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Yea a lot of people are clueless to how much of an effect lawns have on keeping pests away from the house. Mice love living in tall grass while using your house as a buffet and bathroom.

An actual ecosystem would keep the tick population down though, but also if you don't have deer regularly roaming through your front yard you should be fine too

And yellow jackets

We've tried both clover and thyme, but we can't get them to really take off. But I think we just weren't doing enough at a time and wildlife was eating it all. Our current course of action has been killing sections of grass with a tarp, then planting the clover and our first patch is doing well.

It might help to make it look more intentional, such as a bordered flowerbed with native plants in it that just happens to be the size of most of your front lawn.

Good job at least trying to do something. My current city and previous home city have finally started doing more native plantings and my current local city's uni has started up a significant prairie restoration project right outside the city. There are also a few small prairie restorations going on inside city limits mostly in the burbs where there's space but I can't seem to find out what org is running them.

The snakes are only there to eat the mice and rats this brings. Which is why most locales in the US won’t let you do this. If you want a similar effect of this to simply encourage pollinators you can plant a native pollinator garden and get some pollinator houses. Similar, but smaller effect without the mice and the county/city giving you flack.

Another viable option isn't to completely convert lawn but just make one or a few native plant beds . If you aren't willing to give up the lawn completely, you could still convert smaller portions of it.

Also sneks aren't that bad.

My main argument against lawns is the massive amounts of pesticides, weed killers, and fertilizer they require to look like the ones in the picture. Coincidentally, that's the point this meme is making.

Also, just because lawns aren't the worst possible use off water that you can think of, doesn't make them not wastes of water. Just because almond farms in California use more water that lawns on the same state doesn't change the fact that lawns waste water. Those same California almond farms sissy have nothing to do with the thousands of suburbs in other areas which have HOAs that require grass lawns.

Aside from all that, not all of the 85% of industrial water usage is wasteful. Efficiency needs to be improved, but we do need to grow food to eat.

So don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

I'll never understand why so many people seem to willingly buy houses under an HOA tyranny

That's funny because that's exactly how lawns were created - to showcase that lords were wealthy enough to waste land rather than use it for food production. it's essentially the 'smash a bottle of expensive champagne challenge' of the feudal period.

Get clover and creeping thyme. Neither grows tall and both stay green without really any watering.