You Want To Paint My What?

I think MC Hammer put it well . “ Let ’s Get It start up . ” I ’m have-to doe with tomy maiden blog :

“ From time to sentence ” is now . You go jab out the boxing baseball glove from your sporting goods bin , I ’ll put in my mouth guard , and we ’ll foregather in the alley .

If you are working on fix your landscape more sustainable , you may take a quantum bounce by taming the biggest wrongdoer — your lawn . Lawns are without a doubt the most unsustainable , resource - intensive , contaminate part of our garden . Yes , lawns sequester some carbon , but not enough to make up for their negative impact .

What do I have in mind by sustainable ? The simplest definition is a garden that resemble a natural system . It does n’t have to look like a innate system ; it just has to behave like one . That mean introducing the fewest numeral of resources ( we ’ll call them inputs ) , like potable water system , chemical plant food , pesticide , herbicides , and fogy fuel . If you populate in a climate where you do n’t have to irrigate to keep your sward green , you ’re doing well than us here in southerly California . If you have a manual push lawn mower or graze Shetland ponies in your front one thousand , here ’s to ya . Have you go all - organic with your lawn care product ? Then you’re able to tune out now . You ’re pretty darn close to zero encroachment .

What about the outputs ? Are your weekends spent pass around nationally promote miracle turf products that promise continual feeding and weed - free ontogenesis ? That ’s what I ’m talking about . Read the health warning on the burnished old bag . Most of these product are load up with stuff that can have a pretty nasty shock on our weewee supply , your Kyd ’s skin and the tune we breathe . Whether these material are leaching into the piddle tabular array or running down thegutter and into local brook , it ’s a job .

Using a top executive lawn mower ? According to the EPA , those contraptions are responsible for for5 % of the nation ’s air pollution . There are plenty more statistics I could cite , but that one says enough .

What really cheer this office wasan article in the May 2 , 2009 Los Angeles Timestitled “ Painting the town unripened — the dead lawn , that is . ” The clause business organization , David Milligan , an brave enterpriser who has been hire by the city of Perris , out in Riverside County , CA , to paint the beat lawn of foreclosed family a charming specter of green . Neighbors and the local leaders feel that neglected lawns are harming surrounding place values . They ’re probably right . Milligan is making between $ 400 and $ 700 a papa for a treatment that lasts three to four months . He ’s using biodegradable paint , so I have no beef there .

My trouble is the mindset that put all these acres of lawn in front of these raw house in the first piazza . It might be different if the lawns function a recreational value , but ninety per centum of our kids are in the house tether to their electronics anyway . Savvy developer know that people like the smell of a monotonous swath of resourcefulness - greedy turf , so they roll it out like so many square miles of verdant shag carpet .

get ’s just say that the current economy turn around on a dime bag and all these home trade like cold watermelon vine at a county bazaar . Then what ? Our atomiser paint Picasso is out of a job ( who need to make up $ 2800 a year to keep spraying the soil immature ? ) , the sprinkler come back on , and everyone stampedes the big box stores to stretch their pickup trucks with 50 pound . bags promising suburban nirvana . I recommend four access to getting our yard a draw more earth - friendly . I ’ll start simple-minded , then get more radical .

1 ) If your lawn serves a utile purpose , like playing nut with your up - and - coming Cy Young Award success , how about downsizing to the minimum necessary size of it , manage your water system wisely , blend in fossil - gratis , and pass the chemical a rest ?

2 ) If you do n’t use your lawn for recreation but think you might go through backdown without a bit of story green stuff in your thousand , hear this : Downsize the lawn and replace it with a turf specie that is adapted to your clime and can exist without being put on liveliness support . Here in Santa Barbara , people are switch to Buffalo grass and aboriginal sedge likeCarex pansaandC. praegracilis . They do n’t ask any plant food , can get by on very little summertime pee , and are pretty much pest - costless . In some of my design projects I sprinkle in a bit of milfoil and blue - eyed pasture seed , then let it “ go meadow ” . I ’m partial to a natural looking at so the meadow rarely sees a mower and the flower bring a bit of interest to an otherwise monotone swatch of green .

3 ) rive the whole lawn out and make a endearing garden of aboriginal and locally adapted ornamental . While you ’re at it , add a tree or two to make a shaded recitation area . Your reward is a beauty and function without the forethought and eating .

4 ) Grow food ! Raise chickens ! Graze llamas ! That ’s what suburbia was think to be about — folks moving from the urban center to the land to have a little rural patch of productive priming coat under their feet .

I think we ’re stuck on our obsession with lawns based mostly on a learned aesthetic . I ’ve always thought that if America had been first resolve in the southwest — with the great unwashed moving east — that homeowners in New Haven , Connecticut , would be trying to originate saguaro cactus in their yards . We ’re just used to seeing lawn . But aesthetics can and do develop . I ca n’t retrieve the last time I see a top chapeau or hood in my Land ’s End catalogue .

Perhaps Mr. Milligan can put away the blusher nebuliser and retrain his crew to build chicken coops .

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