Puddock Hill Journal #13: When No Mow May Bleeds Into July, Further Possibilities Await
Imagine a science fiction movie with the following plot. You live a peaceful, pastoral life, comfortable in your surroundings and with plenty of food. But once in a while a giant, spinning, fast-moving blade arrives unexpectedly over the horizon. If you don’t happen to duck into a hole in time or somehow get out of the way, you’re chopped meat, left to die. If you do get out of the way, you emerge from hiding to find your home and food destroyed. Genre: horror.
What would we call such a movie? How about The Great American Lawn.
The Xerxes Society’s Bee City USA initiative notes that our nation’s lawns cover 40 million acres in aggregate or 2% of all land, “making them the single largest irrigated crop we grow.” What’s wrong with that? Bee City goes on to count the ways: “The traditional monoculture lawn lacks floral resources or nesting sites for bees and is often treated with large amounts of pesticides that harm bees and other invertebrates.”
For the first ten years that we lived at Puddock Hill, we maintained approximately a third of the property in lawn, as the prior residents had done, although we never used chemicals, rarely fertilized, and did not irrigate. Eventually, we stopped mowing the steeper slopes and decided to manage them as micro-meadows that we only mow once a year, except to fight off patches of invasives.