Skip the Lawn: Diverse and Hands-off Gardening

 

Lawns are Attractive Only to Weeds… 

I have never met a garden owner who was happy with their lawn.  They all complain about the work, the watering, weeding, fertilizing, and expensive lawnmowers.  And point out ground-covering plantains, crabgrass, creeping charlie, dandelions, and other nasty weeds. Not to mention grubs or moles that are destroying the lawn.

Perfectly manicured lawns are a thing of the past!  Who needs turf around the house that requires frequent mowing, fertilizing, raking, aerating, watering, and lots of pesticides?  Doing all this work (or paying someone for it) is not worth the effort.  Not to speak about the cost of labor, material, and most of all: the environmental impact. 

Ecological Desert

CBC wrote in an article recently: "The case for leaving the perfectly manicured lawn behind. North Americans have had a longstanding love affair with crisp blades of grass and the perfectly manicured lawns we shape them into. The tidy turf tradition isn't homegrown though: the concept was hauled across the Atlantic by colonists who maintained lawns in Europe going back to the 17th or 18th century. The growth became a staple of the leisure class who reveled in lawn games like croquet and tennis and turned it into a status symbol since bringing neatness to nature's chaos required deep pockets. And so, keeping up with the trim-turfed Joneses began.

Though its shorn blades are a bare-footer's dream and the smell of it freshly cut may be inseparable from summer nostalgia for many, a pristine lawn comes with a whole whack of taxing environmental impacts - and high maintenance cost."

Lawns are a Dead Part of Your Garden

Insects that are necessary to pollinate vegetables, flowers, fruit, and other crops cannot find anything in lawns, but the odd dandelion bloom. Bees and butterflies are not finding any wood in the sea of grass blades.

Fertilizers and pesticides can create runoff and pollute lakes and reservoirs. Nitrogen and phosphorus and other chemicals contained in these products can lead to oxygen-choking, overgrowth of algae and other plants - and kill small animals.

The fertilizers and pesticides we put on lawns can create runoff that pollutes surrounding bodies of water. In surface waters like lakes and reservoirs, the nitrogen and phosphorus contained in these products can lead to oxygen-choking, light-masking overgrowth of algae and other plants. 

The monoculture, free of wildflowers, shrubs, dead wood, and trees, is also not ideal for wildlife.  It provides neither shelter nor nutrition for flittering pollinators like bees, butterflies, and birds that help plants reproduce, creating more vegetation — our food.

Lawns also require a huge amount of water to maintain, drinking water that can be better used.  This obscene amount of drinking water onto our lawns makes them green because they're the wrong species for our climate.  Turf spends a large chunk of the summer on "life support," browning and dying in peak season because the grass isn't living in its ideal climate.  

Kentucky bluegrass is a species brought over by colonists from much wetter and cloudier areas, such as the UK or Ireland.  The same with dandelions: Europeans brought over dandelions because they were medicinal and useful, they ate the greens, roasted the roots, and made tea.

Smart: Growing Native Plants due to Raising Water Costs

Water-wise landscaping, a xeriscaped yard has the potential to cut watering at least in half - and it looks much prettier.  Start by digging out a part of the lawn and planting drought-tolerant shrubs and flowers.  You even don’t need to dig out the lawn, just cover it with wet cardboard in the fall, and secure this with a couple of big rocks. 

Comes spring, place good garden soil mixed with compost or composted manure, at least 1 foot high.  Plant sedums, Russian stonecrops, salvia, Santolina, sunflowers, irises, lavender, ornamental pink Muhly grass, rudbeckia, coreopsis, milkweed (especially for butterflies), yarrow, lupine, coneflowers, and in shade parts aruncus plants or hostas of a variety of leaf colors. Then mulch this new flower bed well.

Blooming Shrubs

Small shrubs that need water only a short period after planting are wild roses rosa rugosa), burning bush, sea buckthorn, privet, beauty bush, rose glow barberry, forsythia, or butterfly bush, just to name a few.  A little bit of blooming is all maintenance they need once a year. 

Mulch the ground well and the area around the shrubs will be weed-free.

Ornamental Grasses

Jodi Delong wrote in an article in Saltscapes: "Like many gardeners, I evolved into a love affair with ornamental grasses, and now I can’t imagine a garden without them. Oh, for sure, in the spring they don’t look like anything but a bunch of dead sticks, but as we roll into summer and autumn, they take on delightful texture, and make gorgeous sounds as the wind whispers through them…

And many produce elegant and long-lasting flower heads that are eye-catching.  As an added bonus, many types of grass have interesting colors throughout the season—not just green!—and great fall/winter colors, too. What’s not to love?

Most of these ornamental grasses offer more than ornamental value.  If you want to create a relatively quick screen to block the view of an unsightly fence or just to add some privacy to your yard, some grasses get quite large and showy.  Most importantly for many gardeners, they are relatively problem/pest free.  Best of all, deer do not like the majority of grasses: their tough, sharp leaves (blades) aren’t at all appetizing to Bambi.

Another idea, in case you want to keep your lawn, is to over-seed it with short-growing clover.  The benefits?  You will never have to mow again and your lawn is always green - even through a drought.  

Lawns are an anomaly.  And they may no longer fit the realities of the world we live in.  In today’s world, we worry so much about environmental issues, it is satisfying to have something that's really under our control - our gardens.

https://www.epicgardening.com/xeriscape-plants/

https://www.pinterest.ca/rvs11/drought-tolerant-plants-zone-4/

https://www.naturehills.com/blog/post/drought-tolerant-plants-for-the-landscape

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/the-american-obsession-with-lawns/

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Roundup, Pesticides, Your Kids and Autism

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Traveling in the USA, I was shocked to discover these enormous shelves of Roundup in a garden center. Banned in Canada and Europe, these poisonous products are freely applied in gardens instead of pulling weeds out... No one seems to care.  I even witnessed people in flip-flops, bare legs and without any protection to spray their gardens with Roundup while their children were playing next to them. UNBELIEVABLE!

By 2025 half the newborn will be Autistic! That is the conclusion of Stephanie Seneff, Phd., a professor and senior research scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  She warned at a recent conference that:  “At today’s rate, by 2025, one in two children will be autistic.” 
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She noted that the side effects of autism closely mimic those of glyphosate toxicity, and presented data showing a remarkably consistent correlation between the use of Roundup on crops (and the creation of Roundup-ready GMO crop seeds) with rising rates of autism.

"Children with autism have biomarkers indicative of excessive glyphosate, including zinc and iron deficiency, low serum sulfate, seizures, and mitochondrial disorder."
Read the whole article here.
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It gets even worse:

Glyphosate Herbicide Found in Breast Milk of American Mothers

In the first ever testing on glyphosate herbicide in the breast milk of American women, Moms Across America and Sustainable Pulse have found ‘high’ levels in 3 out of the 10 samples tested. The shocking results point to glyphosate levels building up in women’s bodies over a period of time, which has until now been refuted by both global regulatory authorities and the biotech industry.

The levels found in the breast milk testing of 76 ug/l to 166 ug/l are 760 to 1600 times higher than the European Drinking Water Directive allows for individual pesticides. They are however less than the 700 ug/l maximum contaminant level (MCL) for glyphosate in the U.S., which was decided upon by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) based on the now seemingly FALSE premise that glyphosate was not bio-accumulative.

Read more.Glyphosate-containing herbicides are the top-selling herbicides in the world and are sold under trademarks such as Monsanto’s ‘Roundup’. Monsanto’s sales of Roundup jumped 73 percent to $371 million in 2013 because of its increasing use of genetically engineered crops (GE Crops).
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Glyphosate is Not the Only Culprit According to the National Pesticide Information Center fact sheet, glyphosate is not included in compounds tested for by the Food and Drug Administration's Pesticide Residue Monitoring Program, nor in the United States Department of Agriculture's Pesticide Data Program. However, a field test showed that lettuce, carrots, and barley contained glyphosate residues up to one year after the soil was treated with 3.71 lb of glyphosate per acre (Wikipedia).
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Weed Resistance: 

Over the 16-year period since genetically modified crops were introduced, "herbicide-resistant crop technology has led to a 239-million-kilogram (527-million-pound) increase in herbicide use in the United States between 1996 and 2011. Resistance evolves after a weed population has been subjected to intense selection pressure in the form of repeated use of a single herbicide.Weeds resistant to the herbicide have been called 'superweeds'.

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in herbicide formulations containing it. However, in addition to glyphosate salts, commercial formulations of glyphosate contain additives such as surfactants which vary in nature and concentration. Laboratory toxicology studies have suggested that other ingredients in combination with glyphosate may have greater toxicity than glyphosate alone.
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Inert Ingredients Amplified the Toxic Effect on Human Cells

Until now, most health studies have focused on the safety of glyphosate, rather than the mixture of ingredients found in Roundup. But in the new study, scientists found that Roundup’s inert ingredients amplified the toxic effect on human cells—even at concentrations much more diluted than those used on farms and lawns.

One specific inert ingredient, polyethoxylated tallowamine, or POEA, was more deadly to human embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells than the herbicide itself – a finding the researchers call “astonishing.”

“This clearly confirms that the [inert ingredients] in Roundup formulations are not inert,” wrote the study authors from France’s University of Caen. “Moreover, the proprietary mixtures available on the market could cause cell damage and even death [at the] residual levels” found on Roundup-treated crops, such as soybeans, alfalfa and corn, or lawns and gardens.  Read more in this article by Scientific American.

Scientific FraudOn two occasions, the United States EPA has caught scientists deliberately falsifying test results at research laboratories hired by Monsanto to study glyphosate.