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Staying Off The Grass
Here’s another example of a yard that breaks the shackles of a resource-hungry lawn. This non-lawn front yard on Dave Avenue in Eden Park is attractive and quirky, even in the Nashville-worthy heat of this June morning. The garden has a good selection of carefree plants, including the nasturtiums, creeping phlox, arborvitaes and junipers – all of which do well in dry, sunny conditions. The nasturtiums, a self-seeding annual, are especially adaptable to poor, dry soil. Ivy and cedar mulch fill the gaps between the plants to help to retain moisture and reduce weeds.

The water usage on this yard is probably negligible, and most of the plants can be found at any garden center. Outside of the occasional time spent on weeding, freshening up the mulch and keeping the ivy in check, this is practically a hands-free garden.

Staying Off The Grass
One of the ways to break the shackles of that resource-hungry lawn is to replace the grass altogether. This non-lawn front yard from Kneeland Street benefits from its small size. The early-spring pic shows that this is obviously the yard of someone who loves to garden. This is not a plant-it-and-walk-away yard. The lazy gardener would probably be better served with the right selection of sustainable, carefree shrubs.

Wide, green lawns are the ultimate badge of the suburban lifestyle. The manicured lawn has become the accepted front yard landscape, thanks to the urban exodus of the 1950’s and the proliferation of the suburban plot. Some clever marketing efforts at that time, by companies such as Scott’s, further solidified the turf grass lawn as the de facto American home landscape.

But the cost of upkeep for the prototypical manicured lawn is steep, both monetarily and environmentally. The emissions from power mowers, edgers and blowers, the cost of gas, fertilizers, pesticides, water consumption and your time all add to the cost of maintaining a lawn. Running a lawn mower for a half-an-hour emits roughly as many carbons as driving from Cranston to Boston 5 times. And a riding mower? Well, if you own one of those, you might as well just go outside and start clubbing every living thing, you walrus-hater.

We use an estimated 26 billion gallons of water per day, and approximately 30% of that (8 billion gallons/day) goes to water lawns and gardens. That adds up to 35,000 gallons per year per household. For suburban homes it’s about 10,000 gallons more than that.¹ Anyway, that’s a lot of water. Fertilizers and pesticides find their way into the Pawtuxet via runoff. The extra nitrogen makes the algae bloom and fish angry.

OK, so you’d like to reduce the environmental impact of maintaining your lawn, but you want to keep it looking, you know, tidy. The options range from a slight alteration in maintenance to a complete 180 about the concept of what the front yard should be. Here’s a list of maintenance habits that can make your lawn greener – in the save-the-earth sense. I’ve tried all of these things with some great success, and some spectacular failure, on different sides of the same yard.

• Mow it taller and less often
  This will encourage better root growth, promote better drought tolerance, and keep less weeds from germinating. 2-3 inches is recommended. Taller if you want to encourage antelope.
• Use a hand mower
  This is actually a relatively easy and cheap thing to do, and those newer reel mowers are actually easy to push. The negatives? At times there might be more raking. If you use a service, ask them if they have alternative mowers like electric or preferably reel mowers. And when they stop laughing at you, fire them.
• Don’t use those silly blowers
  If a dumber power tool has been invented, I want to see it.
• Stop watering
  OK, you just spit out your gum. Keeping your lawn off water is like setting it on fire. But the lawn will just go dormant during the hottest driest months, and bounce back in the Fall, like magic.
• Can’t go cold turkey on the water? Water less
  Water less often – but water more deeply. Water in the morning to reduce water lost to evaporation.
• Switch from chemical fertilizers and pesticides
  Chicken manure provides a great alternative to the usual lawn chemicals. Corn meal can be used as an effective natural weed-suppressor. Ask your lawn service if they’ll apply organic fertilizer. They might. If not, here are some that will:

Gro Pro
Laurel Garden Design
Thompson Organic Landscaping 401.861.3616
Gardens Are…
saferyardcare.com
NaturaLawn of America
Simply Safer

Find organic land care pros in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island using Organic Land Care’s guide

In future posts, re-thinking the front yard.

– with information from Pawtuxet Farmers’ Market/Friends of the Pawtuxet
1. lowimpactliving.com

-photo by Paul Frederickson

A homeowner’s preference for either neatly manicured shrubs or wildly arching branches is never more evident than when the forsythias are in bloom. Taking an informal poll in Eden Park and Garden City, I found that freeform forsythias outnumber pruned powder-puffs. However, the final results have not been tallied, so beware of superdelegates bearing power hedge trimmers.