Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for September 16, 2023

Now in our CA drought we’re just letting our lawns go to seed

She wants the grass to be short enough that she can see snakes. Interfering with nature is bad unless nature is venomous.

Nature and wifes have this unique feature to make the lazy souls do some foraging, be it for food or for aesthetics.

plant a garden, buddy, and you will never have to mow again!

I feel you, brother. I like mine tall, too.

A well manicured lawn is an environmental disaster.

Cover the yard with wildflowers

Although if you’re worried about pollution, then maybe use a reel mower. They actually work quite well if you can keep the blades sharp.

She’s a force of nature.

Tried that, kept getting notices from local government treatening fines unless I got the lawn mowed.

Or you could get ahead of the rising temperatures and eliminate the mowing at the same time by xeriscaping. (I changed landscapers when the one I had spelled that “zeroscaping” and assumed I meant arrangements of different colors of pebbles and rocks.)

The beauty of not living in an HOA neighborhood. Since I don’t have to maintain a green lawn, I don’t have to water it. If I don’t water it, it won’t grow. If it doesn’t grow, I don’t have to mow it. Bonus, I save time and money not having to water or mow it.

Given the recent extreme heat in central VA we haven’t needed to mow and many of us couldn’t get out to do it, but there wasn’t much grass left anyway. Even watering in the late evening hasn’t helped much. But, being the average homeowner, I have begun listing the seeds, fertilizer, etc, and laying out the usual plans for cultivating through the winter. Hope dies slowly, but sometimes the weather can speed up that process.

Get rid of the yard. Lawns are bad news.

Homeowner associations (HOAs) get to decide how nature is allowed to behave.

My wife never needs to bug me to mow the lawn. After a lifetime of pushing around various devices, I finally sprung for a riding mower, which makes the chore far less onerous. Money well spent!

Yep. That’s me in a few hours.

Nature has kept me from having to mow the lawn for more than 6 weeks now. The fall rains have started, however, and I doubt I have more than another week before I have to mow again.

Lawns do have an affect on the environment. Normally they are not pollinator friendly. Then there are the chemicals you have to put on them and the water needed to keep them green.

I have a lawn, but it is not traditional grass. It is whatever grows naturally without extra water and without artificial fertilizers. It looks good when I mow it.

If I didn’t mow it, it would revert back to forest like the rest of my property.

I have a “wild patch” in back that I don’t mow, but do weed. It seems to be a combination of clover and ivy.

We also have flower boxes that are fertilized with compost and I do water these when needed. These keep the bees, butterflies, humming birds and some other critters happy.

A lawn mower puts out as much air pollution as car and then you have noise pollution.

have some pride in your home’s appearance… mowing the lawn is a start.

We have some clover that never needs mowing, but mostly garden.

Get rid of the lawn and put in native plants!

I totally agree. As a matter of fact, I’m not going to mow my lawn today either. Let’s all go natural for a while. …umm, not to natural, if you know what I mean.

If you don’t have a lawn to mow, trim, blow, fertilize and water, how will you be able to constantly annoy your neighbors?

I wanted to get some goats to munch the lawn, boss shot that one down real fast.

Too many people treat the lawn, as if it was the living room rug. Too much fussing.

Just pull weeds, fertilize, water and pull lots more weeds

Americans and their obsession with lawns have done a lot of environmental damage. Using too much water, fertilizer run off.Better to have, as someone mentioned, a garden or xerioscaping using native plants and low growing ground cover

You need to change that fossil fueled mower! Go electric – and set up a solar roof and fence!

I mow my grass when I start losing sight of dogs in it…

There are electric powered lawnmowers. Not only are they expensive and not particularly efficient, but you have to buy multiple batteries because one does not hold enough charge to do the entire lawn. However, they do burn with a beautiful blue and green flame that cannot be extinguished with water and creates lots of toxic black smoke. Kind of like a Tesla only smaller.

Sorry Wiley, you still have to mow but maybe put on a pair of shoes next time.

I was a vegetable gardener for over 40 years, till this year. I’m not sure why, perhaps the effects of climate change, but my production is way, way down. So, I gave up. Canned is just as cheap and tastes good, too.

One really crazy option to mowing I’ve begun is carpeting. That’s right, I carpet a good portion of my backyard. The section near the pool doesn’t grow much grass, and the section that does grow grass my dog has destroyed under her paws. So, I picked up tossed carpets and have strewn them over these sections of the BY. The dog loves them, I like them, and mowing has been cut down by half.

Gallant effort.

There have been numerous suits against HOAs to allow lawns to go au natural and the HOAs have lost some.

I tried something similar. I cut the grass but left the clippings on the ground. “It’ll make a good mulch!” I said… Later, after I raked up all the clippings, I rethought my approach to yard work.

Don’t forget to tune your lawn mower! Lots of lawnmowers make lots of pollution. Or you could always get a goat!

Women can actually mow a lawn too !

I tried that once. Unfortunately, I was a young enlisted guy living in government housing. They didn’t approve of the long grass, and they notified me of their displeasure. Bought an old manual push mower to take care of their problem.

I’m not a big “save the planet” type, but I’ve thought for years that the “well-groomed lawn” was a societal oddity we could do without. Unless you’re going to be playing croquet or something. Supposedly, short grass keeps the vermin away, but unless your hiding trash in the grass, or putting out food and/or water that you wouldn’t with short grass, tall grass isn’t going to produce or attract rats or anything like that.

Ditch the bag, let the clippings fertilize the lawn rather than toxic chemicals.

Getting rid of lawns will help. Lawns are a big waste of water. Grow native plants.

Get a rototiller and solve the problem. Good for water conservation.

You may not be able to fool Mother Nature, but it’s even harder to pull one over the wife.

The neighbor across the street had moles, and got rid of their whole front yard. They replaced it with plants and various stones. It looks like heck now, and will look even worse after the winter. Cheap is not a good option

Velly cleber cartoon man…

We’re a part of nature. What else would interfere with nature besides nature itself?

And some husbands will try this.

Some of Frank Luntz’s focus groups a few decades back revealed that the phrase “global warming” sounded scary to people, but “climate change” wasn’t so much; more like “yeah, yeah, weather tomoro’s gonna be a bit different than today, so what?”. So promptly all the Republicans, plutocrats, and right-wingers adopted the less worrisome wording, and the clueless Dems just went along with the flow. Well, time to turn the tables. I’m abandoning “climate change” and hereafter going with “climate crisis”. You should, too!

I mean, he’s right! But then again, so is she! lol

I’d try, too. I hate mowing the lawn!

We already have interfered with the ways of Nature why we have a ginormous problem of altered climate. We done did it ourselves to ourselves.

Less lawn, more perennials and groundcovers.