Wouldn’t it have been easier to dissolve the HOA and start a new one? That’s one of the things that would take a unanimous vote.
Although I think that since that time there has been successful litigation asserting that restrictive covenants had been abandoned when an HOA ceased to function for several years.
But the lawn comes with the house, should one nuke it and start over? I like the park we’re a block from but sometimes you just want to kick it around a little before dinner without walking down the block.
Not every suburbanite with a green lawn is a water-wasting chemical-spraying fossil-fuel consuming lunkhead. When we bought our house the entire lawn was destroyed by grubs and chinch bugs, so we tore out the entire lawn and planted seed from Jonathan Green. Once a year I go over the lawn with a push spreader and throw down new grass seed, but I don’t fertilize it, I don’t water it during the summer (I prefer to let it go dormant if it gets dry out), and when I do mow, usually once a week, I cut it at max deck height. And I mulch the clippings back into the lawn. It’s lush, it’s thick, it’s green and soft, but it takes care of itself. Yes, I do sometimes get crabgrass, or dandelions and I pull those. Ditto broadleaf. In fact, the only real weed I have real troubles with is nutsedge. My point being, not all of us are destroying the environment for the sake of some shiny astroturf looking lawn. Some of us have found a middle path.
I have loved my electric lawn mowers. I finally upgraded to the cordless one with the battery to avoid all of the electric cord drama. All of the freedom of a gas mower with none of the gas. It’s a Black and Decker one also, and the battery lasts through all of the mowing without even a hint of running down.
I know I am supposed to hate my lawn but it is nice to have somewhere to run around and play on. Let me add some rationalizations about letting weeds grow and not using too many chemicals.
At least the article and these comments point to one important but sometimes subtle insight - mowing (and having) a lawn is a luxury, not a chore.
My five year old keeps picking the dandelion leaves and insisting we use them in salads, and my wife keeps feeding them to us. There’re okay, I say grudgingly.
There is a monument to the law of unintended consequences in the hall of intentionally introduced invasive plant species (in hell!).
That’s the one I have and I think it’s just great. Corded ones were never even a consideration. When it’s time to mow I bring up the battery from the basement charger and I’m done in twenty minutes.
We leave a lot of dandelions for the bees and have pretty much blown out the front with flowers, so I’m always having to trim here and there. The push button start is magnificent and I’ll never go back to cord pull mowers.
As a physician and a fertility specialst i find this article particularly relevant. Behind the quintessentially American obsession with the manicured lawn there may be a health crisis. In fact many of the fertilizers and pesticides that are used to maintain such lawn are well known endocrine disruptors. These substances mimic the effects of hormones, in particular estrogen. Over the past decades we have observed a steady decline in sperm counts and infertility in men and this has been attributed to such substances. Paradoxically men who live in big cities have been shown to have higher sperm counts on their semen analysis . One cannot ignore the irony behind the quest behind this ideal of “perfect nature” that ends up killing the human species. Andrea Vidali MD , New York
I have given up on my lawn. oh it gets chopped down to keep it from getting ugly, but summer in Seattle is dry and I will let it go brown and dry. Too many neighbors with yards full of dandelions to make the battle just not worth fighting and then there is the moss anymore I just go yep it is green and call it good. I am actually tempted to do as my neighbor across the street has done and just cover the front yard in wood chips and have flowers and raised beds for veggies.\
Yes it kills all things green and it is wonderful at it. I have a jug for two things as it seems to be the only thing that will kill the neighbors bamboo that is trying to grow up the side of my house and the blackberries that hide in the slowly going away laurel hedges and those get round up dumped into the holes I drill into the stumps otherwise they will happily grow back in full force.
Nothing wrong with the English Garden front yard, we’re slowly working our way there.
Too Long. Stopped reading after a while. It became repetitive.
My experience of lawns (Ann Arbor and where I grew up in Michigan) is that this obsession with the perfect lawn is extremely overstated, and might even be declining. (But the part of Michigan I grew up in was Dutch/German and I can easily believe that the Teutonic/Prussian mind is obsessed with meaningless details.)
Yes, there are people obsessed with the absolutely perfect lawn. They tend to be retirees with money and too much time.
Then there are the people who learn their values from advertising and have the money to hire lawn services to chemically sterilize their lawns.
Most people are still influenced by advertising values and realtor values and spread some weed killer and fertilizer whenever they feel up to it and keep it mowed. It’s a half-hearted effort, but probably the most harmful.
There are people who just don’t give a damn and park their pickup trucks in the yard, turning it into a muddy mess.
And then there’s people like me, who mow it when the kids get trapped in the lawn. I was amazed a few years back that my lazy approach to lawn care left me with a greener and more verdant lawn than my meticulous (Republican) neighbors a few doors down (and most of my conventional, half-hearted other neighbors as well - except for the Rain Garden Lady, who was doing a kind of native plants garden in her front yard.)
But like I said, I’m lazy. But I fear I’ll have to mow my lawn this weekend. The dandelions will come back soon anyway.
I bought a corded one and a few massive extension cords (and rewired an outside circuit to 20A.) It takes about 4 hours to mow my back yard. I suspect a battery powered one wouldn’t last on my backyard and the cord is manageable. (And corded was cheaper than cordless too.)
Or just dissolve it. I’m inordinately glad that they’re not a thing back home in Mud Island. They give me the willies.
Four hours? How big’s your lawn?
Can anyone explain the rise of the striped lawn? Lawns are all over the world: UK, Germany, Australia, Canada and many others, but I’ve only ever seen examples of the striped lawn in the US. Seems to me to be a lot of effort to go to for an ugly effect.
I understand mine can do 1/3 of an acre on a charge. You can always get more than one battery and swap as needed.
Are your outlets not already 20A?
Poor kid, ‘Mugrage’ was named like a caffeination or hot beverage service app before his time. Was this before or after the 3-body neighborhood limit on offensive corpses to get police service had come around? What about putting lawn chairs and flying flags on the roof? DrVidali- A daring quest to save either Yard Ape, Flag Football, or the Palatial Lawn Estate Afflicted…where should the runoff stigmatizer chromatographs be placed, one wonders?
jsroberts- …fruit bushes…most of the weeds I leave are useful in some way or other
Instrumentality Of Wiccan Neighbor HOA Achievement Unlocked! Or something! Wow.
IngoH- …lawn is a sheet of glorious yellow
Well, get those HDRs cooked and post them already. Dandelions sound fine as a Cd(SO4)2/UO4 upgrade (c.f. Coppelion) but it sounds like you’re fighting the neighbors’ Kohl Rabi super hard.
It’s a house built in '56. Which still makes it more modern by half than most houses I’ve lived in (gotta love knob-and-tube wiring in houses from the 1920s…)
I’ll consider a battery mower when the current (heh heh) one dies. With luck, battery technology will be improved too.
Tremendously well-written piece. Just one small quibble:
Kenneth T. Jackson notes, in his classic study The Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, that before 1860 most houses had no front yard; they “nestled up to the street, with a prominent front door that invited entrance.”
That should read “most urban houses”. Until very recently “most houses” have had a “lawn.” I.e., until very recently most folks lived in rural areas (with acreage). As has my family. And as I still do today. In fact, in 1860 the USA had been experiencing massive urban growth, but 65% to 70% still lived in the countryside by then.
This phenomenon of crazy obsession over sterile plastic-looking lawns has crept into rural areas as well, unfortunately. Really only to the pseudo-rural (i.e., suburbia with extra large lawns).
The irony… all these folks never leave their houses. And when they do, they simply do that to walk to their car. Maybe they’ll grill out back a bit. I suppose it is then that they survey their astroturf, but will rarely leave their deck. And if they go running or biking, they keep to asphalt or concrete and probably have headphones on.
I.e., There is an obsession here with “control” and it is further indicative of man distancing himself, not from each other, but from nature.
