Posted on 24th June 2010 by Mish in food | frugal | gardening
anti-lawn, grass, lawns, no lawns, urban farm, urban homestead
I’m still trying to find a purpose for lawns…other than golf. I really can’t. I mean, it’s nice for my kids to have a grassy area to play soccer on, but other than that…
In fact, lawns are pretty new to America. According to American-Lawns.com, “Green, weed-free lawns so common today didn’t exist in America until the late 18th century. Instead, the area just outside the front door of a typical rural home was typically packed dirt or perhaps a cottage garden that contained a mix of flowers, herbs, and vegetables.
In England, however, many of the wealthy had sweeping green lawns across their estates. Americans with enough money to travel overseas returned to the U.S. with images of the English lawn firmly planted in their imaginations. Try as we might, it wasn’t as easy to reproduce a beautiful English lawn. After all, they couldn’t just run down to their local hardware store and pick up a bag of grass seed. Grasses native to America proved unsuitable for a tidy and well-controlled lawn, and our extreme climate was less than hospitable to the English grass seeds.
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Technorati Tags: anti-lawn, grass, lawns, no lawns, urban farm, urban homestead
Posted on 9th June 2010 by Mish in frugal | gardening
frugal, garden, gardening, grass, grass-cutting, lawnmowers, lawns, money, organic gardening, time
How? Tear up your lawn. No, seriously.
I hate lawns. I hate green grass, sitting there, doing nothing but waiting to be cut. And then cut again. We have a huge lawn at our new house. So much in fact that the house came with a lawn tractor. And it’s not even nice, golf course style lawn. It’s ugly, cabbagey lawn. So, as part of my urban homestead plan, I have been bidding as much lawn as I possible can “goodbye.”
What’s the point of a lawn? No one knows. I can’t find anyone who can tell me why having lawn is a good thing. In fact, a History of Lawns in America, published by American-Lawns.com tells us that it wasn’t until the American Garden Club “decided” that Americans should have nice, neat little lawns – to go along with their nice, neat “little boxes on the hillside made of ticky-tacky,” that most Americans started to grow them: “Through contests and other forms of publicity, they convinced home owners that it was their civic duty to maintain a beautiful and healthy lawn. So effective was the club’s campaign that lawns were soon the accepted form of landscaping. The garden club further stipulated that the appropriate type of lawn was “a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mown at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green, and neatly edged.” America thus entered the age of lawn care.”
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Technorati Tags: frugal, garden, gardening, grass, grass-cutting, lawnmowers, lawns, money, organic gardening, time
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