As part of my master gardener coursework, we had to watch a segment on the benefits of green lawns. The tone was very much, there are actually a lot of benefits of turf grass, and you have to be nice to people who want to have traditional lawns. I loved it/this year we will water our lawn all season
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Yeah I suppose I would clarify I wouldn’t keep a green front lawn. The back is tot zoom zone, but it gets watered a lot even just by virtue of summer water play lol.
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IDK if it’s all the cold medicine or what but this is making me laugh really hard, except silently so I don’t cough. As someone who’s lived in apartments my entire adult life I didn’t even know there was beef between lawn and…non-lawn? people? What even is the alternative? Astroturf? Rocks?
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I only water mine in the summer. I actually just put down fresh bluegrass seed because we have some bare patches. In the back yard I am trying to get turf-type buffalo grass to grow because you can’t use the sprinkler back there so it is a PITA to water.
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LOL, in Arizona where my ex used to live, these were indeed his lawn surfaces and I think are very common choices!
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Does anyone do ball pits? That would be fun.
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The tone was totally funny! One of the funniest things to me is when you get advice or there is a rule that’s totally a response to something very specific that went wrong.
Lawn haters here are really horny for xeriscaping, so something along these lines:
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Ahhhh, ok so it’s like a “more sustainable than thou” thing. Gotcha. I love those clearly pointed additions to things, haha, I imagine the traditional lawn lobbyists had to fight hard for that kind of inclusion.
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This is definitely my take on the lawn vs. no lawn thing, it has really become a holier than thou thing. I think lawns are great where they are easy-ish to grow, and also are probably not a great idea in places with harsh climates like AZ where you literally have to water them 3-4 times a day, minimum, to have a chance of success…but to each their own. Most everything here is xeriscaped or there just aren’t front yards at all, just massive driveways. Any time I see someone attempting a lawn here I just kind of silently laugh because I can’t imagine what their water bill is.
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It was so weird when I first moved to Albuquerque and all the yards were just rocks and sand. What drives me a little crazy is that homeowners were told not to water their lawns during a drought, but they keep using more and more water for farming in the middle of the desert. Conservation is a nice thing for individuals to do, but damn we can’t even make a dent compared to the industrial complex.
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part of it can be that the lawn people are snarky about their neighbours who don’t do their part by watering enough/weeding enough (ok, I get it about the weeding, because then it creates weeds for other people), or call the city/HOA on them if they are doing a more sustainable approach. So there is mutual snark & lack of empathy.
I have credibility on both sides of this argument
- my front yard has a few very small patches of grass that I cut with garden shears 2 times a year (probably 1 square foot over 3 patches), and is garden in the back
- I have contacted the city to complain about a neighbour whose front yard was 3’-4’ tall dog strangling vine and thistles
So the alternatives could be rewilding or raised beds for food gardening or shrubs & flowers with a small amount of hardscaping.
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Also fucking nutrient runoff. This may be less of a problem somewhere the natural landscape has its own nutrients, but my country’s soils are depleted of things like phosphorus and nitrogen and the lawn people put a lot on that used to run straight to river via groundwater or Overland.
Now we’re all better about slow release fertilizers.
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Oh, another thing you can do that is Not A Lawn (yes, this is in my neighbourhood)
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There are also more sustainable ways to have a yard. I fertilize mine only once per year in fall, lightly- it gets the rest of its nitrogen from the clover that I seed with the grass. Water deeply once or twice a week rather than in short bursts to encourage deeper roots. We keep the grass tall enough and thick enough that we have few weeds; those that we do I pull by hand and don’t use other lawn chemicals besides the fall fertilizer. And I have to pull them by hand because we cut with a push mower (which can’t cut weeds). I am trying to get the edges of the lawn to be all clover, which doesn’t need so much cutting, but that is just laziness because I don’t like to use the trimmer 
.
If we didn’t already have bluegrass I would do something hardier like turf-type fescue or maybe even buffalograss, but the bluegrass is already there! (I tried inter-seeding fescue. Do not recommend.)
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Water pollution from nutrient runoff is a big problem here as well. (It’s true of agricultural areas as well, obviously, but lawn also plays a not-insignificant role.)
Also lawn is typically a monoculture of plant that isn’t very ecosystem-supporting, and a lot of time and money and herbicides and pesticides are spent trying to keep it green. (I mean, I am not against target herbicide or pesticide application, but many lawn care companies just spray and spray and spray…) And water usage in drought prone areas is just… I can’t. I don’t think people should not have dedicated grassy space in their property, even in the dry areas! For sure! But no need to make the entire thing just grasssssss.
Lawn is certainly better than concrete or asphalt. But I can’t imagine it ever being objectively better than a diverse landscape. Other than the fact that your average Joe has the ability to push a lawn mower around it once a week all summer, whereas landscaping with plants/shrubs/trees takes more knowledge and possibly more money, at least, initially.
You can also just have a lawn like a lot of us in the northeast have - I call it garbage lawn and it is 50% grass and 50% other stuff (clover, perennial weeds, annual weeds, wildflowers). It’s green though! (6 months of the year).
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The people who had my house before me put down bluegrass sod just immediately in front of the house. It was lovely for a few months (if weird that there was this nice bluegrass right in front of the house and regular yard everywhere else), then I got a dog. The urine burn kills it dead. (It doesn’t kill the garbage lawn, just the nice bluegrass.) Right now there are dead spots in the starting-to-grow-after-the-winter lawn. Anyone’s guess if it will come back from that. (My guess is no, I probably should overseed with clover or at the very least more bluegrass or possibly a rye? IDK) 
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There are special turfs designed to be dog-resistant, but as I do not have a dog I can’t vouch for any dog solutions… they exist, though!
This is what I have, and he does not seem to be a threat to the lawn, although he does like fresh dirt and must be kept out of the planted garden beds.
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oh, my soapbox
golf courses should not be allowed to avoid all the anti-pesticide rules (I have more extreme views about golf courses, but at the Very Least…)
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At the PHX airport I once overheard someone complaining about their $4,000/month air conditioning bill 
. Maybe they ran an ice rink??
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I redid our thermostat schedule and should be saving more energy and money. Last year with a newborn our schedule was so irregular, I switched from a very specific and frugal daily schedule to the same, bland 68 degrees of heat all day (effectively 65 in the bedrooms). I was also in a very postpartum = treat yoself! space.
Our routines are a bit more normal now, and neither I nor the baby are so fragile anymore, so I just set it back to much cooler overnight. I’m happy we loosened the reins last year, and I’m also happy that I can rewind lifestyle/consumption increases if they’re no longer necessary or important.
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