I’m very much a proponent of “food not lawns” but I’m also fucking realistic that a ton of people do not have the resources/time/energy and getting into gardening is daunting as fuck. I’ll excitedly encourage it but if people can’t or even just don’t want to then that’s FINE. I hate the posts full of pictures of idealistic food lawns. Even outside of the actual growing and care, just processing a harvest takes so much damn time and More Energy and More Resources or Techniques and acting like it’s as simple as “just grow your own food!” is setting people up for a huge letdown when they realize how much that can take
i watered my garden every single day it didn’t rain last summer. no matter how tired i was, i had to go trundle around with the hose and the watering can. because i didn’t use pesticides, i lost all my pumpkins and squashes to a squash borer. my carrots didn’t really amount to much. all my watermelons died on the vine, tiny. my grape vine still hasn’t fruited. my herbs pretty much universally croaked. my lettuces looked great but were sobitter. i didn’t harvest my cabbages in time and only got to eat one–the slugs got the rest. i planted a bunch of peppers and got almost nothing from them, just weird little gnarled green fists.
then i got an absolutely absurd amount of cucumbers and turned every single jar in my house into a pickle container. i’m still working my way through the six gallon freezer bags of frozen beefsteak tomatoes that august produced.
your garden will produce way less of a lot of stuff you want and way more of some stuff you’re not prepared to consume or preserve. you have to water, to weed, to think about sun exposure, to debate about pesticides.
i love gardening! it’s great, it keeps you grounded, it feels wonderful to materially contribute to the local ecosystem, to see the wasps and spiders and bees and butterflies, and fresh tomatoes are delicious! but it’s SO MUCH MORE WORK THAN A LAWN.
Hi, indigenous person here with good news: The food not lawn doesn’t have to be food -for humans-
You can do amazing work for your local ecosystem by replacing your lawn with native wildflowers, shrubs, and trees. Which have the added benefit of generally not needing any looking after -because they are native and evolved to be there-
The following infographics are going to be North American (and specifically Northeast) centric because guess where I’m from:
^^ this is it, and “what would happen if you did LESS maintenance” is such a good question to center with.
In terms of human food, I’m a big fan of allotment/community garden style food production, where you go away from your immediate home to a place shared with others with individual personal plots for the purpose of producing food. People are available to help, it creates a place to go, it becomes a social center, you can have events and work days, and if you form enough relationships then someone will be available to (say) water your plants through the tricky periods or during vacations; plus, if you get bored or hate the work, you simply stop paying dues and hand the plot to the next eager person. Of course, this isn’t available everywhere - but setting one up might be a valuable use of time and energy, with more resilience than converting your home plot to something high-maintenance.
There’s also a middle ground to all of these. Having less lawn and more native plants is a more practical option or starting point for a lot of people than converting their entire property to native plants at once. Start small whether it’s with native landscaping or food gardens.
Growing natives isn’t necessarily lower maintenance, just different maintenance. They might not need weekly pruning and watering but they do need weeding and a good clean up in the spring or fall. Yes, they’re adapted to your local environment but we have changed that environment profoundly and your front yard, surrounded by cement, partially shaded by trees, with the only grazers being rabbits is a very different environment to a wide open prairie with frequent flooding, seasonal grazing by a wide array of large herbivores, and semi-annual fires. (Assuming you live in an area that was formerly plains, we’re also not even going to talk about invasive plants, worms, bacteria, diseases, soil compaction, etc etc etc)
Give yourself the room and permission to learn in your garden. You will need to acquire new skills to succeed and you will absolutely fail at some things in the process. You will plant things in a location you think will be perfect and they will struggle along or die. You will plant other things that were only supposed to get 3’ tall and instead are taller than you. It’s all part of the process and fun. Start small, get a hang of the new techniques, then grow from there.
As a person who tends other people’s gardens for a living, I’m going to disagree and say that native plant gardens are way lower maintenance, though I do recognize that this might be different in different ecolosystems.
One of my clients keeps their yard as a mostly native plant space, with a bit of sad lawn because it’s too shady to grow well. I go out there two or three times a year, for about 2 hours each time. While I’m there, I remove any invasive plants, and thin the under story (as they’ve fenced it, so the deer can’t do their job), and occasionally expand the planted areas into the lawn by adding plants, roughly 75% of which are native, and the remaining 25% are adapted to similar climates but are not invasive.
Compare that with most of my other clients, who have similar sized yards, that are a mix of ornamental plantings & lawn. I visit them every other week from April to the end of October, about two hours each visit. I’m pruning, deadheading, trimming, weeding, mulching, dividing, mowing, raking leaves, etc etc etc.
I think it’s helpful to remember that lawns and purely ornamental gardens started as a way to show off wealth, because of how much work they take to maintain. But just because that’s how they started, doesn’t mean they have to continue that way.
From my experience, if you live in an area that was forested, the easiest way to have a yard is to have native trees, with native under story plants, and then leave the leaves & conifer needles alone. Go through regularly and remove any invasive species. If there aren’t enough herbivores and the under plantings start getting congested, start pruning out the oldest stems of multi-stem shrubs- maybe every other year, maybe less often. More specific maintenance is going to depend on your type of forest- not all of them evolved with regular burning.
If you’re starting a forest from scratch, I highly recommend you start by putting down a thick layer of woodchips. That’ll help kill/prevent weeds, increase soil moisture retention, and help keep the soil cool in summer, much like the shade from a forest.
If you’re trying to make an ornamental garden less work:
1. Mulch with woodchips and then plant a ground cover. Do not let soil be bare. Ideally, have multiple layers of foliage, so the soil is very shaded- makes it way harder for weeds to get established.
2. Stop watering. Plants are much more capable of getting their own water than a lot of peels think- and if it can’t in your climate, really think about whether you want it. Watering also makes it easier for weeds to grow.
3. For every tree and shrub, look up its adult width, and plant it no closer to another shrub or tree (unless you’re doing a layered forest on purpose, in which case consider how tall they’ll get), and make sure you plant them far enough away from paths, fences, and buildings that you won’t have to prune them away.
4. Learn which weeds are invasive and will take over, and which you can live with. Bindweed vs dandelion, for example. Ignore the ones you can live with.
5. For things that die back to the ground, mulch every fall. That alone will reduce your weeding by a lot.
6. Figure out which native plants will work in your yard. Some are very adaptable (see: self-heal) and some are much more particular (trout lily). Keep in mind that your region isn’t just one kind of ecosystem- and there’s a lot of habitats within each ecoregion.
I really appreciate native plants because they are so important to other native species- particularly native bees. There’s a lot of bees that are dependent on particular native species, and for whom lavender and all the rest of the non- native flowers people say to “plant to save the bees” do nothing. The best way to save native bees (and birds, and butterflies, and, and, and) is by planting native species & creating habitat
I do agree with the previous poster in large part though.
These are a few of my Sempervivum tectorum (hen and chicks). They make me happy because they have so many unique details in their individual plant clusters. They are extremely hardy and have a strong drought resistance. The container that they are in was made from old heat treated pallet wood from one of my decommissioned compost bins (non treated wood). And because my focus is on compost and food, the plump leaves of this succulent are edible raw. Go easy at first to avoid a upset stomach.
These are a few of my Sempervivum tectorum (hen and chicks). They make me happy because they have so many unique details in their individual plant clusters. They are extremely hardy and have a strong drought resistance. The container that they are in was made from old heat treated pallet wood from one of my decommissioned compost bins (non treated wood). And because my focus is on compost and food, the plump leaves of this succulent are edible raw. Go easy at first to avoid a upset stomach.
This is our version of Ecological Accounting. These are 50 days in and we have only had to cover them with Agribond twice.
Atlanta Urban Agriculture.
Seriously….. Atlanta Urban Ag.
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9/9/21 ~ Getting a little cooler here.. still hot as hell though . Still hot enough to germinate my fall garden outdoors. Planted these babies in the raised bed today.
8/9/21 ~ Edamame update. Think I’m gonna let these dry up & use them as seeds next year. I only planted 2 of these & that’s just not enough for eating .
