Lawns alternatives

Lawn alternatives seem to represent opposition to larger system, one with significant momentum. Failure to adhere to local yard norms often represents an... 

For the most part, however, the broad enforcement of these rules to control and extirpate alternative yard management has been the rule rather than the exception. Where homeowners pursue local and sustainable lawn alternatives, municipalities often intervene. One couple s efforts to allow tropical jungle plants to return to their Madeira Beach, Florida, yard—along with tree fruits. 

Clearly, Suzanne and her family were not insensitive to the plight of the animal, and the alternate solution they devised-dog booties-makes a certain kind of sense, but only if changing lawn care practices and priorities is overlooked entirely, along with the possible implications that these treatments might have on people in the household or children in the neighborhood. Why not stop using pesticides Is it something peculiar about Suzanne ... 

Clearly, Suzanne is in no way aberrant. Something is at work on her that puts the lawn before the dog, which allows her to reconcile potential evidence of more general risk, and which forces her to live simultaneously with her lawn and her anxiety. Well-educated, affluent, and fully cognizant of a technological hazard, she chooses to maintain her current practices rather than seek out alternatives. 

These high-profile conflicts reemphasize a question raised in Chapter 1. If in some places the public is struggling to ban chemical applications that the industry is fighting to maintain, is it demand or rather supply that drives the behaviors of lawn people, especially their application of insecticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, throughout the United States and Canada More fundamentally, are the risks outlined in Chapter 4 essential to this economy, or incidental to it, an unfortunate market inefficiency that wiU soon be fixed through more and better competition Can the industry produce alternatives How does it communicate and manage risk ... 

But alternatives exist. A cottage industry for reform has emerged in recent decades to provide a menu of antilawn options for urban residents. Do these practices represent real alternatives Are they realistic under the current legal regime Or do alternatives simply reinstitute the position of lawn people as the lonely adjudicators of a larger socioeconomic machine ... 

What better captures and describes the embodied anxieties of lawn people If we replace food with the chemicals and other consumer goods required to maintain lawn landscapes, we find the lawn as a sink for surplus and risk, but also an acute location of anxiety, directing people to nervously consider and pursue alternatives. 

The book concludes then, that whereas the aesthetic of the lawn may be old, indeed ancient, the turfgrass subject is new the urban person who is concerned about nature but uses chemicals, who supports the Kyoto Protocol but drives an SUV, who recycles fervently while constantly wasting more and more. Rather than condescendingly dismissing such inconsistencies as cognitive dissonance as is common to apolitical critique, the book advances an alternative, which emphasizes the range of constraints on our alternatives and that stresses the way the biotechnical machines we make increasingly make us who we are. 

Any leaves from deciduous trees and shrubs can be gathered up in fall to make leaf mold. Do not use evergreens, such as laurel and holly. Leaves of some species take longer than others to decay, but all rot down eventually. An easy way to collect leaves from a lawn is to run the mower over them. The grass and chopped leaf mixture in the mower bag will rot down easily. (Alternatively, mow without the bag on the mower worms will soon take the chopped leaves down into the lawn.) To supplement supplies, collect leaves from guiet streets or, with permission, from parks and cemeteries. Leaves from busy roadsides can be polluted with oil and vehicle emissions. Some communities collect leaves and produce leaf mold to sell or give to the public. Never collect leaves or leaf mold from woodlands. 

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