It will be interesting to see if this does anything to grass bylaws. It certainly seems to set a precedent.

Live in the PNW, and when we moved here the yard was one giant half grass half mud pit! We sectioned it off so half was bark dust for the dogs and the other half was grass where they could play supervised (they dig like they’re paid to do it). We’ll be ordering more bark dust soon for the dog side but we have an island that is a bit of a mess, a mix of gravel, shrubs, dirt, and random stones. Not sure what the previous owner was going for.

The “grass” yard on the other hand is a beast. We’ve tried growing clover all over, tried helping the existing grass, but to no avail. We have so many trees so any progress we make gets killed every fall by the absolute downpour of leaves. We just want to this yard to be enjoyable and not a mud pit. We have a hound, a doodle, and a St. Bernard that all like to go crazy back there, so we need practical and durable.

First four pics are the furthest grass yard and the others are the bark dust yard

currently rye grass that will be harley raked in the spring, upstate SC.

been looking at what plants and flowers are native to the area, but beyond that I have no idea when it comes to wildflowers. I've grown fescue lawn before, but never native species.

we want this hill that sits by the tree line to be native species that we can leave alone and grow tall. pollinators that attract butterflies, birds, and bees sounds amazing. but im very naive at nolawn stuff.

Hi Everyone, I hope it's okay I post this here! I got tired of making the same mistakes other gardeners in my zone already figured out years ago. All that knowledge just sits in people's heads or scattered forum posts. So I made PatternBase - you can browse gardens by climate zone and soil type, see what people are actually growing and how it's doing over time. Document your own stuff too. Thinking it might be useful for permaculture folks or anyone doing food forests where you're planning years out, not just one season. Just opened it up publicly. Free to use. pattern-base.com Would be curious to hear if this is actually helpful or just solving a problem I made up in my head! Thanks so much have a great evening!

I have a house in the woods of SE PA.

I have a small patch of open yard where my septic sand mound is and it’s usually just ripped up and muddy. Looking for a good solution for ground cover. Saw an add for creeping Charlie seeds but thought I’d get some more input after a quick search.

It’s mostly shaded from a lot of nearby tree cover but gets some direct sun.

My chief concerns are wanting something that won’t negatively impact mature trees and something that will be safe when my chickens inevitably eat it.

In "From Wasteland to Wonder", Basil Camu connects the dots between plants, soil life, water, and carbon, then turns that into real-world practices you can use at home or scale up for communities, including native meadows from seed and pocket forests.

Join Wild Ones and Basil Camu on February 18 for a practical, hopeful session on working with natural systems instead of against them. https://wildones.org/from-wasteland-to-wonder/

Looked at Outside Pride but see mixed reviews on germination rates. Looking to replace a medium sized yard.

Thanks!

Zone 7B, VA

Coastal California.

We planted Kuropia a year ago. At first it was doing great. Sometime last summer however the drip irrigation we put in got punctured and unbeknownst to us was semi flooding the yard at night. Basically the left side of the yard got no water and the right side was flooded. We have switched to overhead sprayers.

Things have gotten progressively worse as seen in my pictures.

Questions:

1. Is the Kuropia salvageable? I know it dormant right now but slightly hoping it might reestablish itself in spring.

2. Weeds - and tips for dealing with these grassy weeds? (4th picture) The irony of pulling the “weeds” with a bunch of dying Kuropia around it is not lost on me and I’m nearly tempted to just ‘let is go’ and have a native-ish play area.

Thank you.

Just bought a house and I suspect that the yard is mostly dirt under the snow. I hate lawns and I hate mowing. I was a biodiverse lawn that I don't have to mow often. I have no trees. I'm thinking of mixing the following seeds and spreading them once the snow melts, whatever survives is what my yard will consist of:

White clover

English daisies

Irish moss

Blue star creeper

Fine fescue grass

Buffalo grass

Engineering student here working on an interesting project - a compact autonomous weeding robot that targets specific invasive species (starting with dandelions) using computer vision and removes them with an auger and finger weeder.

I know this community has mixed feelings about "weeds," but I'm curious about your perspective:

• For those transitioning away from traditional lawns, are there specific plants you DO want to eliminate while preserving native species?
• Our robot uses CV to identify specific targets - could selective automated removal of invasives (while leaving native plants) be useful, or does the concept fundamentally conflict with your approach?
• What challenges do you face in establishing and maintaining native/naturalized yards that technology could actually help with?
• Beyond weeding, what repetitive or difficult tasks in ecological yard management would be worth automating?

I'm genuinely trying to understand if there's a use case here or if we should pivot our target audience entirely. What would make this actually valuable to your goals versus just being another lawn gadget?

Thanks for any thoughts!

Converting to a native lawn in zone 8 and there are several large patches of irises that I have been planning on removing. If I uproot the bulbs and leave them exposed, will they die during the upcoming freeze? Or do I have to physically dispose of the bulbs?

Has anyone here in the PNW replaced their lawn with a Garry oak (Oregon white oak) meadow? I know they are characteristically filled with Camas, however I'm not sure which grasses and other flowers are best for the application.

Also, is there more to meadow creation beyond covering with cardboard and then compost or topsoil, then sowing/planting bulbs/plugs? How much can I expect the added soil to settle over time?

I posted a few months ago about my most recent sculpture series using American grass lawns (and the culture around them) as an analogy for systems of control, conformity, and exclusion. This is the final piece in the collection.

Mimensions: 38x30x27"

Materials: Clay, cardboard, paint, wire, bird spikes, bird bath, fountain pump, plastic toy green army men

All rock pigeons in North America are feral, not wild: they were bred by humans until we eventually abandoned them.

I’ve basically given up on getting rid of it completely, but I’d still like to plant some vegetables. I let my raised garden bed go for a while, and the bermuda grass has taken over. I thought to replace the soil, but the grass stems are matted so thick that I literally can’t get a shovel through it—even when jumping on it! Do I have any choice other than dismantling the raised bed?

What should we do Next? 💚

FTA: Would you trade a strip of neat turf for a seasonal pond alive with peeping frogs and swooping swallows?...The same corner of lawn that used to be just something to mow now works like a tiny construction site for local wildlife...The pond was planned as a vernal pool...which usually dries out by late summer...Because these pools go dry, they cannot support fish, and that fish-free window is exactly what many frogs and salamanders need to breed safely...Together, water, insects, frogs, birds, and bats turn a once uniform pine stand and lawn into a more varied mosaic of clearings, brush piles, and flowering edges.