I live in a city. As do my friends and family. My contact with lawns/lawn care is minimal at best.
I was reading a pit thread and it got me wondering:
Why do people rake leaves? As someone mentioned in the pit thread, allowing leaves to decay is good for your lawn/soil. Why get rid of them? Do you find leaves unsightly? Also, why not compost leaves? It makes excellent and cheap fertilizer.
What’s wrong with fences around lawns? A friend was telling me about a relative of hers who put up a fence around her lawn. She lived right next to a street and had a young child with a tendency to bolt out of the house and into harm’s way. Before she installed the fence, this woman went around to all of her neighbors to apologize and explain exactly why she was putting up this (very expensive, wooden) fence. I can understand why people wouldn’t care to see chain link but nice looking, well-maintained fences? Does anyone have a problem with these?
And clover lawns? How do people feel about them? A friend recently moved to the burbs and was debating what kind of lawn to put down. I mentioned an article I had read about clover lawns and how easy they are to take care of. In turn, she spoke to a neighbor of hers and mentioned the clover lawn idea. The woman, according to my friend, practically had a heart attack and told her that the clover better not spread to her (immaculate) lawn. Would you object to clover lawns?
And finally, why do lawns have to be cut to look like a golf course? I kind of like the look of longer grass. It reminds of English gardens. Do people have a problem with long grass?
Well, piles of leaves and tall grass can provide shelter for various critters you don’t want around your house. I’ve also heard they are a good place for bad guys to hide IEDs, but I doubt that’s something you deal with in your neighborhood.
When I lived in Arizona, everybody had landscaped pebble lawns, with various colors of pebbles in various areas, sometimes making patterns and such.
Leaves are possibly good for soil, but when left on a lawn they will kill the grass by blocking sunlight and causing a build up of moisture on the grass underneath. Even when mulched, the excessive cellulose can stifle grass growth.
I have never seen a clover lawn, but I am familiar with clover as a crop rotation and as used as ground cover. The clover in which I am familiar looks nice when left alone, but is not hardy enough to handle traffic. It also does not respond well to mowing. Clover is often considered a broad-leaf weed. It is undesirable as it can take over a lawn starving the wanted grass of nutrients and sunshine.
Your friend’s relative probably didn’t want her neighbors thinking she was putting up the fence because of them, so she felt it necessary to let them know it wasn’t a “your property is an eyesore I must hide from my delicate sensibilities, your beer bottles are spilling onto my lawn, and I don’t want your spawn crossing the property line to retrieve their pet chickens” thing.
It depends on how many trees you have, I mow the leaves in, and there’s no problem with critters living under them, and they don’t kill the grass. Come spring, once the grass starts growing again, they’re not noticeable. My trees aren’t that big, though, and my soil sucks, so to add organic matter I’ve collected other peoples leaves they’ve raked into the street or bagged, and spread them on my lawn.
I’m also encouraging clover in my back yard (but not my front). We had a patch of low growing white clover in the back of our back yard, that was crowding out the grass, but now the clover has improved the soil to where it’s mostly grass, although the clover is still there. Other patches have grown in some of the worst parts, and those parts are greener than they had been, and greener than the parts that don’t have much clover. I’ve been picking clover seed, and throwing them where there isn’t clover, to get a more uniform coverage. I like the look, myself. We had some clover with pink flowers, but it grows as taller clumps, so we pull it.
As for height, cutting longer is supposed to give a healthier lawn. We cut one notch below as tall as our mower goes, but that’s still taller than our old mower went. It still looks neat when it’s been cut, it’s really how uniform in height the lawn is that matters.
ETA: I haven’t noticed any of the problems with clover JKilez mentions, except for some temporary “crowding out” that went way.
I am with you on the leaves and it has been a years long fight with people that believe the best solution to any problem is the one that makes you work the hardest and is the least efficient. I just run over them once a week in the fall with a powerful lawn tractor. They are all but gone right away and completely gone within a day after that. They just go POOF. The only ones you need to rake are the ones stuck under plants or right around the house. Once you get those out, you mow those too. It works great and it is fast. This is for a 2 acre yard. There is no way I am raking that by hand. You would be amazed at how many people this offends badly for no reason. Other people are spending whole weekends doing backbreaking labor using tarps and pickup trucks and hired help to get a worse result than I do. I just mow in the fall basically like I do in the spring and summer. It only takes an hour a week or so.
How can leaves be good for soil? We got more than ten feet of snow the winter before last, and when it finally melted, the leaves that we hadn’t raked (in our woods) were still there, most looking fully intact. They don’t break down easily, so what does the soil get out of them?
I don’t mind clover so much, but my wife doesn’t like it because it attracts bees, which our often shoeless children might step on and get stung. I don’t share the same concern (I like bees), but she’s a worrier.
My kids prefer the grass in our yard to grow wild, the longer the better, but I cut it rather high, which as previously mentioned gives a healthier lawn, especially if it’s only watered by rain, as ours is.
I have a mulching lawn mower, so I just mow the lawn to get rid of the leaves.
If it were up to me, I’d just have a lot of flowering plants and let everything grow wild. But I live in a suburb with fairly strict ordinances regarding a property’s appearance, and a lawn is mandatory. But I do encourage the growth of dandelions.
This is downright wrong. Clover is excellent for lawns because the nitrogen-fixing nodules on its roots ADD fertilzer to the lawn. (Which is why it’s also used for crop rotation.) It’s leaves also shade the grass roots to keep it from browning as much in the summer. Often times the greenest most lush looking parts of our yard and where the patches of clover are.
One drawback I’ve read of is that clover is more likely to leave “grass stains” kids’ clothing than grass is.
Single-species “immaculate” lawns require a lot of work, artificial fertilizing. chemical weed killing, and watering. They’re extremely unnatural and wasteful.
When you mow them, they break down or are eaten by worms more quickly. I’ve found that the chopped leaves are still visible early the following spring, because worms and other micro-organism are less active over winter, but they “disappear” shortly. They’re especially good for soil that is low in organic matter.
In your woods, the whole leaves may stick around a year or two, but they get broken down also.
I have a friend who was visited by the lawn Nazis and threatened with a $200 fine if he didn’t cut his grass/weeds below 15 cm. There is, of course, no definition of what constitutes a lawn as opposed to a garden; the law applies only to the former. Incidentally, the law applies to the back yard just as much as the front.
It really depends on how many leaves you get on the grass. People who just mow their leaves in have no idea what its like to actually have a serious amount of leaves. I can’t do that, first the cut leaves under the mower would act like knives and cut all the grass back to bare ground. And then the several inches of chopped leaves would smother the ground so that there’s no hope of the grass growing back. Mud is never a good thing, either in terms of looks or for walking on.
I do compost many of my leaves. (Some just gets blown to the edge of the woods.) I chop and compost a lot for my garden and flower beds. But note: leaves are quite acidic. I have to add a lot of lime to counter that.
The break down just fine if you mow over them. I use to rake my lawn until one year I got tired of waiting for the city to pick them up so I raked the pile back to the lawn and mowed them into dust. The grass loved it. Now I just mow them down on a dry day. It’s quicker than raking.
I disagree. Having mowed a leaf pile down to fertilizer I can safely say it’s possible do do the lawn this way. It means you may have to go over it a couple of times if the leaf density is high. It also has to be done when they are loose and dry. The leaf pile I did this to was over a foot high and it took maybe a dozen passes.
Are they trying to explode leaf piles/houses? Or are they hiding them to come back for? In which case it seems kind of a stupid hiding place because who knows when someone would rake them up/jump in them. Who are these “bad guys”?
Like I said, if your neighbors are the sort to worry over what kind of plants you put in your lawn, you probably don’t have to worry about IEDs, but in places where that is a concern, the idea would be to dig up a pile of leaves, put something like a rocket launcher on a length of rail aimed at a nearby road, cover it up with the leaves, then go hide in the scrub a few hundred yards away until somebody you don’t like comes driving by. One of the methods they use in Iraq to minimize the effectiveness of IEDs is to keep the roads clean so there are not as many good places to hide nasty surprises.
And of course, the “Bad Guys” would be whoever is trying to plant IEDs in your lawn (which would probably also get you a visit from the Lawn Nazis. Turns out lawns with hidden explosives are bad for property values…) If you live in a place where you can fuss over whether or not to plant clover, then I’d say your next biggest concern is critters living in the leaves and tall grass.
Again, some people have no idea what a real leaf problem is like. If mowing fixes it (instead of making it worse), you don’t really have much in the way of leaves. You just think you do.
