What is a weed but an unwanted plant? Depending on circumstance, a plant that is the bane of one man’s existence may be a boon to another. And yet we often assume that there are certain plants that are weeds and others that are not. Slow down. Look closer. I’ve found the average untended lawn [...]
I just dug up an old article from USA Today about the anti-lawn movement: Americans mow 31 million acres of lawn every year. It takes 300 million gallons of gas and 1 billion hours to complete the chore. And for this privilege they will spend $17.4 billion on everything from pesticides (70 million pounds) to [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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’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 [...]
