That's fair, but you don't gotta invite them in. And I will remind you that "outside" is kind of their domain, not ours 😉
All that said though, a rock or sand yard is still vastly better than a manicured lawn which serves basically no purpose other than to take in resources (mostly water) with no real output. Hell, even if you paved over your lawn with one big slab of concrete that would still probably be ecologically better than the waste involved in maintaining a manicured grass lawn!
Slabbing is much worse, holds heat and cold and prevent groundwater absorption. Crushed lava rock over sand and gravel would be a good idea though, nice and solid to walk on but drains out no problem.
I gotta disagree there. My yard even when mowed is a haven for all sortsa critters. Lizards, squirrels, and birds prance around by day, and at night you can find hundreds of varying spiders and wasps hunting smaller insects. Rocks might afford some of that but just about nothing would be happy with plain sand backyard. Then again, I live in an area with lots of rain and no shortage on water.
I try to mow pretty high and I let it grow for a few weeks between, but unfortunately I cant just leave it be due to my hoa.
Legit, we've got about an acre in the back yard, and I was working toward this for most of it. Can't do the work required now, so it's gotten less native than it used to be, but at one point, it was all plants native to my region, and they are still dominant. The rest of the yard is better set up for my crippled ass to handle, so I can pull out invasive species as needed. There's a section maybe twenty feet in a rough circle plus a corner where it's "grass", but it's mostly random clover with dandelions I can't be bothered to remove every year. The chickens have been keeping anything else from setting in compared to yard B.C. (before chickens).
It'll eventually get taken over by random plants, I'm sure. It'll be as I age out and cripple out of the work involved, since getting my kid to do a damn thing ain't happening lol. But for now, me and the chickens have a nice area to walk around and putter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We're on step 3 for the back and 4 for the front (kind of, it's not really wild but it's all native xeric plants) and I gotta say, highly recommend it. We have so many pollinators. I have to gently shoo them out of the catmint before I prune it because there are so many in there.
If you’re in the US, I have gotten good results/ seeds from ptlawnseed.com. They have a bunch of different options and tell you what works well in your climate zone!
I just looked up what type of clover grows well in my climate, then every spring, I order a 5 lb bag and just walk around throwing that everywhere. Add some water and let it go nuts. Once clover is established, it starts to spread on its own, but I like to give it more friends to speed up the process. Plus, bunnies love it, and with bunnies comes bunny poop. It's one of the best fertilizers you'll find. It's a work in progress, but once it's completed, I'll have to mow like 2 times a season, I won't have to worry about weeds, and it doesn't need fertilizer. Clover is an incredible plant and I can't wait until it's completed.
My lease has two things. Mow the lawn AND abide by any HOA shit, so I had to mow the lawn to their standards and do the random bullshit they came up with. My garbage cans were in front of my house for 9 months and then all of a sudden it was a problem. Fuck HOA's and land bastards
Well, if you decide to move out you can be a prick your last few months there and a violate every HOA rule imaginable. Might try to take away your deposit but could be worth it.