this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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I have spaces in my yard that look like that, but it takes soooo many hours of meticulous hand weeding to encourage and protect the wildflowers and discourage the goat head burr, fox tails, storks bill and burr clover. And forget hiring anyone to help, professionals call them all weeds will only eradicate the whole lot (which would start it back to the beginning since those nasty ones are the first to take over when the earth is bared). Every year there are few more flowers and friendly "weeds" and few less horrible thorny noxious weeds, but it's been a process over about 8 years and it's not finished and probably never will be.
The easiest to maintain part of my yard is my "no mow" native fescue lawn, that would never be allowed in an HOA and you can't really walk on it, but it houses a billion bugs and the birds and spiders and cats love it.
Yes! The anti mow people don't understand that your yard doesn't turn into a wildflower meadow if you stop mowing.
I spent hundreds of dollars on wildflower seeds and tiller rentals to get a wildflower meadow started.
5 years later and it's just weeds. And not nice weeds- It's 1/2" long thornbush weeds- perfect for spreading tics onto the local deer population.
As an anti-mow person, I don't care, if it's a wildflower meadow. I don't call random plants "weeds", they're all cool with me. Like, alright, if you've got a super-invasive foreign species that's actively killing the local ecosystem, then I'm on board with doing something against that. But it can hardly be worse than mowing the local ecosystem.
That’s the thing, the super invasive weeds are what establish the best. I’ve got a broader definition of “wildflower” than anyone I know, but if you’re encouraging foxtails and goat head burrs in your yard, you’re a dick.
I live in an area where a lot of people raise sheep and you can check out x rays of storks bill seeds that burrow down through the fleece, skin And fat, into the poor bastards muscles. Being all “Look at me! I don’t judge plants, they’re all welcome!” is going to cause a lot of pain and suffering and punctured tires and shoe soles.
You're right. I used to be "no mow" when I lived in the city and the burbs, but now that I have a rural acreage, I've realized that you have to use every trick in the book to even have a chance against invasives.
Tomorrow I'm renting a brush mower to take out an acre of 8 foot tall Himalayan blackberry that's completely choked out a meadow. It's flowered, but hasn't set fruit, so I need to get it now. I'll have to follow that up with herbicide application in late summer because it has vigorous root energy storage. That'll be year one of at least three years of restoration. This is on top of wineberry, tree of heaven, stilt grass, japanese honeysuckle, and autumn olive. It physically blocks animals, consumes all the sunlight, and none of this shit supports native lepidoptera so it totally fucks up the food chain.
I wish I could just let it be and it would be fine, but that ship sailed a hundred years ago. The upside is in areas where there's been active remediation the forest looks fucking fantastic.
I still let it grow despite the weeds. But weeds is an understatement. As I said, it's thornbushes and they grow into impassible thicket. I have enough acres that I'm fine with it. But it's not something the average homeowner could allow to happen. It isn't child safe.
The weeding is insanity. It felt like that's all we did last summer. I'm now paying some teenagers $40/hr to hand weed it because all the professionals just want to spray everything, and the kids are willing to be really meticulous because they don't want to jeopardize a really well-paying job.
One of my biggest disappointments with my neighborhood is that the otherwise effectively non-existant HOA came down on someone with a beautiful "cottage garden" style space in their front yard. It was traditionally wild local flowers and it wasn't unkempt by any stretch.
I think they just disliked that so much of the person's front yard wasn't grass. Or there was some petty personal beef going on.
It's even more ridiculous when we have a "community beekeeper" with hives in the back of some of the community open spaces. We have people with vegetable gardens in their back yards (hell fucking yes) when it's explicitly against the HOA rules (I ain't no snitch). But god forbid someone have well kept local wildflowers and mulch as half of their front yard.
With my yard layout I had hoped to do the same with my front and side yard.
I think I got quite lucky with mine. I've barely touched it in 15 years, and it's mostly free of anything with spikes on.
Could do with a bit more variety in it, as most of it is this big green stalky thing that grows quite tall.