Might be a nice idea for some places, but not all. We get goat heads where I live. Unmowed lawns become impassable. Animals or humans that try to make their way through are covered in barbed seeds.
Houses are infinitely better than apartments because you have more distance from your idiot, asshole neighbors, and can build a fence to improve the separation.
Being able to then do away with the grass and plant native flora is just a side benefit.
No mowing means I can’t walk in the yard without getting covered in chiggers here in the US south. My grass has to be stupidly short. All it takes is 5 seconds of walking in not even tall grass and I’m covered in invisible chiggers that will give me weepy swollen itchy bites lasting for weeks, unless I shower within 30 minutes and immediately wash my clothes. OFF doesn’t make a damn difference. Pants help, but wearing pants in 85+ degrees makes me sweat buckets more than I would otherwise.
I don’t water my lawn or use fertilizers. EDIT: and “natural selection” will absolutely be a field of invasives. The native prairies require fire management and have been outcompeted by invasives many many decades ago. Unless you’re going to round-up the entire yard to kill the grass, rent a seed drill and provide a ton of seed to put enough native prairie seed into the ground to outcompete the invasive seed bank, install erosion controls since we killed the grass off, and then set up an endowment to cover the expense of hiring burners to burn off my field annually, go make ill-informed suggestions to others.
Yes, you would have to densely broadcast seed/plant plugs with native prairie species or noxious and invasive stuff will take over initially. And you would have to kill all the grass, either with a spray (which helps keep the existing invasive seed bank down), or till or sod cut or solarize or smother the grass.
If you replant relatively quickly, erosion won't be too much of a concern as the natives will establish fast enough to stabilize the soil. Long term, the natives will actually reduce erosion compared to lawn grass. You don't need to burn in an urban setting, mowing once or twice a year (once in earlier spring and maybe again in early summer to help natives out compete invasives) is gonna be enough generally.
Is this from "101 ways to ensure your neighbors hate you"? Invasive species are a bad idea because they can actually harm native species, plus they can be difficult to prevent from spreading to others areas, in which you may get in trouble depending on local ordinances. It also "sounds" like it would like pretty, but 9 times out of 10, it is not. Many times the weeds are already an invasive species. There are other alternatives to planting grass that's a lot better for everyone involved. There's rocks if it's small enough, there's moss if you care about the environment, and if you really want a meadow (because let's face it, you'll likely get a fire hazard of weeds instead). Not all grass is invasive or non-native and you can purposely plant other things. And you may still have to water them as nature doesn't always care whether a tiny insignificant parcel of land because a dried out lawn fire waiting to happen.
Lawns will require maintenance to look good. And letting just nature take it's course is not always the best answer because it's no longer a balanced environment to begin with. The environment is already out of equilibrium and you could make it worse.
Not mowing in some places means letting it turn into an overgrown, unusable mess. I’m all for more natural and beneficial lawns, but just letting tall grasses and things grow until it’s hard to walk in and looks abandoned isn’t an option in a lot of cases. There might need to be to be a bit more artificial selection involved.
I don't weed or fertilize, and mow at the longest setting and only when there's at least a couple inches to cut off. There's at least a dozen different species of plants in my yard, depending on how much shade and water that spot gets: Clover, violets, dandelions, and several different kinds of grass and flowering plants.
It stays nice and green all year long, and I get compliments on it from my neighbors who have TruGreen showing up every month. You don't have to leave it overgrown to have something much healthier than a monoculture lawn.
A major overlooked ecological value of parasites and the diseases they carry is population control. We all hate them and the off chance of getting a serious disease from them, but they do help keep populations of mammals in control. Also, some mosquitoes are pollinators.
Generally, if the question is "Should we eradicate native species?", my answer would be no regardless of species because ecology is extremely complex and we likely will never exactly understand the impact of voluntary species eradication until after we do it.
There are non-native mosquitoes and ticks though, eradication of those should be okay unless maybe if they've been naturalized for a long time. Less severe population control near urban areas is probably the most reasonable compromise between not disturbing native ecology and human comfort.
we likely will never exactly understand the impact of voluntary species eradication until after we do it.
Then keep a totally self contained population segregated while we find out. Then if we find proof they’re absolutely critical for something, reintroduce them. Otherwise, fuck em.
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