Sure, you could spend hours mowing, watering, seeding, fertilizing, and pest-proofing your lawn this summer.
But why would you want to?
As the climate crisis worsens, droughts make water scarce. And as fertilizer prices soar, doesn’t it make more sense to ditch your grass in favor of a garden?
Californian Sarah Lariviere sure thinks so. When the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California restricted outdoor watering in her community to two days a week, the gardener and author decided to tear up her turf and and replace it with native plants, fruit trees and other edibles, a shady Coast live oak tree, decorative walkways, and raised beds made from sticks, chicken manure, soil, and compost. The raised beds help retain water that can sustain neighboring plants. The wildflowers attract native insects. And the beauty of it all has turned Sarah’s yard into a spectacular oasis, delighting a neighborhood that is otherwise pocked by one boring lawn after another.
“It’s so beautiful,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “We can enjoy the bees, butterflies and birds… I’m amazed by how little we water.” She loves the relative sounds of silence too, since she’s no longer using a noisy lawnmower to keep her grass cut and trimmed. Skipping the lawnmower has an added climate change benefit as well. Princeton University says that it takes about 800 million gallons of gasoline annually to power lawn mowers and that 17 million additional gallons of gas are spilled in the process of using them. One four-stroke lawnmower engine operating for one hour equates to a vehicle traveling for 500 miles! Fewer power mowers can only be good for the climate, our air quality, and our health.
Here in the DC suburbs where I live, I’ve always maintained a large part of my yard lawn-free. It’s gorgeous in the spring when the azaleas bloom, inspiring when the native bottlebrush buckeye and Joy Pye Weed flower six weeks later, and a joy when the native hollies burst out in bright red berries in early winter. In the spirit of No Mow May, I ignore what little lawn is left in April and May so the clover and dandelions can feed bees and other pollinators.
“Maintaining a turfgrass lawn is increasingly impractical,” notes Kathy Jentz, editor of Washington Gardener Magazine. “How much better to use that same acreage to grow food for nourishment and/or flowers for beauty!”
Here’s another benefit to growing natives instead of grass: you’ll create a much healthier environment for your family and community. Lawns can only be maintained with enormous inputs of fertilizer and insecticides. Children are especially sensitive to pesticide exposure because they take up more chemicals relative to their body weight than do adults, reports BeyondPesticides.org. Dr. Philip Landrigan of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine concurs. A child’s “delicate developmental processes are easily disrupted by very small doses of toxic chemicals that would be virtually harmless for an adult,” he told the Washington Post.
The climate impact of lawn chemicals is significant too. Professor David Wolfe found that, for every ton of nitrogen created to make lawn fertilizer, four or five tons of carbon are added to the atmosphere. Plus, if (when…) too much fertilizer is applied to the soil, soil microbes turn the excess nitrogen into nitrous oxide gas, a greenhouse gas with 300 times the heat-trapping ability of CO2.
If you want to lose your lawn, where should you start? Your local native plant society will have lists of plants that thrive in your climate, along with folks who have already done what you want to do and will willingly share their experiences. Watch “Kill Your Lawn,” an informative seminar by ecologist Dan Jaffe Wilder that covers both the problems with lawns and tips on how to replace them. Whether your region is in drought or you just want to save water, learn more about xeriscaping, a smart and straightforward way to replace a thirsty landscape with one that is more drought tolerant. Contact your local metropolitan water district or water utility to learn about available programs that help fund your “no mo’ lawn” project.
Remember California’s Sarah Lariviere? She not only used free community compost and mulch in the new garden beds she planted. She also eventually received a rebate check for $4,700 from her Metropolitan Water District because her planting plan met their criteria for a more drought-resistant landscape so well. It’s definitely worth checking with your water district to find out if it offers a similar benefit.