Why we are Here or: Grass Lawns and why Monoculture can be Less Desireable

Picture the ideal lawn. Not necessarily yours, but what you expect would show up in a Google image search for "lawn." 

You get pictures of perfectly manicured grass yards, either uniformly one shade of green or crisp alternating lines from precision mowing. 

Did you picture dead spots, clover patches, dandelions evenly distributed,  tall and unruly grass, mushrooms, wood sorrel and other small flowers, all in several shades of green from various grass species and broadleaf "weeds?" If you did, then I have one question for you: why are you standing in front of my house?

Not mine, but close.

I want to introduce folks to my thought process when it comes to lawns. It is multi-faceted, but honestly, the biggest reason why Third-Acre Farms exists. We aim to teach, and I think the biggest lesson we will ever share is about why typical monoculture yards are not what we at Third-Acre consider an "ideal lawn." 

Part One: A Brief History of Lawns

I recently heard a quote about how all of our opinions and thought processes have been developed for us by corporations and advertisers all in a 30 year period between the 1920s and the 1950s. At first, I thought, "Naw, that can't be," but the more I look at everything we do, I'm starting to realize it holds some water. One of those things is the American Lawn.

Now, the lawn did not start in this period, it has its roots (ha) way back into the 16th century. Grass lawns came a bit later as a status symbol saying "Look, we are so wealthy, we don't need to use this land to grow our own crops." It however was post-war America where the suburban lawn began to take hold. Developers dreamed of families having their own miniature 'estates' where the single-family home would sit away from the road, have a private driveway, and a lush green lawn all to show status. Each family could now own their own miniature private estate and truly feel wealthy.

So, what were these lawns made up of? Well, everything! Commercial grass seed had been developed some time ago, but the average lawn was a mixture of grasses, clovers, and other groundcover plants natural to the area. In fact, an Ideal lawn was considered to be grass and clover, until 'Big Chem' developed artificial fertilizer. The problem was, they couldn't figure out how to fertilize the grass without choking out the clover. Clover, as discussed here, is a nitrogen-fixing plant. If the ground is artificially amended with nitrogen (the stuff that makes grass green) the clover gets choked out. The solution: gaslight America into thinking clover is an evil weed that needs to be destroyed. These companies launched massive ad campaigns that changed our collective image of an ideal lawn. Now, your status symbol isn't just having a lawn, it is having a perfectly trimmed, full, monoculture of non-native grass.

*Results may vary. Dead lady not included.
**May cause cancer, and dead ladies.

Part Two: Why I Changed My Mind

In 2019, my family moved out of the city and into a suburb. The previous owners of our house had a lawn service who would mow and fertilize regularly, and the lawn looked atrocious. There was a large neglected circle of "landscaping" in the middle which was taken over by poison ivy and the wrong variety of Hosta for a full sun location (I mean honestly, variegated dark greens go in partial shade. What are you thinking?). There was a patch of bare dirt that encompassed a third of the front yard that had thistles and plantain growing around it. The underground sprinkling was non-functioning. We moved in in the fall, so I ignored all of this until the spring of 2020 when I had copious amounts of time at home for one reason in particular. 

Thanks pal...

The back yard was very patchy as well, plus I had just torn out a dangerously rotten swing set and needed to fill that area in. I couldn't afford grass seed at the time, because of all that lack of work, but I remembered the clover I had growing in one corner of my old yard. I'd always take notice of how when I would mow it down, there was always a nice layer of green happy clover waiting for me below the layer I had just cut off. If it was so good at filling in space, could this be an option for the back?

I did some research and found a whole slew of benefits, but I still wanted to be a responsible yard owner, so I decided I'd keep it to the back of the house. I found a 5lb bag on Amazon for $20 and seeded the whole backyard. Meanwhile, I worked on the front hardcore to get my lawn on par with my neighbors'. It needed to be thicker, darker, less weedy, and complete. I fixed the irrigation, watered a ton, used a lot of weed and feed product, and went on the hunt for deep-rooted weeds by hand. By fall, my lawn looked amazing. 

By spring of 2021, the weeds had started to return, the grass started to dry out, and moles obliterated the uniformity. Money was now incredibly tight. The township sent angry letters warning me that my yard wasn't up to their standard, so I was forced to turn my irrigation on during peak water prices. In the meantime, my backyard looked amazing. The clover was thick and green, I didn't spend a single dollar on fertilizer, and not one drop of water touched it that hadn't fallen from a cloud. Something clicked in my head, and I called the township. I asked, "What are the regulations on what I can and cannot grow in my front yard?" The answer was "You cannot have bare dirt, and you cannot block any sightlines for drivers around corners." Ok, bet!

You see, if I'm going to have to spend $300+ a year on fertilizer and water just to keep my lawn from becoming bare dirt, I'd rather that money and effort benefit me somehow. The declaration: No. More. Grass.

Part Three: Lawn and Monoculture Alternatives

"Okay, so you're tearing out the grass. What are you replacing it with?" Glad you asked! Let's take a look at some options and then I'll describe what we decided for our home.

Microlawn Mix 

As I discussed above, adding clover to your lawn can greatly improve the biodiversity, appearance, and health of a monoculture lawn. You can create your own microlawn by simply adding clover seed. White Dutch clover is a fantastic choice as all pollinators can utilize it (bees cannot reach the nectar in red or purple clover). This is a very popular choice, so of course major corporations have jumped on the bandwagon and are now selling seed mixes of fescues and micro clover varieties. I don't hate this because they are recognizing a paradigm shift, which hopefully leads to less harsh chemicals being pushed as the only way to have a nice lawn. Now, I will admit that a microlawn is still grass. Grass isn't bad; I'm intending on keeping my back yard as a microlawn. The downside to this is it still needs to be mowed as the grass will continue growing whereas the clover will reach a shorter max height.

Thyme

There are varieties of "Creeping Thyme" (Elfin, Wooly, Purple Carpet) that grow low to the ground and form a ground cover that is highly resistant to foot traffic. It is related to the culinary Thyme, and is actually edible just like its cousin. It starts slow but will quickly fill in your space in a year or two as it spreads. It doesn't need fertilizer and doesn't need to be mowed. Walking on it is totally ok, and it releases a fresh herb scent as you do! Plus the purple and pink flowers really put on a show in the summer.

Landscaping

Fill your yard with landscape features! Plant trees, place accent boulders, add shrubs, and build up some terraces. This can be an extremely expensive option, but the biodiversity will be huge! Everyone seems to have some sort of landscape "island" as an accent in their yard. Usually these spaces need less water and fertilizer because they utilize hardier plants such as shrubs and perennial bulbs which quickly become established. Obviously the bigger the island, the less water and mowing has to be done.

Garden boxes

Not a lot of people seem to be brave enough to plant their garden in the front yard, but I love it when I see it! Utilize all the space you can to grow food for your family! This will consume a lot of water, possibly more than the grass, and it will be more work, but you actually get something out of it rather than perpetuating the mass gaslighting that grass lawns are somehow the only good option.

So, which option did we choose? All of them!

Here's the plan. We wanted to get rid of the grass and replace it with something that would give back. The top priority is food that doesn't need a lot of care or planting. For this, we started looking into permaculture and perennial foods. There's a trivia question you may come across that asks "What are the only two perennial vegetables?" The general answer is Asparagus and Rhubarb. The true answer is mind blowing. Hosta is edible, daylilies are edible, dock, ramps, and ostrich ferns are all edible and perennial! There are tons of options.

This exploration into permaculture led us to food forests, where you build a forest ecosystem from trees down to ground cover of all edible plants. We'll do a full post on this later, but what you need to know for now is that we decided this would be the crown jewel of our front yard. We planted peach trees, hosta, strawberries, kiwi, saskatoon berries, juniper, daylilies, turnips, chives, saffron crocus, and even mushrooms in our food forest.

From there we decided on a 3 year plan where we would slowly add islands of themed plants across our whole yard all the way up to the house. Each island is connected by walking paths throughout to connect and separate them at the same time. Kind of like a botanical garden. The islands we have planned are the food forest, fruit shrubs, herbs, tea and medicinal flowers, tubers and root crops, "floral vegetables", butterfly and pollinator meadow, berry bramble, and a Japanese-style reading garden.

In the meantime as we work through our 3 year plan, we top dressed the yard with White Dutch clover to fill the bare spots as we are no longer going to water the lawn, full stop. So we have 75% of our lawn still "installed" as a microlawn. But on top of this, we aren't mowing either. We started it off as No Mow May, but the thistle, purple clover, and fleabane look so good and bring so many bees and butterflies to the yard that we extended it indefinitely! Every 2 weeks I use the weed trimmer to top all the grass that is poking up over the clover, but that's it.

The last problem I needed to solve was how to protect my food from snow plows and cars parked along the side of the road. Well, I do have a 4' wide perfectly manicured lawn strip along the road as a buffer zone. But something is lying in wait just out of sight. It's creepy,  it's crawly, it's creeping thyme! I top dressed this grass with hardy thyme which will out-compete the grass once established, especially if I don't water. In a few years, that entire strip will be thyme and the grass will be gone!

So that's where we are.

I wanted to walk through the thought process that brought us to this blog so that you know why we're doing this whole crazy project. The last aspect of this all is you, and the rest of the community. I want to take my experiences, the lessons I learn, and share them with others as a way to teach the community a little bit about self-sustainability, organic gardening, urban and suburban food production, and other environmental benefits of growing something other than grass.