The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Decreasing entropy

Homestead lawn

When you have no neighbors in sight, it seems like mowing should be at the bottom of your priority list.  But Mark and I have learned that a quick pass with the mower significantly decreases the perceived entropy during a busy time of year.  As an added bonus, shorn grass means I no longer get soaked to the knees when I do my morning chores.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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Hi Anna and Mark,

I have always wanted an edible lawn....

Ideas?

There 'must' be some plants that would work?

John

Comment by John Wed May 7 12:25:26 2014
John --- You might look through Rosalind Creasy's The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping for hints, but I suspect the best you're going to do is to either create a low-growing area of edibles that can't be walked on or to create a true lawn that doesn't provide food but does attract pollinators. Thyme is a possibility, but it would cost a lot to cover a whole lawn in thyme, and even that can only stand up to light traffic.
Comment by anna Wed May 7 19:39:15 2014
Not sure if you guy have ticks in your area, but keeping the grass and weeds short help prevent ticks and thus prevent Lyme disease. Of all the insects, I dislike ticks the most, that includes mosquitoes.
Comment by Zimmy Wed May 7 21:13:38 2014
I second the comment about ticks. I don't have deer (or other animals) fenced out of my main grassy area (yet), so that could be why there are so many ticks crawling around. I've had much less trouble with them since I started mowing. The first year the grass got waist-high by mid summer, and every time I went out there I'd have at least one tick crawling on me--or I'd find it later when it had already attached.
Comment by Anonymous Sun May 11 22:27:21 2014





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