Yard lookin' fine tho.

Natural yard full of native species > gross manicured yard

i hate insects tho?
- Clip dragonfly models to wire rods. Scares the ever living crap out of anything that flies. https://www.getyourbug.com/
- 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!
- Have you tried aging past 8 years old?
That's great if you don't have ticks, snakes, ants, termites, and mice.
- See my reply to the other commenter

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.

Yes! The anti mow people don't understand that your yard doesn't turn into a wildflower meadow if you stop mowing.

I spent hundreds of dollars on wildflower seeds and tiller rentals to get a wildflower meadow started.

5 years later and it's just weeds. And not nice weeds- It's 1/2" long thornbush weeds- perfect for spreading tics onto the local deer population.
- 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.
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.
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.
I think I got quite lucky with mine. I've barely touched it in 15 years, and it's mostly free of anything with spikes on.

Could do with a bit more variety in it, as most of it is this big green stalky thing that grows quite tall.

My landlords HOA would bitch at me if my grass was slightly too long.

My landlords HOA

🤢🤮
- That's how I feel every time I have to mow the lawn even though I'm renting from them.
  
  Free labor for them.
check with local state and native plant groups – there’s several cases where native plant species are protected even from HOAs
- Or you can go the complete other way and plant knapweed lmao

You forgot scythes

Or goats.

Every year, we dump wildflowers in three spots on our property, and every spring, I spread clover seeds the entirety of my lawn.

Each year, the clover takes over more and more, and with that, you get a short lawn that is drought resistant and bee friendly.

How do you do this? I am interested. We have drought problems here.
- 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.
Same, but I do a clover and yarrow mix.

i think it would be funny to start and HOA, and give it one rule.

The rule would that a total majority would need to agree in order for something to be passed. That way nothing gets passed ever.

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.

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 had a fairly large yard backing up on forest on three sides in the back, two in the front. I decided at some point that mowing was just stupid and gave up on it. I was thrilled with what happened in the back - it was just like this. Flowers started growing, including some I'd never seen before there or since. Birds came and started nesting in the middle of the long grass. The front, I gave in and mowed it a few times.

I lived across the street from this retired military guy who literally mowed his lawn every single day, riding mower on like half an acre. You couldn't even tell the difference between where he had mowed and where he hadn't gotten to yet. This guy had a bumper sticker "Never seen a FLAG burned at a GUN SHOW!!", whatever that meant. They invited me over to their backyard a time or two where they drank Busch Lite and grilled hot dogs over old furniture (seriously). Nice, but well, hmm. Anyway, he drove his mower over and mowed my front yard a time or two when I was out of town.