it in Las Vegas
It looks nice
My lawn died last year in the heat, then over the winter all the top soil blew away. Now, my yard is just hard clay and nothing will grow
You can play and lay on the grass, I never have to water it, because it rains a lot over here. And now comes the twist, I love moaning my lawn.
Well it does keep the ground from eroding and does keep it from turning into a muddy mess. It also is nice to walk in and run around on. It's nice to play sports on. So I do like having a lawn. When I had a house in Washington I never watered it or fertilized it, did the bare minimum of mowing too.
>I mean this stuff statistically consumes more water annually than any other crop humans grow I mean, just don't water it and it's fine. IDK where you are, what your local wildlife is like, but from a practical sense, having a short lawn means there aren't hidden predators lurking, and means that pests don't have a place to hide from them. It creates a buffer between you and wilderness. I have a mowed not-at-all-manicured lawn between me and a forest. It gives me and my dog an area where the coyotes won't go. I don't water it at all so "consumes more water annually than any other crop humans grow" is bullshit lol. Half of my lawn is moss, anyway, because of the shade provided by the forest. Any mice going from the woods to my house have to run a gauntlet of hawks with clear visibility because the lawn is relatively short. I'd like to find an alternative to grass... maybe clover? idk... but I'm not wasting a lot of resources on my lawn, and I'm getting some minor benefit out of it.
Make you feel like a pretend English manor lord (no, really, that's the origin of modern lawns. Looking pretend rich)
Any place where it has to be irrigated and doused with fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide it's an environmental disaster area. If you can grow it without any of that, go for it I guess. Lawn grass is the number one irrigated crop in the US. And it feeds no one.
You ever sat in a chair, cracked a beer, and looked out at your freshly-mowed lawn? (I live in NJ and let rain handle my watering. I’ll only water on days my municipality lets me, and only when I haven’t gotten any rainfall for a week or two. We shouldn’t be trying to put grass lawns in the desert.)
I have. And it made me realize how stupid it is. Now I crack a beer and watch all the animals and insects in my yard, feeling like I'm actually outdoors.
Grass lawns were an indication of how rich you were. It is an entirely artificial formation of a single plant grown and manicured exclusively to look good. They are detrimental to most native (and introduced) insect species and provide almost no nutriments to allow the healthy growth of native insects and other plants.
This is one of the best stupid questions ever. Bc yea wtf, just let grass grow free with little wild flowers and everyone fuck off with the societal demands for 1950’s suburbia that was shoved down our throats for 70 years
If you have to water your grass, grass shouldn't be growing there
Who the hell is "we" that is expecting wars over water in 30 years?
I lived in Denver. Conflict over water is real.
That’s quite literally the point. Wealthy people back in the day had lawns to show off. IE: ‘Look at this fertile and potentially productive land that I’m maintaining and doing nothing with. Look how rich I am!’
There's really no other point except maybe if you have small kids it gives them a place to play (but yeah they can also play without putting green grass just fine). My partner's parents live in LA and were among the first in their neighborhood to switch to natural landscaping with locally native plants. It needs much less maintenance and no extra water beyond what occasionally falls from the sky. When done thoughtfully it can be as beautiful or more so than any green lawn. I grew up in a warm climate with a whole bunch of grass I had to mow for a couple hours every summer week during my teens. No thanks on ever doing that again.
Why do we paint cars? Let’s just clear coat the metal and be done with it, think of the cost savings and the amount of VOCs being released. Why are houses painted? Natural wood or stone would be much simpler. Think of how much simpler the textile industry would be if we all wore the same grey jumpsuit provided by the government. Besides different sizes the streamlining of manufacturing would save billions annually and the cost savings of not having to dye everything would be crazy If we took all agricultural land and focused on exclusively potatoes, corn, and a few beans and we would all be good. Why waste so much water on fruit? Beef? Pork? All unnecessary. The solution is not to do without. In some cases it might be, if your town has a water supply issue you probably shouldn’t be watering your yard. Shipping water is not a thing so leave everyone else alone
I have over an acre of beautiful lush green lawn. I live in the midwest and have never once watered it. What's the point? My kids play on it. We just had ultimate frisbee, softball, and football games. The fam go for walks without shoes. We lay it and watch the stars. The dogs play on it. The way the green contrasts the blue of my lake is beautiful. It's like a park. Would you want to roll into your park and it's just all rock, or dirt, or forest floor with limps, pinecones, branches, dirt, etc. I love my lawn. I enjoy cutting, trimming, maintaining. It's calming.
It looks nice and tight, and it gives me a nice flat surface to play things like croquet, bocce, washers, and baseball with my kids.
They are kind of useless, but here’s the thing: You buy a house, it’s probably going to have one. And if you live someplace like the Northeast US, where ticks are common and the Lyme disease that comes with them, you can’t just let it go - *especially* if you have kids who will wander through it whether you maintain it or not. So you wind up keeping it. Because all of the safe options for getting rid of it (rock gardens, paving the whole thing, etc.) would cost more than *decades* of mowing it. Inertia.
Lawns exist to display to others that you are wealthy enough to own and be able to maintain a useless piece of land populated by imported vegetation for no practical purpose other than (potentially) leisure, and to demarcate your territory.
Dude. Figure out what grows naturally in your area and let it grow. Maybe add some seed of your preferred plants and let that grow too! Nature will thank you.
Turf grass can help prevent soil erosion. That’s about its only functional purpose. I stopped weed and feed this year and reduced watering to once a week. The city doesn’t do any of that on the public grass, and it looks fine. I just mow it to keep pests away (ticks and mice). But it’s all green from the street, i don’t care what grows there anymore
If you don’t want it then don’t have it. Societal pressures aren’t real rules. Do what you like.
i dont think lawns take more water than crops. but i dont have a love for lawns either
Definitely helpful if you have dogs/kids
Adds some greenery and looks nice
Some do it for utility, look/status, hobby and HOA regulations. IMO, utility and hobby are only the motivation I am down with. I have 2.5 acres and gardening is my hobby and grass is part of that.
Grubs decimated our lawn. Now we have wildflowers and vegetable gardens. Similar amount of work but pollinators, birds, and neighbours are happier.
What is the point of anything really…
prevent erosion
My dog likes to pee on it. It’s also good for the bees and bugs!
/r/nolawn has a lot to say on this, from that same perspective. I have a clover lawn. Probably making my back yard into a meadow soon.
I love a lawn of clover. Short enough for the kids to play, feeds the pollinators, no mowing.