*mogs your grass lawn*
you vill mow ze lawnyou vill plant ze grassyou vill discard the clipping in a garbage bagand you vill be happy
>>2730976as soon as the weather clears up a bit, i'm tilling up the front yard, burying the irrigation, and planting a grass/clover mix. I fuckin hate mowing. But I want my house to look decent too.
>>2730976Too high maintenance
>>2731020It's less maintenance
>>2730976>grass + clover masterraceCompost your clippings.
>>2731202Pretty much this.I leave them on the lawn,but I make a second pass to disperse any clumps.Also,mulch your leaves into the lawn in the fall.My yard was a sparse mess of weeds and sand when I first purchased my home,but it's slowly beginning to resemble a lawn without the use of herbicides or fertilizers.
>>2731204>My yard was a sparse mess of weeds and sand when I first purchased my home,but it's slowly beginning to resemble a lawn without the use of herbicides or fertilizers.Same. My lawn was completely paved over when I started out. Tore it out only to find a layer of sand on top of a layer of clay. I took a pitchfork to it to mix it up, then added a layer of acceptable topsoil.Three years down the line now, I have a lawn lined with little (grafted) pear and apple trees and a small wildflower patch. Couldn't be happier.
>>2730976I planted that shit! Fuck grass! grass is a soil eater and water hog, if you try keeping ti green year round. I've never understood the desire for a monoculture lawn. I actively try and add clovers, vetches and the like to my lawn. No fertilizers, less water, much softer to walk on!
>>2731270This
>>2730976You know what would be cool.An entire lawn of creeping thyme.Imagine how good it would smell when the wind blows.
>>2731907Herb lawns in general sound really cool. If I were in a warmer climate I'd try to make lawns out of all kinds of things. Do you think a basil lawn could reseed itself reliably if you stopped mowing when flowers appeared?
>>2731907Trve
>>2731907Creeping thyme could maybe be OK. Perennial Peanut could maybe work. But both of those are non native same way most landscaping grass is. Creeping Phlox is good for some areas here and there, but look grass lawns are ubiquitous for a reason. A well kept grass lawn is ideal, fairly low maintenance, beautiful when kept correctly, good for high traffic, uniform, etc. It's the best option. I get people want to be different and all but the best thing you can do is keep a nice well kept grass lawn and then go in with native specimen hardwoods and then layer some flowering understory trees in below them. Then do beds along borders and fences and fill them with native perennials and shrubs as you please. If you have space beyond the yard harrow it up and spread a native wildflower/grasses mix for your region. I keep a manicured lawn around the house with native hardwoods and a few natibe lines here and there. Native understory shrubs and trees underneath and alomg fencerows I make rectangular English style hedge squares from dwarf yaupon hollies and then inside of the rectangles I make raised beds with native perennials. Crossvine on the fences. Beyond the yard I'll pick a few little paddocks and pastures here and and let the red sorrel and toadflax come in on its own in early spring- it's beautiful. But once It plays out by about mid april- I mow it and start fighting the Bahia Grass all summer with the rotary mower. I'm a big fan of Southern Sugar Maple as an undersea native landscaping tree (if you are in the South east). Anyways- you MUST mow and spray if you have sizeable areas you are working with, things will simply get out of hand if you don't. knowing when and how to time it and having some restraint is the key.
>>2733731Underused* native landscaping tree.
>>2731907Might do this with lemon balm
very tempted to go about, transplanting kudzu into suburbia.
>>2733731lunatic boomers insistent on growing worthless tareshit
>>2733762That would be awesome. If lemon balm doesn't work for you then you could try lemon catnip. It has a very strong lemon smell while it's fresh so cats don't like it very much until it's had time to dry and lose most of its lemon scent.
>>2733731Grass takes more water to keep green than a lot of alternatives. Yarrow and clover are two classic examples of lawns that need less water and I've found that mugwort is a good addition to lawns, but I don't think it can grow dense enough to form a lawn by itself.
>>2733863Water is not a huge concern of mine. I got 4.5 inches in the last four days. Anyways, I've messed around with alot of alternatives, the closest to hitting the mark is Perennial Peanut. However it is inferior to a good grass. Nothing will stay as uniform as this with as little work. No irrigation, high traffic, shade and full sun. Nothing gets close. Anyways it goes without saying that natives will always be preferable to non natives, however, if I'm already making the sacrifice to have a non native grass why add clover to the mix? Sorrel etc. will grow in it naturally anyways and thicken it up. If I want to put a ground cover down around the base of trees or in some beds I'll go with the creeping phlox or villas or something but they aren't a replacement they can't take the foot traffic.
>>2733890Ok, boomer
>>2733890Now like I said outside of the immediate yard I let it go. The natives keep themselves in check for the winter. For the first month and a half of spring you get this really nice coverage of toadflax and sorrel like in the pic (which was from some time in april). By about the start of May though it begins to play-out and you have to mow it. If you mow back the sorrel a bit early might pick up a week or two of dandelions, blue eyed grass, primrose, and vervian- and some asters in places, but eventually the Bahia is going to start dominating and it will go to seed every three days or so and will get out of hand fast and you just have to keep mowing it back. You get stuck with a choice between the Bahia getting out of control or mowing back the asters/vervian/primrose. Also if you don't eventually mow you are going to get brambles, greenbriar, persimmons seedlings, live oaks, water oaks, red cedars, cherry, etc. popping up in places you don't really want them. Obviously other regions will be different though.
>>2733890Also when I refer to sorrel thickening up the grass I'm talking about yellow wood sorrel not the red sorrel. The red sorrel is obviously totally different. The yellow wood sorrel when mowed though will stay low and grow like a ground cover down in the grass
>>2730976I have bermuda now because it stays green in summer and fills in. However, it jumps and digs and now I have bermuda grass everywhere. It still looks good on the lawn.
>>2733894Here's what you get if you sparingly mow the Bahia and natives a half dozen times or so every year. It's pretty but this is like waist high in the pic so you don't want it in your yard.
>>2733901For comparison, this is predominantly native grasses (not much bahia) now if you just let this go some places would stay more or less like that and others would get wooly over time but generally areas will eventually grow up into brush if not mowed occasionally.
>>2730976clover seed costs 2-3x what fescue seed costs.
