Tired of cutting the grass? Worried about the pollution from all
those small engine lawnmowers? Then tear up your turf!
Lawns are monocultures that use ten times as many chemicals per
acre as industrial farmland – chemicals that pollute groundwater and contribute
to global warming. Then there is that power mower, which pollutes more than your
car. And the water...the lawns in the United States alone consume around 270
billion gallons of water a week – enough to water 81 million acres of organic
vegetables for a whole summer.
Many people are replacing their front lawns with native plant
gardens and other landscaping that fosters biodiversity, but not as many
ecological gardeners consider growing food in these spaces. That’s unfortunate,
because the space occupied by the grass that surrounds your home could produce
enough vegetables to feed your family, with enough space left over for a bit of
recreational turf (maintained with a push mower, of course). While it requires
more work than the relatively low-maintenance established native plant garden,
growing food makes a strong social statement and is a positive step towards
healing our planet’s many ills.
In her book Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community, Heather Coburn traces the
idea of lawns back to the 18th century when French aristocrats planted the
agricultural fields around their estates to grass, to send the message that they
had more land than they needed and could therefore afford to waste some. Of
course, the French peasants were starving for lack of available land and the
French Revolution was the result.
Writing in the New York Times recently, author Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals), suggested that this is one of the ways
individuals can contribute to solving the global warming crisis: “Rip out your
lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t, look into getting a plot in a community
garden. Measured against the problem we face, planting a garden sounds pretty
benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual
can do to reduce your carbon footprint...sure, but more important, to reduce
your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.”
It’s not difficult to get started. You might want to transition
from full lawn to full garden, reclaiming a bit of grass each year. There are a
couple of methods for removing grass. If your lawn is healthy and you want quick
results but don’t mind the work involved, you can rent a sod cutter to slice out
strips of grass. Roll the sod up and use it elsewhere, give it away to neighbors
or advertise it for sale on craigslist.org or a local bulletin board. You’ll
probably have to add a layer of topsoil and compost, because the soil under a
lawn will be compacted and not rich enough to support food plants.
This fall, you could use the “lasagna” or sheet mulch method.
Put down a thick layer of cardboard and/or newspaper and then pile six inches or
more of compost, clippings, mulch and topsoil on top. The grass underneath will
die off and decompose and you’ll be ready to add more topsoil and compost to
plant your veggies next spring. Some people prefer to use sheets of black
plastic, which has to be removed once the grass dies, but we prefer to avoid
plastic.
So if you want to reduce pollution, improve the quality of your
family’s diet, increase local food security, beautify your surroundings, build
community, improve your mental and physical health, and change the world, tear
up that turf.
Learn More
Planting Peace
www.organicconsumers.org/plantingpeace
Food Not Lawns www.foodnotlawns.com
Food Not Lawns, How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood
into a Community by Heather Coburn Flores (Chelsea Green, 2006)
Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times by Steve Solomon
(New Society Publishers, 2006)
Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway
(Chelsea Green, 2001)
Author Wendy Priesnitz is the Editor of
Natural Life Magazine and a journalist with over 30 years of
experience. She has also authored nine
books.
Read her
blog.
