Weeds are very easily pulled without damaging anything in a rock garden. Also it doesn’t require fertilizer or water (except for a very small amount for those small bushes).
I feel like this can still be a native lawn depending on which biome it’s in. Seems more desert like than a prairie/forest type “native lawn” you might traditionally think of.
But yeah native can look different depending on location so I might be ok with this
Is the native landscape a rock garden? If you live in the Mojave: Go nuts, but that black rock is going to bake your house and drive up your carbon dioxide usage. Plants breathe just like animals do and that increases humidity locally, and in dry climates that can be a significant cooling effect. Essentially cheap evaporative cooling.
Remember it’s not just about saving honey bees! Honey bees are domesticated, which means that humans will make sure that they have food and shelter and appropriate medicine and care throughout the year to ensure they make honey.
Saving “the bees” moreso means saving wild, native, often times solitary bees like bumblebees or carpenter bees that don’t produce honey but that also aren’t domesticated - they have no safety net that humans give them.
Those bees along with all other pollinators like bats, birds, and other insects are the ones at risk!
Still, we should all consider growing native yards to return habitat back to these dying species!
I have lived at my current property for nearly 7 years now, and while I cut the main area up against the house once a week, I typically let the rest grow out for a month. Never used sprays other than flea and tick for my dog’s yard, and never even pulled weeds.
Still, it’s almost all completely homogenous grass. Not sure what species, but it doesn’t grow very high. 3-5 inches. No wildflowers have encroached, no other grasses except clover, not even weeds other than dandelion. The only other thing that grows anywhere is some English ivy that’s pissing me off all over the house. Every time I pull some out and dig up the root, I find more a few days later.
Still, MUCH higher insect, pollinator, and other wildlife activity vs my previous residence. It’s been nice seeing fireflies again, even if it’s still nowhere near what it was when I was a kid.
Our yard is about 3" of top soil on top of basically solid clay. When we moved in a little over a decade ago I tried taking on the dandelions, but I quickly pivoted to planting clover. Now we have tons of the stuff, fewer dandelions despite no chemicals (not that I really mind them anymore), and our yard smells fantastic in mid to late spring when all the clover is in full bloom. Tons and tons of bees, crickets, etc. We re-did a flower bed and intentionally planted swamp milk weed and red crocosmia in it. They look fantastic together and the bees absolutely love it, not to mention the butterflies.
But yeah. About English ivy. Been fighting that stuff for years…
The EU has uncultivated land subsidies. To avoid overproduction of food and overexploitation of the land, the EU pays farmers to keep their land uncultivated. Some countries, like mine, force farmers to uncultivate their land once every N years, and, of course, they get subsidies for this.
In my region, farmers will plant flowers and let weed grow, since they’re not putting any pesticide. They let the flowers and weeds die and rot at the end of the season. This way, they dont have to put as much fertilizer the next year. I’ve always seen these uncultivated fields full of bees and other pollinators in summer.
That happens in the US too. It’s why there’s New York addresses that own huge “fields” of land that’s usually a wetland. The marginal land is protected and they get a corn subsidy from the government to not farm the land.
I started doing clover in my yard a year ago and there are so many bees and butterflies now. My neighbor was like “why are you doing that yo your grass??? The previous owners took so long to make that yard look nice”
I dont really do anything about weeds anymore. I let the dandelions do their things. I have some patches of crab grass but it doesnt bother me. The clover doesnt grow very high but when it is full bloom you can tell when it is walked on in high traffic. We have wild turkeys too and they will roost on the clover and it leaves imprints in the ground but it springs back after a day or so.
I couldn’t find a source for this, but I heard that we were convinced to think of dandelions as weeds by the makers of a herbicide so that we would accept the collateral damage.
Dandelions were brought to North America as a food crop. We can eat every part of the plant. They’re an invasive species, but not what I would consider a weed.
Theres only one plant in my yard i consider a “weed”. It grows almost like a carrot or a parsnip. But it grows a long thick root straight down and has a small leafy part on top. And when you pluck them out it leaves a cone shaped hole. No clue what it is but ive been calling it a tuber lol
We have a chemical free yard that I also plant clover in. The high traffic areas are more clover than grass, which makes me think it holds up better. The clover also turns green earlier in the spring and stays green longer of we’re having a dry spell in the summer. Clover helps keep the grass happy and the pair seem to do a decent job keeping dandelions down, but we have them in our yard too. They don’t bother me at all personally and our kids like them. Thistles are not that common in our yard, but when they pop up I’ll spot treat them since they’re painful to walk on.
When I moved in the grass was pretty close to the picture in the meme. I liked it at first but then I realized how expensive it was going to be to upkeep and how bad it is for the local ecosystem. I have successfully undone most of that work literally just by planting clover and not mowing down to the bone.
If only everyone realized that grass is just a weed and not worth the maintenance and effort we put into it, it’s sad how ubiquitous it is in some places
I prefer a garden full of grown weeds than a clean grass cutted one. If a weed can grow and prosper without me watering it once a day, I think they deserve the right to be there more than anything my father ever planted on his yard that would die without getting water for 3 days or too much rain water.
Agreed, except thistle plants can go fuck themselves. I rip those out at least once a month and they keep coming back and crowding out the plants I want.
You could have some potted plants that have simple flowers that polonaters like unlike the really ornate ones. A couple times a year I try to start new patches of native milk weed on random segments of land along the roadside.
Few symptoms of old fashioned boomer-standard death cult mentality are as insidious and understated as the obsession with inch-high fuzzy green obedience rectangles and their hatred of viable ecosystems.
It looked like that for exactly one summer. Not it’s mixed again. And the lower half of the property is literal wilderness anyway. A mother deer with two fawns likes it a lot. The other plots are also completely mixed, and so large that we just have sheep on there to avoid mowing. Bonus: They’re tame, fluffy, cuddly and warm.
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