it's true!

Source: https://www.crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt.com/kill-your-lawn

Look, this guy is a phenomenon and worth at least some of your time. Not just for the kill your lawn stuff, but for making botany actually interesting. There's a whole-ass youtube channel that is sure to entertain if not educate.

His rambling podcasts are great.

Roundup doesn't want you to know this. In their eyes... Dandelions are weeds, which is such a sad opinion.

When dandelions pop up they let you know to start looking for morels in a week or so. Thank you dandelions.
Dandelions are awesome! You can make a salad of them with great health benefits and dandelion honey is also great! And the latex milk it has can be used to make rubber!
- You can also make tea out of the leaves, root, and flowers (all together, or some combination of the three).
  Dandelions have a lot of vitamin A and C, some B vitamins, calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, copper, and zinc. It's good for the skin, liver, and digestion. It's a diuretic and can help with cramps.

I know this is a meme, but shit like this is why I allow wild growth on my property. First year I owned my home the ground got muddy as hell from the new build since the ground was all dug up and tilled.

From the second year on I’ve only mowed a path for my driveway and the front walkway and the rest grows wild. Sweetgrass and other native plants anywhere from like 1 to 3 feet tall and the area is high desert (Colorado) so the “weeds” suck up any moisture they can get, no flood, no mud. It’s great. I’ll never understand MFers in the rurals curating lawns.

Plus, it looks nice, and the deer in the area seem to like it as well.

I’ll never understand MFers in the rurals curating lawns.
Basically, it's a flex. In order to have a perfect looking grass yard, you either need to kill all your free time to maintain it, or pay people a lot of cash to keep it tip-top. And the free time thing also requires money since you probably don't have your life set up like that unless you're paying for it somewhere else. Any other approach will yield mediocre results which will immediately mark you as unable to keep pace with your more monied neighbors.
Assuming you're playing their game, that is. Which you clearly are not. Good job!
How do you deal with native fauna that lives in wild vegetation? Mosquitoes, flies, ticks, etc.?
- It essentially all takes care of itself, it’s a whole ecosystem. There’s no standing water for mosquitos thanks to the foliage. There’s also lizards, the occasional frog, birds. The deer eat some of the taller stuff. Even with the deer, there’s at least one mountain lion in the area I’ve seen, which I presume helps keep the population reasonable. I dunno, it doesn’t really need any tending, other than to clear a path where I need.
  Aside from that, my neighbor has pine trees, and occasionally pine cones take root and need their root- balls shoveled out. That’s the only big maintenance because I don’t want the big trees on my property. I wouldn’t mind, but for two things:
  They always seem to root down near the road on my driveway path or walk-down.
  I have solar panels and can’t have them growing up on the southeast side side of the house, and that’s where they tend to fall.
  Besides that, I have to knock down the occasional wasp nest (paper wasps) on the house, but if they nest away from the house I leave them alone. It’s all minimal maintenance. If you let nature do its thing it tends to find a balance. Humans are the ones usually screwing it up.
- Mosquitoes need standing water
- Moskitos live anywhere there is stale water, so either clean it or have it wild enough that other insects outcompet them.
  Put your compost pile somewhere you don't walk past a lot, because that's where flies congregate.
  Ticks aren't that mobile, they need some animal to carries them there.
- Mosquitos hardly exist in much of Colorado, so that probably helps them.
I love natural growth and we have plenty around (PNW), but that invasive Himalayan Blackberry is constantly creeping back out of the wild edges. We've done well enough pushing it back, but it is so pervasive and the animals help spread the seeds. That and the other noxious weeds (Scotch-broom, thistle, tansy, etc) have us quite busy doing our best to remove and keep out. It's like spitting into the wind if the other land-owners around don't do it as well. Oh well.
We also planted tons of native "deer-resistant" plants. They love it. I call it deer salad.
- If this isn’t the most relatable thing that’s (kinda) specific to me

I was purposefully allowing my grass to grow because my area is in a severe drought and the herbivorous wildlife (groundhogs, rabbits, and deer) have slim pickings right now and they started coming onto my property to eat. I even leave the gates open to the fenced part when I'm not home so the critters can get in easier.

The other day my neighbor mowed half my yard without my consent because he saw a garter snake cross the road and go into my yard. I was, and still am, so pissed. He cut the grass down to the dirt. He didn't even tell me after the fact. I had to go door to door asking my neighbors if they knew who tf touched my yard while I was out and about. My neighbor admitted to it when I got to his place to ask and had the audacity to get shitty with me about letting my grass grow.

I've had something similar happen too. There's some shitty fucking people out there.
- Right?? Like this neighbor seemed pretty damn cool until he pulled that shit. He lost a bunch of weight and he suddenly became the biggest dickhead on the planet..🙄
that's so fucked up for them to do that
- It really was. I had to pay my usual grass guy the price of a full cut to finish it, too. Apparently making the drive to my place for less isn't worth it for him, which I totally understand. I could not afford a full cut on my own, so I had to borrow money from my mom. My usual grass guy is really great and he uses my yard to teach his kids yard work, so my mom didn't mind helping me out.
  Still super bummed about the wildlife needing food though. It's super illegal to actively feed the wildlife where I live, so I can't really provide for them.

!nolawns@slrpnk.net

ITT lots of people who blessedly have no idea what an HOA is.

I think it's a curse to know what HOA even are. Rest of the world is just normal.
Benefits of living in bumfuck. Though to be real, I’d never buy or build in a HOA. It’s a choice. Renting in HOAs was bad enough in the past.
Or we know all about them and avoid them at almost all cost.
Ur mom?
/j

Unless you have really sandy soils. Then the rain mostly passes right through (ignoring all the parts that are paved - insta-flood!), and it's just a situation with malnourished grass, probably more susceptible to "weeds", and not a lot of organic matter to hold all that soil together.

That's the thing missing from this image - it's not just being more porous that makes larger plants retain water better, it's that they're a critical part in creating the conditions that produce more of that organic matter, getting that carbon (and a lot of other stuff) in the ground. It acts as a sponge, and in sandy soils that are too porous, it fills those gaps and acts as a binder.

The shape of the roots of the shrubs is somewhat exaggerated. Many do go that deep, but they’re not that wide all the way down. There are only a few types that grow roots that look like that.

There are also deep root grasses if you want a lawn, but don’t want to ruin your soil.

https://thankyourlawn.com/grass-root-depth/

props to crime pays but botany doesn't. Great stuff.
needs a subtle Saddam in the root structure of native plant.

We tore out our front lawn out this summer. By the time we were working in July the (clay) soil under the sod was brick hard for 18 inches before it got workable again.

The yard is now 70% native and the area with high sun is drought tolerant. It's only been a few weeks and already the pollinators are here in force and there's a pair of mourning doves that come by to hang out most mornings.

Is there an alternative to grass that covers well, and doesn't spread fast like an invasive plant?

I've read about clover but it does spread fast.

I love the university of Minnesota Bee Lawn page about some ideas. You can also buy pure flower seeds at Flawn
The spreading nature of clover is not overwhelming. I have it everywhere and doesn't pass even the smallest barrier to my more traditional gardens. It weedy status is more marketing than factual
Clover is honestly fine, its short so even if it spreads into your flowerbeds its not going to do any damage, in fact since its a nitrogen fixer it might even help, and insects like clover a lot more than grass
native grass, probably

Not shown: the limestone 16" down.

Plus lawns are typically domed up to avoid sogginess, causing tons of runoff into the storm drains (including runoff from sprinklers). It's lunacy.

I work in municipal government, and I have very strong feeling about leaf blowers.
All these assholes blowing all the great fertilizing trulimmings and dirt off their lawn and into the street to clog up the storm drains.
- Bro if ur using a leaf blower to remove leaves from your lawn and not from your driveway you gotta be extra special
- That's why I love my twin blade mower. Turns all yard trimmings into basically powder that feeds the lawn and even helps prevent moisture from evaporating out of the soil.
  I also use controlled natural selection so that only shit that can survive our brutal summers grows, so I don't even need to water.

Also, you can totally have a lawn. It's a great place to Do Things in your garden, and it's better than bricks or concrete. I can't host a bbq in between the shrubs after all.

Just, turn the bits where you don't Do Things into some other plant than lawn grass. At the very least you don't really need those corners, and come on, a natural zone is way easier to maintain than a lawn too!

In my area we have communal lawns for lounging, soccer, etc. so that individual homes have smaller gardens, and areas not needed for human activity are allowed to grow wild while in season.
There's better ground cover that stands up to reasonable wear and tear from activities etc that also improves the soil, unlike standard grasses.

Relevant Climate Town-video which just dropped: https://nebula.tv/videos/climatetown-americas-dumbest-crop/ / https://youtu.be/KLYMjPNppRQ

Why is it someone hasn't modified the dna of grass to give us one that has both deep roots and works like lawn grass on top.

As others have said, the size of roots is pretty directly tied to the size of foliage. Roots store energy(calories) in case something happens to the foliage or sunlight is low. The more energy they can take in, the more storage they need, as well as the stability that larger plants need from larger roots.
But how do you keep feeding the larger roots if the photosynthetic engines have giving them energy have been damn near removed?
- Hm, this doesn't fit. You are saying the roots store energy in case the foliage is lost, then saying the roots can't exist without the foliage. Which is it? I get that they are energy storage. So the foliage in all plants must generate an excess of energy to fill the storage. That should mean that once the storage is full, extra energy can be spent to extend the roots, then fill with energy, rinse repeat.
I doubt think it's a DNA problem, the amount of roots depends on the amount of leaves.
So keeping the grass short keeps the roots sorry as well
- But why? Roots act as energy storage, so once full, grow more. Not full stop. That should lead to pretty decent roots.
Because lawns are fucking stupid.
- Context is important. I grew up on 5 acres of pretty wild land so the lawn around the house was anything but fucking stupid.
  Gave kids a place to play in view of the big windows in the house, was a very very small part of the overall land. A small maintained area is a very good thing to have access to. But so was the wildness behind it
  In more suburban or urban environments is a completely different discussion I will grant you
There are prairie grass stains that have very deep roots. Not sure how they act as a replacement for typical lawns but they exist already
Because releasing genetically modified organisms into the wild can have absolutely disastrous consequences on an ecosystem. I think there are cases where the benefits are worth the risks, but pretty lawn is not one of them. Might be nice in the future when we have a better grasp on what we're doing.
- Thats a great talking point, but it is BS. Humans have been genetically modifying organsims through selective breeding for millenia. Any animal or plant you eat is nothing like it natural origin.