Reminder that every time you see ârip up your lawnâ or âkill your lawnâ youâre listening to hot garbage from people who donât know anything about plants, and you will walk away from their advice having actually lost knowledge.
I mean, youâll still be a happier person than someone who cares too much about fan fiction! But you wouldâve destroyed biomass and stripped topsoil for no fucking reason, and released carbon, and killed off a whole root system for being unfashionable.
Repeat after Elodie what we do with lawns that we donât want:
1. We compost them down, with cardboard and green mulch, and build a bed on top of them - especially if we are converting to vegetable gardening/food production/ flower production where we NEED soil quality and nutrients preserved. We NEED every scrap of carbon to go into our damn nutrients, and we wonât get there by ripping back to dead clay. Or,
2. If the turf is terraformed in a different environmental type i.e. an arid setting and youâre planning to xeriscape, itâs less important to keep nutrients but we still want to lock in what can be preserved and ensure that your actions arenât REMOVING the soil you need or EXPOSING IT TO INSTANT EROSION WHILE YOUR PLANTINGS ARE ESTABLISHED OH MY GOD. We might section and flip the turf over and expose the roots to kill it off, while preserving the structure and any native soil, and giving native microorganisms the chance to build a new life without being shoved into sacks and taken to landfill. Or,
3. We grow them out and see what components are in them, then style them pleasingly; often the much-derided turf grass actually contains an interesting mixture of plants that are maintaining themselves beautifully with absolutely no inputs, and therefore could make a wonderfully dreamy, low-maintenance step towards a âwildlife cornerâ if left to flower and seed. Or,
4. We plant over and through them; for example, converting a lawn space into an orchard meadow with successional bulbs and wildflowers is such a delightful choice that produces fruit, flowers, picnic opportunities, forage for pollinators, a pleasant multi-use space and requires so few inputs. Just a few fruit trees provide shade, habitat, carbon sinks, and copious food. Leaving long grass to grow under them brings all the benefits of groundcover (nature abhors bare earth, and so should we, the poor bastards trying to save it) and management can nudge it from a charming burst of crocuses at the end of winter through to a very nice wildflower space in summer, which will do nothing but replenish your soil and soul. Or,
5. If youâre actually rewilding , rather than just throwing sunflower seeds around and patting yourself on the back for it, youâre in touch with local knowledge-keepers who are advising you much better on your specific situation, right? Right? So youâre doing what they advised you, right.
I havenât even touched on soil health or the carbon cycle.
It isnât as punchy and REBELLIOUS AGAINST YOUR DAD as ripping/killing language! but DO YOU SEE HOW EVEN AS A JOKE YOU WALK AWAY FROM IT KNOWING LESS ABOUT PLANTS?
Seriously, if you guys can do one thing of utility on social media it could be to mock the âripping/killing grass is so good and ecoâ thing until it falls apart. It has no value, itâs just Americans scolding their dads at a safe distance. And even if we just make it more fashionable to replace it with âcompostingâ at least thatâs a more valuable word to shove between your ears.
If you want to grow food on turf, and number 1 is too woke/hippieish/permaculture/Charles Dowding/no-dig eyerolly for you: hereâs how your grandfather (or rather John Seymour) converted lawn turf to food. This was written in 1974. Funny how much he talks about topsoil and soil health, guess they arenât new inventions. Odd how he says lightly that this is âan excellent way to bring old grassland into food productionâ, like itâs a reasonable thing that people have done for 50 years but not acted like it was violently radical (or like it was cringey to have grassland; Seymour wasnât into lawns as ornaments, but all of his drawings for ideal homesteads have small grassed areas as multipurpose spaces.) also, despite being a British person he does not assume that everyone has the same exact growing conditions and desired outcomes: he explains what the technique is for, some benefits of doing it, and how people with short arms might wish to tweak the plans; he particularly notes that it works in small spaces, or dry places like California. Itâs not like I emerged the principles of plantcraft spontaneously from my headache just to be contrarian.
Deep beds were revolutionary in the 1970s for the focus on preserving soil health. Prior to that, ploughing - the digging/ripping/killing/churning method in which soil and groundcover are ripped to pieces to provide tilled earth - was literally the thing. Growing food without violently ripping away the topsoil was inconceivable to Western agriculture. Americans sat around blankly in the dust bowls in 1930s saying, âgoshâ and âguess that grass mightâve been playing SOME kinda roleâ and âtopsoil! Who knewâ and over the next decades people really started to reconnect and question, and by the 70s this is what the really radical grandpas were doing.
Today, Deep beds are out of fashion, as the current crop of self-sufficiency aficionados have different intentions; in the 1970s the goal was to ânot buy thingsâ and to extract as much food as possible from the land; and in the 2020s people have pivoted so the primary intentions are more towards âstaving off environmental collapseâ. So the field has pivoted towards no-dig, with the idea of not tilling soil at all -> improved soil health BUT ALSO locking down as much CO2 as possible in everything we do.
I donât know, I wonder if we could aspire to reach AT LEAST the Lawn Discourse of the 1970s, here on 2020 social media? Itâs like grandpa tier knowledge? There were reasons for it, and stuff. Like we could move maybe 50 years forward in learned discourse and still be on a better page.
