It’s also sad to see what people are doing to their gardens over here. Fake grass, no plants/just bricks. Not to mention the municipalities mowing nice patches of grass/plants/flowers where insects thrive.
It's crazy! On one side, I have a neighbour with all slate and concrete backyard, and a barrier at the top of the fence (to keep the fancy cats in 'o_O ) covered with plastic vines. I think they have one actual living tree and maybe a flowerpot.
Fortunately, on the other side ... I have the head of the groene commissie (neighbourhood gardening enthusiastc) and a beautiful tended garden. Mine is the most natural: a barely-tended jungle which gets trimmed and brushed once a year. We have hedgehogs!
We installed ~200m^2 of green roofs in the neighbourhood and there are bug hotels all over the place so we are doing relatively well. Quite a few different varieties of bees.
All this green absorbs a lot of heat, and manages rainwater which is important at 0 above sea level and 2m below the nearby canal.
In far too many parts of the US, what you're doing with your yard would be considered "neglect" and might result in harassment from your neighbors or even fines.
It would be nice if people realized that they can have a low-maintenance, inexpensive, and insect-friendly garden full of pretty wild flowers, by planting a perennial meadow. This needs to be cut once a year.
While this works, an alternative if you have a lawn already is to just stop cutting it every x weeks but mow once or twice a year. Mow paths where needed. More often than not there are already seeds/plants in the soil which just never got the chance to grow. And if not, depending on where you live, fauna and wind will transport seeds to your garden. The end result (mind you, takes years) will usually be similar: of the seed mixes bought, a bunch won't grow, others might but won't thrive. Whereas starting from 'scratch' this also happens. And what's left are those which happen to thrive best on the local soil type and circumstances, which usually is what works best for the local ecosystem.
If I didn’t cut my yard for a year I wouldn’t need a mower, I’d need a large brush-clearing tractor. It’s already almost impossible to cut with a mower after four to five weeks.
I can stroll through acres of local meadows and not find any ticks. Once I dare come close to bushes or go off tracks in the woods though, it's a disaster. I.e. I don't know why, but in any case the 'grass is riddled with ticks' seems highly location-dependent.
One thing I've noticed after moving back to the Netherlands is how absolutely obsessed people are with keeping things "tidy". In a way, it's nice I guess, at least sometimes, but it comes with some serious costs too. This is not unique to the Netherlands, but we're probably the best (or worst?) at it, except maybe Singapore.
From near the end of the article:
"Sometimes people find it a bit gross when we put the mulch back in plant pots, because it smells a bit woody"
Are people really so detached from nature these days that the smell of wet wood puts them off? I do despair for humankind some days when I read this sort of thing.
It just so happens I live in Eindoven, so I guess some more explaining is needed. They're working with the leafeblower now. I hate those contraptions so much.
I blow them off my wood deck, so they don't rot and damage the wood.
I let them lie on the rest of my 1.6 acres. And the 1 acre that's forested, we're working on trying to de-invasive-ize the forest and try to help rehabilitate it. Its just 2 of us, but we're trying.
Are there any guides on "deinvasiveizing"? It seems like a complicated topic. Some non native life is considered to be non invasive, having found a homeostasis its new nich (common carp as an example). And some native life is considered invasive by some because it is so well adapted it crowds out all other native life (some bindweeds)
Given the dramatic impacts we have made on a global scale, is trying to preserve de-humanified areas realistic anymore? Or are we supposed to simply try to maximize the diversity of life without regard to what life was in a place before humans arrived?
We're looking at the super-low-bar of doing things like removing known invasive plants as published in the state's DNR. They maintain a yearly list of nasties to remove.
We also don't use any chemicals to do the killing, as so many of those have terrible side effects. Killing larger invasives involves something as simple as "black contractor bag enveloping and tied at base". It captures all the seeds, kills the plant, and provides easy removal.
We also see that a lot of "lawn grasses" are also pretty invasive especially to forests. So, we also try to keep the lawn encroachment from happening..... as much. Ive done the high tech solution of "lay a slab of plywood on the grasses at the edge of the forest"!
We're also designing our garden with local plants in mind, including rarer plants for our area. If/when those flower and seed, we're seeing natives with natives. And the non-natives we bring in are checked for invasiveness.
Basically, it's being low-key stewards to the land.
Thanks! One well intentioned mistake we made at a previous residence was to plant some flowers for pollinators that were not native. They weren't invasive, but they were prolific. The issue was that they bloomed late enough that the butterflies didn't move on and froze.
wow, that article mentions controversy over the smell of leaf mulch... kinda reflective of how sterile those cities must be for someone who has never visited, so much less surprising they have fewer bugs. Heaven help them if someone ever puts in manure or fish compost :)
Not to mention the municipalities mowing nice patches of grass/plants/flowers where insects thrive.
That lacks an important nuance: in most circumstances (regarding soil type/nitrogen deposition), not mowing at all would lead to those patches being overgrown by fast growers leading to less plant diversity. Can happen in as little as a year or 2. So the mowing itself is not the problem, it's the amount, how and when.
Mowing itself is the problem. Fast growers are just the first step in a recovery process that takes place when a previously stunted ecosystem is allowed to heal. Other types of plants follow in subsequent years, leading to a much more healthy ecosystem than when you mow it all down to hell.
You really cannot talk about this in statements like they apply everywhere. Here's an example: around where I live, the number 1 activity by nature preservation groups when it comes to restoring grasslands of all kinds, is mowing. For a couple of reasons, but the main one being that nitrogen deposition fertilizes the soil too much, so it gets countered by removing biomass via mowing. Not doing that results is fast growers. Not because the'yre indicating a recovery process, just because they outgrow what was there originally. Which is the opposite of recovery.
leading to a much more healthy ecosystem than when you mow it all down to hell.
When I say "it's the amount, how and when" that implicates 'not mowing it all down to hell' is not the right way :)
As the other reply said, each area is unique and so there is no general rule that applies to every location on earth.
Where I live the native prairie was naturally mowed by the bison roaming around, and so not mowing leads to a number of problems as the plants around here depend on that regular mowing. Various lightening strikes and the like ("Indians") caused regular fires as well, which took care of overgrowth. Mowing simulates that without the fire. (this is both good and bad - it makes for cleaner air, but those fires also put charcoal into the ground and so made the prairie net carbon negative over the long term which is something we desperately need)
