Why do old men like lawns?

52 year old single guy here. Divorced a few years ago, and I wound up with the house in Suburbia. I have the best looking FRONT lawn in the neighborhood, but only because I hate lawn work so much.

let me explain. :cool:

About 6 years ago, I got so fed up trying to keep a decent looking lawn in the heat of Atlanta that I bit the bullet and paid to have the scraggly fescue crap killed and tilled under, and then Zoysia sod installed. IIRC, it was about $4000, but now I have a nice low maintenance, heat resistant, slow growing green front lawn.

My backyard still looks like shit. Haven’t paid to have that Zoysia sodded yet. Mainly because the dogs would probably tear it up anyway. The fenced backyard is their turf, dammit.

True, and you also don’t need to water or fertilize as much over a septic field.

Where DO you get this stuff? Lawns have been around in Europe since at least the 1500’s and manicured grass lawns since at least the 1600’s. The were originally the purview of the rich for 2 reasons - 1) maintaining a lawn was very labor intensive and only the rich could afford the labor; and 2) those who weren’t rich were spending all of their time working to survive and had no time for such trivialities.

Ok, you don’t detest lawns. I think they should be illegal, particularly in hot areas with limited water or well, in any area where people like to breath and drink uncontaminated air and water. I don’t have one-I replaced it with mulch, bushes, and flowers. It looks great and requires little maintenance or water and the birds and bees love it. I admire one of my friends yards that is done in gravel and plants in pots. The kids don’t seem to have any problem playing in it.

I know 2 men who as they aged suddenly became obsessed with the lawn. It was weird. That is all.

I mow, pull the dandelions, and blow the leaves, but otherwise, my lawn is a mix of various grasses with big patches of clover, wild onions and strawberries, stuff that looks like wheat, and other stuff that looks like red cabbage. I’ve thought about trying to create something more uniform, but it just has never been a priority.

I’ve had a lifelong hatred of mowing. I finally decided that I’m old enough (59) to pay somebody else to do it.

Was that when the as-Dad-comes-in-the-door martini was invented too?

Wow, some crabby folks here, with hatred for all things suburban. Daddy issues??

Lawn care goes with the homeowning territory, as some folks point out, the City will fine you for not having a prescribed lawn. They will also come out and mow it for you, at great expense. More on this later.

Plant cover in this case, grass, provides a cooling effect in the summer and helps keep the dust (and noise) down. I like native prarie grass too but it really needs to be burned off annually/periodically. This is a Huge no-go in todays society, especially in suburbia. It also looks a little unkempt, admittedly that is subjective, but there is no accounting for taste.

What I’ve discovered is that while lawn care and mowing is not one of my favorite activities, it is much more enjoyable to have and care for a beautiful lawn than it is a collection of weeds. There is something satisfying about mowing (with a sharp blade) a dense, healthy turf. It is pleasing to the eye to see a nice well cared for lawn, it isn’t much more complicated than that.

SINCE it is “required” and expected, I take at least a passing interest in it, and maintain it at some level, simply because experience shows a dense, healthy turf is far more resistant to weeds. So a little work means less work in the long run, if that makes sense.

This means fairly frequent mowing, and at least some use of herbicides initially, and some fertilization. I draw the line at watering or irrigation even though I live in an area where water shortage is not a factor. But a reasonably healthy lawn is actually pretty low maintenance. With neglect it’s no fun at all.

I can’t even begin to imagine how hard to please a woman would be that would dump a guy because he cared about his lawn.

I need the exercise; doctor’s orders.

Don’t kid yourself. Your level green lawn has snakes and rodents now. They live everywhere. Toads, too, if you’re lucky. Snakes eat the big bugs, and toads eat the little ones. Mice are owl food. You probably get the occasional raccoon and opossum, too, but they come around when you sleep.

I so lived in the wrong era… Although SWMBO does get me manflowers* when I collect enough Husband Points**.

  • AKA Beer. Like flower arrangements they come in singles, sixes, dozens, and sometimes barrels. They also tend to be short-lived, often come in a variety of colours and make the recipient giddy.

** Like airline reward points, although you get more when you do nice things and fulfil assorted Blue Jobs***.

*** A Blue Job is any that your spouse has arbitrarily decided is either too nasty, sweaty or smelly to do herself, like filling the car, cleaning the grot out of the kitchen sink or lawn care. Pink jobs generally involve critiquing wedding shows and testing wines for overall quality.
Purple jobs can be done by either person, like cooking supper, but usually falls into Blue Job territory.

PS: Where else can you legally drive around with a beer in the holder, get some sun, and not have anyone bother you for an hour or two?

^^ Excuse me, the opossum uses the upper support of the slat fence for unmolested transport; he’s no dummy. His punch-clock needs adjustment by a few hours, though (usually 10PM), unless he’s on Pacific time.

In olden times when only the rich had lawns, they all had weeds. Killing the weeds is a relatively recent thing. Spraying herbicide on lawns was still unusual when I was a kid. The idea of the Tru-Green man coming around to spray every lawn on the block 4 times a year simply did not exist. Today, vast swaths of American cities have nothing for wild bees to eat. Sure, you have some little flower beds and the veg garden out back, but that’s not enough. Bees eat pollen, or they die, and something has to be flowering all the time.

They should sign up for EBT, then.

Fascist! I’m sending you an autographed copy of The Authoritarian Mind.

A nicely taken care of yard is nice.

But I’m over it.

At age 10 I was mowing all of the empty lots in our family owned 40 acre mobile home park. As well as the open space areas. As well as the 5 acres we had at our house.

Then we moved to suburbia, where my brother and I mowed my moms yard, and the yard where I lived.

For the last 24 years my Wife and I have lived on 2 steep, wooded acres in the Colorado mountains. We have about 1500 sq feet of ‘lawn’ area that is mostly just natural. The rest is forest.

I’ll ‘mow’ that 1500 sq. ft. with a weed eater perhaps twice a year (or not at all).

The trade off is that I have to plow a LOT in the winter. But No. More. Mowing.

There’s grass everywhere because it’s the cheapest thing to maintain that looks nice. People obsess over their lawns because they want to have everything they own look as nice as possible, because people are like that.

When I lived in NJ I’d have found watering a lawn crazy. Here in the Bay Area most people have underground sprinklers on timers - and not for the lawn, for the bushes and flowers too. Sorry, in dry season where it is normal for it no to rain for months everything will be dead by fall without them. But my sprinkling is turned back to just keep it alive. And I have such a dinky lawn that I have a push mower, so no pollution from me, unless you count sweat.
The shady part is okay, the sunny part is awful, but I’ll get it all resodded before I sell the house. Around here a bad lawn is patriotic, but there is no reason to not mow at least once in a while. There is a restored prairie meadow south of Chicago, which has what it looks like untended. You’d lose a dog or child in it if it grew like that in your backyard.

I’m relying on the rats to feed to my lawn snakes.

I have a septic and drain field behind the house so it’s all lawn. Nice place to put the kid’s play set and sand box and set his swimming pool as well. Hard to put a swimming pool in a perennial garden.

I don’t bother to water and just let the grass go dormant in the summer. And my lawn has a healthy amount of clover, wild violets, crabgrass and dandelions. Gives the bunnies something to eat. My sister once complained about the weeds in my lawn and, two minutes later, was complaining about how the rabbits were stripping the bark off her shrubs. I just smiled and said I didn’t have any problems with that because my rabbits would rather each the clover and dandelion leaves than shrub bark :stuck_out_tongue: