When most people think about their dream homes, there is usually a lovely green lawn outside of it. This is a nice picture, but this could lead to some issues down the line, both for our local wildlife and for us. So, why are lawns bad for the environment?
The grass that lawns are made from requires a large amount of water daily in order to stay green and healthy, which is a huge strain on our dwindling water supply. Lawns are also monoculture ecosystems that put pressure on pollinators, which affects our food supply. Instead, plant a ground cover.
Having and maintaining a lawn is not only difficult for you, but it also puts a strain on the environment, so what options are available to you in order to help the environment around your home? We will have a look at some options that you can utilize in this article.
Are Lawns Bad For The Environment?
In modern times, a lot of people are dreaming about the perfect homes with perfectly kept lawns and tidy gardens, but these perfectly maintained lawns are proving to be a big problem for your local ecosystems and environments.
The grass that is used to create the picturesque lawns needs a large amount of water every day to remain healthy and green. This can cause a lot of issues in places that are going through a drought or that have water shortages.
This could also begin to deplete underground aquifers as people resort to using underground water to keep their lawns green. When this happens, it creates a water shortage for the nearby wildlife and damages the ecosystems.
If you only have a lawn and do not provide space for other plants to grow, like a flower bed, you have what is called a monoculture ecosystem in your garden. This is bad as it affects insects like bees and butterflies in your area, which will affect the farms surrounding your town.
Bees and butterflies are pollinators, so we would not have a good food supply from our farms without them. We need people to allow space for these insects in their gardens for food supply, and if you only have a lawn, you are not helping the situation.
Lawns are also very unnatural when compared to the natural environment of most home areas. This means that when you place a lawn down, you are not only affecting the water and the insects in your area, but you are affecting the whole ecosystem as you are putting a living thing there that does not belong there.
Ways You Can Help The Environment In Your Garden
So, we understand why standard grass lawns are bad for the environment, and these factors are pretty concerning.
These reasons are why we need to start moving away from traditional grass lawns to some alternative options, or at least try to diminish the effects of a grass lawn to help benefit the environment and ourselves better. Let us go through a few of the ways we can accomplish this.
Choose Native Plants
An excellent way to help reduce the negative impact your lawn has on the environment is to choose plants and trees that are native to your area and plant these plants in your garden instead of non-native plants.
These native plants and trees will be better suited to provide and house things like butterflies and birds, and other beneficial local wildlife that you may have in your area. Once these native plants and trees are well established in your garden, they will require less maintenance as they have a natural immunity to the pests and diseases that are in your area.
This means that they do not require you to use pesticides, fertilizers, and supplemental watering, making them easy to look after and environmentally friendly.
This is an excellent option if you still want to keep your lawn as the rest of the plants and trees in your garden can balance out the environment in your garden a bit and keep it more natural and environmentally friendly.
Plant Ground Cover Instead Of Grass
If you want to reduce the impact of your lawn on the environment completely, but you still want to have a good-looking and not a bare-looking garden, then you can think about planting ground cover plants instead of the typical grass used for lawns.
Ground cover plants have significant advantages over standard grass lawns. These ground covers do not grow high and require little to no mowing, they do not need additional watering, and you do not need to use herbicides or pesticides on them. All this means that they are perfect for the environment when compared to lawn grass.
There are some excellent options for ground cover plants that not only look nice but also smell good and feel nice under bare feet. These include moss for shady areas in your garden, clover for full sun gardens, and you can use creeping perennials too.
Use Mulch
Using organic mulch like bark, wood chips, pine needles, and leaves in your garden provides many benefits. These organic mulches help to regulate the temperature in the soil, and it helps the soil retain water.
These two aspects of mulch ensure that your plant stays healthy, growing, and happy, with the added benefit of inhibiting the growth of weeds in your follower beds. This allows you to weed your garden with ease.
The mulch also aids in the fertilization of your flower beds because when the mulch breaks down, it adds a whole bunch of nutrients back into the soil underneath it. If you mulch under the trees in your garden to the drip line, this will help retain moisture in the tree’s root area and reduce the footprint of your lawn at the same time.
As we know, grass lawns are water glutton, so if you incorporate some organic mulch throughout the landscape of your garden, then this can reduce your outdoor water usage by up to 50%.
Minimize Or Eliminate Your Fertilizer Use On Your Lawn
Usually, when it comes to lawn care, quite a lot of fertilizer is involved. Unfortunately, a lot of the fertilizers that are used for this contain a large number of unnecessary chemicals. These chemicals then strip the soil of their nutrients, and they can promote disease in the lawn.
This makes the lawn grass dependant on the chemical-filled fertilizers for their nutrients, even though those fertilizers are the very thing that causes the issue in the first place. If you want to use fertilizer, then a better option would be to use organic fertilizer, and only to use as much as you need to, as this will keep your soil healthy.
Wrapping Up
Lawns are pretty bad for the environment, and they can cause lasting adverse effects that can make life difficult for the wildlife in our areas and for us. It is imperative that we try and move away from the standard grass lawn in favor of something else, or as least try and make our existing lawns more eco-friendly.
Kevin is the owner of Land Lawn & Garden. In addition to taking a lot of pride in his lawn at home, he also helps manage the family land. You can find more about him here.