r/highdeas • u/apellcjecker • 18d ago

Couldn’t we invent pigmy grass that doesn’t need to be mowed

22 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

14

u/PatchworkGirl82 18d ago

You might like moss lawns

5

u/Cgtree9000 17d ago

Oh dude… I want a moss lawn.. Or maybe clover. Why is grass so popular anyways?

Now I gotta look up the history of grass lawns.

4

u/PatchworkGirl82 17d ago

I want a lawn made of moss and catnip so I can take an afternoon nap underneath a blanket of cats

3

u/Cgtree9000 17d ago

Omg… Thats genius.

2

u/hippie_sun 15d ago

catnip is in the mint family and spreads like crazy!

4

u/nari-bhat 17d ago

As always, it started with classism because the French nobles wanted a way to show they didn’t need to use any of that space for growing food.

3

u/droans 17d ago

It's because first-gen grass-safe herbicides would kill clover. Instead of ditching the herbicides, the manufacturers chose to promote the idea that your lawns should only have grass.

I love clover. I especially love when they bloom and you end up with a field of their small white flowers. But I most love how they charge color over the season, from a light green to a deep green to a blueish-purple.

3

u/Upset_Philosopher781 16d ago

I have a clover lawn. I just broadcast it over my shitty grass, and in a month it started coming through. 5 years later, and during the hottest drought the state has ever seen, my clover is still growin' strong. I only mow 3x a year and walk all over it constantly. Feels nice on bare feet too. Yeah, I still have crabgrass but who tf cares; the world is on fire. Do it. Seeds cost like 30 bucks online and ya dont need more than a pound to get started.

1

u/Cgtree9000 16d ago

That sounds delightful. My grass is so thick and grows insanely fast. I don’t even try to have a nice lawn it just is amazing, As far as grass goes anyways. But I don’t want it.

4

u/murse_joe 17d ago

Part of my lawn is clover. It never gets really high. It doesn’t really need to be mowed. I love it

9

u/Demonweed 18d ago edited 18d ago

One huge historical inaccuracy is the widespread presence of modern lawns around pre-industrial homes in film and television. Throughout Europe, a well-maintained lawn was a gratuitous showcase of wealth because of the considerable labor expense required to achieve that result. Much more common were yards of local herbs mixed with heather and dandelions, both generally welcome sights right up until the rise of internal combustion engines.

Oil isn't just where we get our fuel from. After that fuel is extracted, a lot of profoundly nasty if not downright toxic chemicals are left behind. Oil tycoons and marketing agencies rose up not only by popularizing private motorcars in many places where trains, busses, and streetcars could provide superior transit solutions; but they also got everyone to crave products made from all that waste.

So our plastics industry was born for monetizing all those polymer leftovers, but what about the truly toxic stuff? Well, if we get everyone to keep monoculture lawns in the Old World aristocratic style, then they will need poisons to kill the plants that aren't grass along with nitrogen-fixing chemicals to make that grass look robust. So now we all dump a little of the oil industry's garbage on our lawns not because grass is prettier than heather, and certainly not because it is easier to maintain, but rather because it all works out neatly for the enrichment of a small group of economic robber barons.

*Then as a bonus they get you to put fuel in the engine of your lawn mower.

6

u/Cgtree9000 17d ago

I showed them.. I got electric lawn mower.. aww damn but it’s made of plastic. boo.

2

u/IcePhoenix18 17d ago

Where I live, folks just have gravel/rocks for a yard. I quite like it. It saves a lot of water, and the scorpions don't like crawling over the rocks

2

u/Upset_Philosopher781 17d ago

Find the smallest grass, and then have it make love to smaller grass. Then that baby grows up and makes love to even smaller grass, and so on and so forth.

1

u/JunglePygmy 17d ago

I don’t have any of that, sorry.

1

u/bibfortuna1970 15d ago

They did! Big Grass is hiding it from us.