Antilawn
Turfgrass Alternatives
So you’re unhappy with how much work and water your turf grass lawn takes up, but love its function. What are the alternatives?
The Native Lawn
Many turf grass lawns occupy space that was formerly inhabited by native grasses and wildflowers, so why not restore your yard to its original state?
This Lawn is Your Lawn
The folks from Kitchen Gardeners International have started a cool campaign to plant a vegetable garden on the Whitehouse lawn called Eat the View. Visit your favorite candidate’s website, get involved and put this on their radars. After what happened in San Francisco, I think the time is ripe to make this happen.
Eat the view [...]
Obligatory Fritz Haeg Post
Who’s Fritz Haeg? If you missed all of the great press he’s gotten for his Edible Estates project lately, he’s a California based architect and teacher that replaces front lawns with productive edible landscapes.
His first edible antilawn was planted in the middle of American suburbia, Salina, Kansas, in 2005, and he has since planted five [...]
Mowing Sucks
A 56-year-old man from Wisconsin has been arrested after shooting his lawn mower because it wouldn’t start. Why do we add unnecessary stress to an already stressful world by covering our personal open space with needy lawns? If only he had stopped to consider why he even had a lawn, he might have diverted that [...]
Michael Pollan, Why Mow?
Michael Pollan’s book, Second Nature, includes a great piece entitled “Why Mow?”, where he explores the American lawn as “a metaphor for our skewed relationship with the land” and places it into historical and psychological context.
Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much.
The whole book (buy it) is [...]
New Yorker: Turf War
Elizabeth Kolbert has a great piece entitled Turf War in the New Yorker that sums up the history and hazards of the American Lawn. She mentions an astonishing figure that:
Recently, a NASA-funded study, which used satellite data collected by the Department of Defense, determined that, including golf courses, lawns in the United States cover nearly [...]
The Dark Side of Lawns
Beth Huxta of Organic Gardening magazine writes:
Americans spend so much money and time on their lawns, you’d think we either eat or sell grass. More land in the United States is planted in turf–32 million acres–than in corn. The typical American lawn sucks up 10,000 gallons of supplemental water (non-rainwater) annually.
Her article is full of [...]
Treehugger: Number of the Day: 11
11 — According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the average home owner’s gas-powered lawn mower pumps out as much pollution per hour as 11 automobiles do.
Read the whole story at Treehugger.
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