One boomer was remarking about the rabbits and squirrels in their yard. The rabbits are there because we no longer have foxes because the boomers poison their yards. The squirrels are a food source for our at-risk birds of prey, while their ecological role spreading plant seeds adds to biodiversity and landscape regeneration in important ways. She called them "vile little creatures" and wished there was a way to kill them all.
The other's yard was 90% dedicated to Kentucky bluegrass. Purely ornamental, green concrete that's too poisonous for the rabbits to eat despite their effort. When I arrived she was pulling clover out of the only garden bed. When I left an hour later, she was still pulling cover out and asked if I could spray the bed with glyphosate to kill them. I said she might want to keep that species because it's important for pollinators and adds to the health of the soil for her other flowers. She opted for a $150 glyphosate treatment which makes the ground carcinogenic and takes two weeks to work.
I fucking hate these people. I hate their settler-colonialism toward nature, their sociopathic need for domination, and their utter tastelessness once they've achieved that domination at the expense of every other species that once lived in that yard. In this desert these deranged freaks will spend thousands of dollars per year to preserve their lawns. The violence behind their bullshit community fetish is only ignored because their neighbours are worse.
American suburbanites are some of the most deranged people I've met. Absolutely hostile to any wildlife that steps on their yard, obsessing over the cleanliness of their grass they waste water resources on, poisoning the soil, and all to achieve a bland and lifeless look. So glad that suburbs aren't a thing where I live.
It's wild that some people seem to just fucking hate nature. This thing is here, keeps us all alive, we exist in dependence to it, is beautiful in so many ways, can be an honest-to-god antidepressant and boomer mentality people just hate it.
It's benign to them. They've got that warped sense of modernism that gave us hydroelectric dams in any space that could fit one. We've conquered nature and now it's a subservient background feature whose value comes from entertaining or feeding us. If it doesn't do one of those two things, even if we can see it feeding a bee or a bird, it detracts from the thing nearest to it which entertains or feeds us.
When people defend boomers i just assume they are way younger than me and have not had the life time of insane interactions I've had with them
Edit. And you think the suburban ones are bad. Try being in ag. Those fuckers are real sickos. Boomer ranchers hate trees. Boomer farmers love the green round up revolution and are openly hostile to any alternative way of growing that they will go out of their way to get you out of their community
Yeah most farmerd don't care and farms of that scale are using immigrant labor. And those guys either don't understand that plastic doesn't break down or straight up don't care. I'm sure it's both.
I leased land from a lady that just let all her abandoned flower beds just get over grown and would leave all the plastic weed mats and irrigation in the ground. Had to pull up tons of it to clean up the field i was leasing.
They don't care. Most of them are extremely isolated and miserable. Even in farm communities they all hate each other and all of them are willing to cut their neighbor off at the knees to take their account. It's really just a prime example of what only seeking profit does to people.
Boomer ranchers hate trees
thousands of miles of tree windbreaks devised during the Dustbowl have all been dozed because of these freaks. oh and what do you know soil erosion is getting worse again :thonk-cri:
If you LOVE your LAWN then you will REPLACE that INVASIVE grass with BEAUTIFUL and NATURAL species of PLANTS
But I have a desperate attachment to my grass with three separate diseases on top of multiple other environmental issues I can't fix but can be charged hundreds of dollars yearly to maintain. Those plants might feed a pollinator for free.
maybe try and trick them into thinking that the native grass is really fashionable
Then it would need less water and wouldn't get all those diseases. My boss only gets to drive a sports car if the turf is diseased.
grasslands are also natural though. Just not the monoculture curated ones known as "lawns"
Or you can be like some people I know and replace it with
litterastroturf to save water :bern-disgust:I tried to tell them about that and how it was literally litter with a different physical form and their boomer brains just shut me out with
"Yes but we really just want to see some green out there"
:grillman:
Like that's where their mind went: they had destroyed the natural world, so they sought to replace it with a facsimile which would destroy it further
:guts-rage:
She called them “vile little creatures” and wished there was a way to kill them all.
How could you feel so much hatred to the little tree rodents? I love little squirrels, just like all rodents
They had apparently dug up some bulbs she planted. In a yard where she's otherwise destroyed the food sources and not replaced them with any edible species, the desperation of an animal to turn to a non-choice food or one that's accidentally edible should be punished. We should eradicate the thing we're starving for no reason.
They had apparently dug up some bulbs she planted.
Well that much is a little understandable. I can't look at snails the same way anymore after they ate all my corn and pumpkins. But squirrels? Just stick a fuckin bird feeder out there and maybe they'd leave your tulip bulbs alone
Even with garden pests, there are ways to deter them with trap crops or barriers. Snails have a similar ecological importance which we need to respect as a practical matter. If it isn't fulfilled, the metabolic rift grows and we get whatever toxic byproducts occur from an unbalanced ecosystem. They're turning non-edible decomposing matter into edible snail for larger species which do their own critically important labour.
Where do you learn more about these decoy plants and whatnot without spending a lot of money on trial and error?
https://www.nature-and-garden.com/gardening/slugs-snails-natural-control.html
I always go for flowering ones. Marigolds are a great option because they'll congregate on a flower and you can just pluck-and-toss it. Trap plant is the proper name for it.
one of the reasons why I can't bring myself to buy a house in the suburbs is my full awareness I'll be surrounded by boomer lawn pedants who will send passive aggressive letters complaining about the state of the front yard
In my area, houses near the city are usually built from the late 19th century to early 20th century. Beautiful Victorian homes with reasonable lawns. Like enough for you enjoy greenery, but not insane enough for you to waste money and time maintaining it every week.
The only problem is that these houses cost $1 million+ because they’re so close to the city :rust-darkness: if I have to live this in this god forsaken country forever, I need to make enough money for these houses. That or I’m renting for the rest of my life :rust-darkness:
Dandelion is imported from Europe. Try picking out some native wildflowers, the grazing animals can't get enough of it.
One of the reasons I was called out to both lawns was to spray 2,4-D across their entire lawn to kill any broadleaf plant. These people inspect their yards for weeds and call in like hungry ghosts if god forbid a dandelion supports pollinators while bringing subsurface minerals to their turf. When I see their neighbours' lawns full of dandelions though, lol they aren't my customer hell yeah keep truckin'.
The dandelions and clover next door are your job security. You know they're going to seed your clients' lawn year in and year out.
These are specifically the people so far in denial that they'll shell out for anything to preserve their lawn. I'm also doing their shrubs and trees so I can say things like "wow these roses are great. You should plant more", but anything which threatens them canceling lawncare services right after I've been there violates job security. Once I'm done with this season, I'm contracting myself out as a pollinator bolshevik though.
That business might be my next step. I took this because the parks department didn't call me in for an interview and the value of those properties looks good on a resume when I apply for something meaningful next year. I figure by the end of the summer I'll be able to walk onto any lawn, point out everything wrong with it, point out how much it will cost to fix any of that, and ramble about ecology until they shut up and give me money to replace it with something real. It's a Sinclair in the slaughterhouse kind of thing where I'll hopefully be able to stoke a healthy hatred by the end of it.
Irrigation tech pays better than my current gig so it's definitely on the table if I can't find a horticulture job at $20/hr.
I think a lot of suburbanites who might otherwise be happy with native plants are kept in line by wanting to look "normal" and "presentable" to their neighbors. So if you can come up with a planting scheme for your local area that's environmentally sane, while still being mostly green and low to the ground, I think you'd be able to get more people to hire you for pollinator bolshevism.
(And obviously the people who want a full natural meadow are cooler than the above, and nothing will convince the "kill all the squirrels, poison the land!" people. I just think you can probably get a lot of people on board with mosses or clovers or whatever grows in your area.)
Before their lot was developed, it would have been classified as oak scrubland: https://thenaturecollective.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Overview_Quercus-dumosa1.jpg
When I as someone transitioning into ecology look at that, I see it in terms of available niches and energy transfer. In a habitat that rich you're talking hundreds of roles for life to carve out and untold numbers of calories for them. A very fragile highland ecosystem where their other migration options involve fewer calories and places to hide. To develop that plot is violence. It's displacing the wildlife that aren't eradicated, and like humans you can only displace them so far before they're no longer able to meet their needs. But now they have their plot and its 5 species of allowable plants, only one of them native. So the insects/animals that evolved to consume those native plants in abundance find a few shitty ornamental specimens. If they consume them, they're poisoned by the herbicides and insecticides used to protect the ornamental value. That starvation is violence even if the insects and animals aren't poisoned. Then you get the inputs. 4lbs of nitrogen per 1000 square feet of turf, and it goes straight to the water table where it gives us algae blooms and Lou-Gehrig's Disease: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-algae-blooms-linked-to-lou-gehrig-s-disease/ . Broadleaf herbicides that target whatever are the non-carcinogenic treatment option, but they don't do anything to control weeds longterm either so you have to poison it 5x a year every year. Insecticides help temporarily control the numerous species of destructive mites and beetles, the only life the lawn supports. The nitrogen and phosphorus used to fertilise the lawn is agricultural-grade and are specifically the kinds we're desperately short of.
If for all the effort and poison that lawn looks beautiful, nobody but you can use it. You can't risk to damage it, it's your property and carefully cultivated domain, the world is a threat to it. Its existence is deprivation of habitat, calories, resources, and space to everything except you. The prestige value of an aristocrat shouting "look how much land I don't need to farm" to starving peasants with their lawn is translated into modern systems of expansionary colonialism as we destroy undervalued habitats for overvalued housing. Fuck lawns to death.
I think that might still be regarded as correlative but like hell am I keen to find out how causative it is. Of course these lawns have storm drains emptying into rivers right outside of them.
first time i saw a bag of that whole lawn pesticide that you use to utterly carpet bomb the lawn and transform it into a sterile desert i felt a bit sick. part of me hoped it wasn't commonly used
Super commonly and with zero oversight if you aren't the one paying to poison your lawn. I might not get any of it on their neighbours', but that doesn't mean runoff won't drench it. I'll tell them to stay off it for four hours as people walk on the freshly-sprayed sidewalk outside with their dogs.
Okay so fuck all of this but also I grew up mowing a lawn and my parents’ neighbors always sprayed pesticides everywhere. I’d love to eventually just replace my grass entirely. So what is an approachable first project for this kind of eco-conscious gardening if I don’t know shit beyond “keep your grass short or your neighbors will judge you”?
It depends on how much you think you can get away with but a very easy first step is to aerate your lawn and overseed it with white clover, the clover will fix nitrogen making your grass greener and eliminate the need for fertilizer, flower to feed pollinators, and grows short so you can mow high without impacting it much and keeping the HOA busybodies happy
If you have a little more leeway reach out to your states department of natural resources, there are biologists on staff who are a public service to assist with recommendations, species selection, etc. I used to tell people to just let the lawn grow and let succession run it’s course but in practice I’ve found you end up just getting a shitload of invasives
Mother's comment is solid. In addition to that, I'd look into locality-specific xeri/zeroscaping laws. Here we have water restrictions so there's a state-level ban on HOAs interfering with xeriscaping. The same neighbourhoods with these plague lawns also have lovely mulch and flower ones. Start thinking about what role you'd like areas to serve and how you'd like to allocate that space between yourself and whatever else might benefit from the lawn. There's still space where you want something to walk on and plants like clover and thyme are fine for that (minus bees, but you're helping bees). If there's unused space, what could it support and how much of the native flora can you bring back? Something productive for you and good for the environment like beehives, something ornamental and good for the environment like a pollinator garden, maybe it's too shady for most plants but it could be a rest area for birds with food and water. If I'm not using an area of my lawn for myself I've seeded it with wildflowers/clover/alfalfa for the things that could use it. Whatever areas you don't want to cultivate for one reason or another, rocks and mulch are both walkable while looking more interesting than grass. Even tossing down native grasses and letting them go a little high is providing habitat for native insects that evolved to live there.
The advice you've gotten from happybadger and Mother below is great. As a pollination biologist the best advice of what to plant in my experience is native flowering plants > ornamental analogues to native flowering plants > ornamental flowering plants > non flowering plants. For example if you can find a sage native to your area that's better to plant than a non-native sage, which is better than say a petunia, which is better than grass.
my dad will mow the lawn twice a week but let poison ivy go unchecked for 10 years
the best part is he doesn't even get affected by poison ivy lul
I hate them too. They're literally killing the planet with their pesticides.
jesus fucking christ, these people hate looking at anything but the most barren field devoid of any color besides green
plant some fucking clover, it looks better
