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The days of the perfect-looking yard – often lawns that guzzle copious amounts of water to stay green – may soon be gone.
Homeowners are increasingly opting to “re-wilding” their homes, incorporating native plants and decreasing the amount of lawn care to make their properties more sustainable and encourage natural ecosystems to recover, according to Plan It Wild, a New York-based native landscape design company.
About 30% of the water an average American family consumes is used for the outdoors, including activities such as watering lawns and gardens, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In the West, where water is absorbed almost immediately by the sun or thirsty vegetation, outdoor water usage can increase to an average of 60% for the average family.
As concerns for the environment – as well as increasing utility bills – grow, so do homeowners’ preferences for how they decorate their yards.
Good first step is just seeding clover where grass is struggling.
Clover isn’t a normal part of lawns anymore because broadleaf herbicide kills clover too. But there is zero reason to use herbicide on a fucking lawn anyways.
But you barely need to mow clover if it’s dominant in an area. It “learns” the height you mow at, and just stops growing taller than that.
Like a 1/4 of my backyard only gets mowed once or twice a season, and it looks green as fuck because it’s denser. That ground covers helps retain moisture in the ground, feeds bees and bunnies, and with all the bunnies, I even get foxes.
Plus clover produces nitrogen, so it naturally spreads to the poor soil and improves it because it can out compete grass and even weeds. Insisting on an “all grass, only grass” lawn is some boomer shit.
This is something the wife and I have looked at doing for our next house but is clover less resilient to dogs than grass? We were figuring on natural stuff for the front yard but keeping grass in the majority of the backyard because of our pets
Clover is better, it grows along the ground instead of straight up like grass So does a couple other kinds of broadleafs that will show up.
With grass if they dig in hard in one place it can kill the grass and then it’s bare, and likely going to stay that way for a while if you mow often. With clover the nearby strands just grow in to the empty space.
Like, if you got some huge dogs in a small yard that pace, it probably won’t matter. But just letting them run around in an open area you’ll be fine.
There will be bunnies back there tho. Even if you have a good fence, they’ll break in for the clover.
We’ve already done our whole front yard in native plants, but we still have grass in the back, which is struggling because we live in CO and Kentucky bluegrass was never meant to grow in a desert with clay soil. My mom finally said I can have most/all of it removed and plant a native grass mix with clover next year. I’m so happy.
I mean, don’t remove it…
Just start using that stuff for bare spots. Plants spread on their own bro, you just got to establish a population first. Maybe it’ll cross pollinate and you’ll get some crazy new bluegrass that’s hardy.
Or it just gets replaced.
Let nature do it’s thing.