Yeah, but if done on a sufficiently large scale it may also invite coyotes to keep the rats in check.
Of course, then the lions might move in to prey on the coyotes…
Sounds like you have a healthy attitude towards this. The kind of thing that makes you happy for privacy fences.
My neighbor has a couple of buckthorn trees growing right along the fence. I made the mistake of observing that they were essentially invasive weeds, so I think he cultivates them just to be a dick. Each year, they drop millions of seeds, and I have the pleasure of pulling millions of little seedlings…
Does your community have ordinances concerning lawn maintenance? Around here you are not allowed to simply keep your lawn unmowed. Most municipalities will send the property owner a notice, and if not complied with, will mow it and send a bill. I’m not sure if those apply to backyards as well as front.
I know that on occasion the few people who have desired to go with natural plantings in their front yards have run afoul of such ordinances.
Forget rats, the real pests you need to watch out for are hippies with drums.
Seriously, I love her labyrinth, and I love the fact that she cares not a whit about your sensibilities. I bet I could make a dozen medicines out of her “overgrown” lawn, and I applaud that she’s letting native flora take hold. I bet she’s not polluting your air or ears with loud mowing equipment or your soil with gasoline spills or herbicides or wasting water watering lawn grass never meant to grow in that environment. By your own admission, there have been no rats (which I’ve NEVER seen in long vegetation when there are yummy garbage cans and alleys nearby) or other problems.
People who are intent on growing a single invasive plant (grass) to the exclusion of every other plant in an arbitrary square of land are the ones that confuse me. Talk about perverting nature. If it takes that much effort and time to maintain a “good” lawn, maybe that should be a clue that nature doesn’t “intend” grass to grow there. It’s a stupid fashion ideal - ideal *because *it’s so hard to maintain, like pale skin among sharecroppers or thinness in a world of Big Macs and fries.
Yeah, the Board of Health will respond to specific complaints, but I’d really like to see how this all goes. It’s the back yard, so the BoH can’t act under the masquerade that they were driving by and noticed…, and I’m really not interested in involving the authorities.
Like I mentioned earlier in the thread, there was a problem with rats a couple years ago, but I think it was limited and seems to have been addressed. We also have coyotes, so I can definitely see this going in the direction you describe. We’ve also got racoons, skunks, and other critters that are really cute and cuddly-looking on iscovery Channel, but can be a terrible annoyance IRL.
Let me guess … is she a new ager? Whenever I’ve seen “natural” landscaping in an area where residents don’t normally neglect it (i.e. outside of the ghetto or a community that has a rural Confederate cultural orientation), it’s always been the work of a New Age lady. Are there rocks scattered around out front, with laser-etched words carved into them like “SERENITY” or “PEACE”?
She’s definitely a “new ager”. She’s an artist, has a studio in town, a deal going on at our Library (it’s a presentation of her work, but I haven’t had time to go and see it yet), and a small studio in her home. You can’t really make it out well, but the purple thing in the middle of the labarinth is a basketball-sized geode. Kinda cool.
It would still be cooler if the rest of the yard was taken care of, though…
Which is why I’m lending my Russian immigrant neighbors, whose lawnmower died on them several weeks ago, my mower whenever they need it. There’s a few houses for sale on my block, and I don’t want them to stay empty. There’s also the accumulation of good karma.
Perhaps the rest of the yard is taken care of. Just not the way you think it should be, your highness…
I despise lawn. Lawn is the second most unnatural thing you can do to a piece of land (paving is the first). It takes enormous amounts of water, fertilizer, herbicide and labor to make a lawn actually look like it’s “supposed to”. You have chemical runoff and periodic toxicity (they don’t put those little white flags out just for decoration) in exchange for a boring monocultural desert of green. Bleah…
Every time I see an intensively gardened yard, or a wildflower meadow, where everyone else in the neighborhood has grass, I get a little lift in my step. It looks and feels good.
Take into account the byproducts of the manufacturing to make the computer yer peckin’ at, not to mention wehn it becomes obsolete and ends up in a landfill, plus the electricity to run it, the environmental impact of that is just as high as my lawn maintenance, so get off yer high horse, hippy.
This is a lawn we are talking about, a patch of dirt with plants growing in it. Cherish it or not realistically, all it is, is dirt (and I don’t have a lawn, I live in an apartment, but I used to have one).
Would you criticize a person for growing roses rather than pansies?
What about if their favorite flower was a dandelion?
I would love to have a yard full of bright yellow dandelions, but somewhere along the line someone thought it should be labeled a weed.
Why discourage a person for trying to keep a little bit of nature in this materialistic world? And yes I like my computer and my TV but I also love going to the park and walking through the weeds by the river. You can have it both ways.
I got no problem with bohemian landscaping. But I’ve said it before in this thread and I’ll say it again: neglecting your yard does not equate to cultivating a natural landscape. And a couple items for the record…
Fully half of my property is low-lying swamp. Nice, natural, and chock-full the very briars, poison oak, vermin and wildflowers that I’m being accused of oppressing. It’s lovely, and I go back there a couple times a week to commune with the goddess and do bong hits. But like my grandma used to say - there’s a place for everything, and everything in it’s place. The swamp is the swamp, and the yard is the yard.
Also, I don’t use chemicals on my lawn, fwiw, and I don’t water it. I weed with a dandelion picker-thingy, and use regional grasses native to Ace Hardware.
One thing is never underestimate the obsessiveness of homeowners and their lawns.
[size=1] Our neighbor to the north property line hasn’t mowed most of his 20 acres - and he should have too - for nearly 10 years. He just mows the bare minimum around the house, enough for his dogs to come out a wee. It’s okay by me, as our neighbors on our east property line have an $8000 lawnmower and chemlawn the freak out of their 2.5 acres and it looks like a baseball field. We have fun calling them right after we mow ours and say, " Mow your lawn, you no-goodnick!" And then they do with their high falutin’ mower and ours immediately looks like poo poo next to theirs. This is why I send my dog over to poop on ther grass.(they have three dogs. Itsokay.)
This argument is why I’m glad I’m unincorporated. No neighbors to speak of, and no one can tell me when to cut the grass. Which, incidently, I like to keep cut, but Mr. K doesn’t.
Here are some photos of my yard and some of the weird shit we have going on. I posted this in a weed thread, but it’s more appropriate here.
Here is a weed from my yard, pancake mushrooms, the pancake tree, and my mostly-weedy-but-mowed lawn.
I actually caught someone trying to pick pancakes from the pancake tree!
