Category: Exteriors

Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of dialogue around killing your lawn. Kill it and get rid of your mower, trimmer, and blower. Kill it and plant native species. Both are excellent reasons – they benefit the ecosystem by reducing fossil fuel use and noise pollution, and increase biodiversity.

Yet, this past week, I installed a pallet of St. Augustine sod.

It’s also a lawn full of weeds. I didn’t notice at first because everything was green, but there were entire sections of the lawn that were nothing but weeds and the excessive rains only fueled their proliferation. I’ve used all types of selective herbicides (don’t judge me) and hand picked others, all in futile attempts to give the grass time to outcompete.

“Weeds” are nothing more than plants you didn’t intentionally place somewhere. Many are harmless and have some ecological value – attracting pollinators are providing food for birds. Others are invasive – choking out other plants and providing no ecological benefit – and should be controlled.

The thing that’s been trending lately is clover lawns. Clover attracts bees, it doesn’t require as much maintenance, it’s drought tolerant, etc. So I gave it a shot. I didn’t kill my lawn, but I heavily seeded all the bare spots and overseeded the lawn in general with white and crimson clover, as well as with dichondra. My hope was that it would fill in the spaces, outcompete some of the invasive weeds, and bring more bees to my garden overall.

When it was all said and done, I hated it.

First of all, I think the folks on social media who claim they love their clover lawns, are lying. Clover is great as part of your lawn, but as the singular element? Absolutely not. If there’s not enough sunlight it gets leggy, it falls over when it rains too hard or you walk on it, and it dies back easily and often leaving you with bare soil primed for some of the more vigorous and invasive weeds we have in Louisiana.

This leads to two question: 1) why not let the regular, volunteer weeds just do their thing instead of trying to be in control? and 2) wasn’t the point of killing the lawn to reintroduce native species?

Most of the regular “weeds” in my area get really tall and grow faster than the grass. I have two dogs and there’s a colony of feral cats in the neighborhood. I do not enjoy easter egg hunting for animal poop. And if I don’t regularly locate it all, the dogs will eat the cat poop, they’ll step in their own poop and track it inside, and the fly population will be out of control. So if my original reasons for killing the lawn included having to mow less, then this doesn’t hold up – I’d still be out there with the string trimmer at least once a week.

On the other hand, intentionally planting native species in a yard this size is firstly, cost prohibitive. More importantly, it still doesn’t solve the poop problem as most native grasses and wildflowers are also tall. Louisiana doesn’t have many species of native ground cover that are commercially available (e.g. turkey tangle frogfruit), and the more available low-growing natives are still 5 – 6 inches in height.

But whether I leave the regular weeds or plant native species, the seasonality is always gonna whoop my ass. Most of these plants die back to the ground in between seasons rather than just going dormant. They come back up the next year, but in the interim I’m left with random balding patches of weakly rooted and thinning plants, or straight up bare soil. With clay-based soil and a cyclical flood/drought weather pattern, the clay goes through extreme expansion and contraction when it’s left exposed leading to erosion, mud pits, and sinking structures.

One summer we had a drought for the first half and endless storming the second half. By the end of the year, my cinderblock raised beds had shifted to the point that I had to rebuild them, and my arbor started leaning to one side where the cement footings on the right pillars sunk deeper, pulling the left ones up. Most recently, so much soil washed away in the back half of my yard that it exposed a buried cement pad I never knew was there (and didn’t want). The overall patchiness and lack of health throughout the lawn makes it a prime breeding ground for red ants, which is a nightmare for both me and the dogs.

So after 7 years of playing this game, I ordered a pallet of sod from a local company.

I didn’t kill the weeds, I just trimmed certain patches down to the dirt, raked up as many roots as I could, dug up soil when necessary to meet grade, and added some topsoil. I left the major sections of clover in my lawn where it plays nicely in between the St. Aug grass blades, but I pulled up much of the fast spreading seasonal weeds to give the grass space to breathe and spread. I’m not aiming for a perfect, weed-free, monocultural lawn, but I needed to find a better balance between how I actually use my yard and how I can support the ecosystem.

I’ve shrunk the overall size of my lawn by at least 40% in my decade of homeownership. Every year the trees get bigger, I expand my food plots, and add more native plants in garden beds. But the reality is, I will always want comfortable spaces in the yard to lounge and for the dogs to play. For those spaces, I’m sticking with the sod. When the turf grass is healthy, with fewer weeds, I don’t pull out the mower or trimmer as often because the grass doesn’t grow tall very quickly and it goes dormant for most of fall/winter. I use fewer pesticides as well.

“Kill your lawn” is a great rallying cry for individual homeowners to get behind for combatting climate change and ecocide. But it isn’t always as straightforward as pulling up the whole lawn and planting a native prairie (or another monocultural space via clover). As you contemplate what to do with your outdoor space, always be realistic with yourself about how you currently use the yard and how you hope to use the yard.

• If you have small children or animals, or you do outdoor sports/activities you’re going to want to have some dedicated low growing areas, able to withstand high traffic, and maybe doesn’t attract stinging insects or snakes.

• If you want to grow food you might build raised beds on top of the grass (which would kill it) or dig up the grass and plant rows in-ground with plenty of additional mulch.

• If you want flowers and other ornamental plants, you might have dedicated garden beds that are contained to a certain location that can be expanded.

The point is, being considerate of the ecosystem and biodiversity doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Kill the lawn in sections based on your personal usage (as I’ve done) or, if you have the right financial and life circumstances, go for the prairie-like yard full of wildflowers and other native plants and marvel in the habitat you’ve created. Whatever you decide, make sure you create a space you can enjoy and not a space you create out of obligation. There’s no perfect way to respect the environment, and whatever you build, nature will eventually show up.