I have previously noted that we should start growing Ohio native grasses in our yards. A few of my readers wanted more information along these lines.
Specifically, one reader asked for more information on the two of the native grasses I mentioned and whether they would work in her yard. Part of the sustainability I talked about is using plants native to your area.
The basic idea behind growing native plants is that they are better suited to your habitat.
Native plants are less likely to become invasive and harm other parts of the environment. When we bring non-native plants like Kudzu into a different environment, even with honorable intentions, things can go wrong, as Southern folks have experienced.
Please keep in mind I’m a landscaper/lawn care person who cares about my clients first, and I’m practical with my plant selections. Some of our normal practices, like what our lawns need to look like, need to change as we review this year of change we live in today.
To answer my reader’s question, we are looking at Little Blue Stem, Big Blue Stem, Side-oats Grama, Buffalo Grass, and Nodding Wild Rye. These grasses come in a variety of colors, including red, gold, yellow, and blue.
The trial is that these grasses mature at heights ranging from 1.5 to 8 feet, so we should be aware that a traditional lawn height will stress the plants.
The good news, though, is the experts I have talked to about using these grasses say they can handle most of these stresses and still do well enough that, in certain cases, you can have a lawn that survives.
Frankly, the basic idea is to keep a low-maintenance lawn by letting the grass grow taller than 3 to 4 inches. This means far fewer mowing trips and stronger, healthier grass. All grasses do better when they are allowed to grow taller.
Healthier grass produces a better lawn.
One challenge is that our native grasses are prairie grasses, which may work well in the northern parts of Ashland and Richland counties. As you may have guessed, growing these normally medium- to tall grasses on a city lot, where all your neighbors have short, well-manicured lawns, may cause some irritation.
Large country lots will be different when it comes to grass height. Neighbors normally won’t be as hard on the owner of a lawn with taller grasses or prairie plants on out-of-
town lots.
The average homeowner on a city lot today has a much different idea of what their yard should look like than their grandparents did 100 years ago.
Currently, small garden beds throughout the yard with some of these grasses as the backdrop and flowers and shrubs filling in the middle work well.
I hope you’ll think about the issues I’m about to present. I like the feel of my feet on a beautiful lawn, but I also spend $4.27 per gallon of gas on average to keep it.
The average homeowner spends 150 hours annually on their lawns, 800 million gallons of gas is used annually by all of us on our lawns, 10 times more herbicides per acre are used on our lawns than agri-business annually, $30 to $40 billion is spent on lawn care
each year by all of us or $343 individually, 7 million birds are killed by lawn-care
pesticides annually, which results in a loss of 30% of our native song birds.
About 30,000 tons of pesticides are used annually, phosphorus run-off from lawn fertilizers about 3 million tons cause algae blooms which sucks oxygen out of lakes and kills our fish.
Approximately 30% of all water used in the Eastern U.S., or 7 billion gallons daily, is poured on our lawns. As many as 7,500 Americans are injured every year using lawn mowers, which is about the same number of people injured by firearms. Normal city lot lawns were considered luxuries 100 years ago.
Let’s consider the real annual expenses for our 1/5-acre yard. Do we really need these sterile, monochromatic, expensive, non-productive features in our landscapes?
Maybe we all need to begin thinking differently about our lawns. Alternatives exist, and I’ll discuss this more in the future.
I’m not big on changing the way I do things, but the way we keep our lawn is so different from how our grandparents did it that it should make us think more deliberately about these issues.
I hope you get to take a nice stroll through your garden this week. If you have any questions, e-mail me at ericlarson546@yahoo.com.