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.
Meadowscaping is just not gardening. A more environmentally conscious idea is to grow your own vegetables, to cut down on the fossil fuel used to transport food and reduce the amount of money going to agribusiness.
Even if you don’t have a garden, you can grow things like tomatoes and chillis in pots if you have a window that gets good light. Anything you can grow yourself helps.
Providing habitat for local species is environmentally conscious.
If a food crop will grow easily in your garden, it’s probably also growing on local family farms.
Nothing wrong with home food gardens (as long as they don’t introduce invasives or toxic runoff, which I’m sure you’re careful about) but they’re not necessarily superior to rewilding.
Ok where I live is essentially a town built into the wilds and every spring the wilderness threatens to reclaim the streets. The sea, however is heavily polluted from commercial shipping and tourism so cutting down on things brought in from other places is more of a burning issue for me. The local farms supply all the meat and potatoes you could ask for but, pretty much all veg is shipped in from places with longer growing seasons. The chillis I buy are grown 2000 km away for example.
Ah, makes sense, O Scot of the Arctic.
It’s also very satisfying growing things up here that really aren’t supposed to grow here. I’m going to try growing watermelon this summer.
Wow good luck! I guess you get plenty of sun in that window. You’ll need to hand-pollinate, it’s usually bees. If it works you can try zucchini.
I’m in Southern California, but in an apartment. I grow tomatoes, blueberries, pomegranates and lemons on my balcony. Along with an assortment of native and non-native flowers. Most of their water comes from filling a jug while waiting for the shower water to heat up, because we’re always careful of drought here.
Yeah I have friends in San Jose and Methdesto they say the water situation is pretty grim. Not exactly a concern here.I’m planning on setting up an automatic watering thing on the balcony, but that’s more to do with laziness than water conservation.
Basically my situation is that I have to start plants inside and get them up to a decent size by mid may. I then have until mid September at which point growth is basically at a standstill due to the cold. First hard freeze usually comes in early October.
Sometimes it’s not about feeding yourself and about feeding the ecosystem.
What’s your reasoning for thinking its not gardening?The article goes into some detail to explain that a fair amount of gardening skill is involved and its a lot more than just letting your lawn grow wild.
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Just not gardening, not not just gardening.
Why not both?