Over the past several months, I've become somewhat of a treehugging hippie (I know some of you think I already was, but I've taken it to a new level). I've started composting in massive quantities and started gardening. I also have a lot of plans for rain barrels, a gray water reclamation system and a homemade solar hot water heater amongst other things.
One of the things that I've been giving a lot of thought to is my lawn. Lawns are a pain in the butt to maintain, require unholy amounts of water, collectively generate more pollution from fertilizer runoff than farms and are completely unnatural.
For a month or two now, I've had a tab open in Firefox to this great article in the New Yorker:
Turf Wars
It talks about how we ended up with the absurd and unsustainable idea that everyone needed to have a patch of land covered with the exact same type of grass. It also discusses what we had before and a lot of the problems with lawns. I highly recommend reading it.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my lawn. I have a hill in my back yard that I planted grass on to keep it from eroding, but now it's mostly dead. For the bigger part of it, which is a little ways off from the house, I'm going to plant a 'meadow mix' of seed that will grow a mix of wildflowers and other plants. This will control the erosion, but will also require less water and maintenance, and will look good.
I've got big plans for the other half of the back yard, too, but they're a lot more involved and so will take a lot more time and effort (and money...) to pull off.
It's the front yard that's the real problem. Currently, it's just grass with some mulched areas next to the house. I've basically decided that I won't water the lawn, so it's not very nice right now. I'm not sure what I'm going to do there, but whatever it is, it will involve the elimination of most of the grass and replacing it with some sort of drought-tolerant, low-maintenance landscaping.
