What good is a crop you can’t eat or sell?

I love the outdoors. I enjoy fishing, hiking, camping, gardening, hanging out enjoying a book in the shade with a cold drink….but I don’t like to mow the grass.  We have over ¾ of an acre, and I spend two to three hours a week or more mowing and trimming, about 8 months a year.

I really don’t understand the obsession with big grassy areas.  I could see a moderate area for the kids to run, a place to toss a frisbee, or throw a tennis ball for the dog.  Beyond that, it doesn’t make sense to me.  You truly can’t eat it or sell it. It doesn’t support birds or bees, or any other critter, including people. In fact, I can’t be outside when they are spraying near my house. I get very ill from the sprays. I would rather support the animals.

This is the wildlife we see in our neighborhood. Momma fox and her 4 cubs lived in the yard behind ours. They would come and drink from the dog’s water bowl on out back porch. We regularly have deer in the neighborhood, and this fawn was laying in the trimmings from a tree. We also have hawks raising their young. These are red shouldered hawks. I have no good pictures of the owls, but we have great horned owls, long-eared owls, and barred owls.

Our neighborhood is part of a group of local neighborhoods that has an online communication board for sharing information, asking for suggestions about home improvement projects, and talking about local restaurants. 

There was a recent post asking people to be sure to treat the dandelions in their yards as it created a problem for others since they spread.  It created a lot of discussion, both for and against doing so.  Most people seemed to take the side that you should do so as a courtesy to others.

I didn’t take part in the discussion, but it got me thinking about it.

Basically, what they are asking people to do is kill some plants and then plant others, fertilize them, water them, and then cut them short and even. It’s expensive, the chemicals are nasty, and it takes a lot of water to maintain.

The fertilizer runs off into the ponds and feeds the algae. The algae blooms, and they use chemicals to kill it. It rains, the pond overflows into the creeks and the chemicals kill the frogs and the fish. It happens at least couple of times a year in my neighborhood.  Not a good thing.

These are probably the same people who complain that my vegetable garden is in the front yard (where it gets the sun) and that I don’t cut down the cone flowers in the fall (the goldfinches love the seeds and eat nearly all of them by spring when I clear the flower beds).  I chose to live in a neighborhood without a strict association, but sometimes have people comment on these things to me when I am out getting my mail or weeding the garden areas.  

I love seeing the flowers every year!

Our house sits on a lot that was once farmland. When the house was built in the late 1950’s, they just cut down the weeds and started mowing it.  The ground is uneven and rough.  We bought the house about 25 years ago, and for the first couple of years, tried to treat the weeds and get the grass looking better.  Now it is a lot of violets, clover, dandelions, and some grass. I work hard to keep the invasive species down and kill the poison ivy in the back yard.

I have been gradually increasing the size of my flower beds and filling the bare spots in the yard with more clover.  I still mow the rest of it every week.  I think it looks pretty good for a bunch of weeds.