When Sara Weaner Cooper and her husband bought their first home in Pennsylvania, they knew they didn’t want a perfectly manicured front lawn like their neighbours. They wanted something that was more than just turf – a flourishing, wild meadow home to diverse species of plants and animals.
Weaner Cooper had always wanted to focus on native plants in her lawn and do less mowing, so rewilding their front lawn felt like the right move. But the Coopers’ lawn is a different animal than her father’s. It’s in full Sun and consisted of over 1,500 sq m (16,000 sq ft) of turfgrass – narrow-leaved grasses designed to look uniform that had to be dealt with before a meadow could fully take over.
Rather than rip everything up and live with a drab, brown lawn for months, they decided to try strategically seeding and planting native plants into the existing turf, hoping it would eventually weed the turf out naturally. “It’s easier in the sense that you don’t need to be beating back as many weeds,” explains Weaner Cooper. “The native plants came in so thickly that they outcompeted a lot of the weed pressure that would have been there if we would have just made it brown.”
It took about two years, lots of planning, some careful weeding, and some trial and error, but eventually a medley of waist-high native plant species blanketed their vast front lawn.
I’m all for growing native plants, but I worry about ticks whenever I see an article like this.
Do you also worry about the collapse of natural systems by preventing pollinators from doing their job?
It’s sad that this is so funny because it’s true.
No
Tick populations explode because tick hunting animals like porcupines and voles need tall grass to avoid being hunted themselves. And because cars run them over and cats murder them.
I suppose that depends on the area but that’s largely not going to be a concern. Just have paths where you need that don’t require you do wade through bushes directly. If one has the space, slap a guinea hen in there they love eating ticks
You probably have ticks in your yard anyway. They can make their nests in the grass.
was going to say my yard produced as many ticks when it was a regularly mowed lawn as after it was turned into “gardens” …
I worry about chiggers and wasps with grass that high. Not to mention the townships.