A new study at King’s College, Cambridge reveals the striking benefits of letting lawns go wild. But can others be persuaded to break with a 300-year old social norm?
I mow my lawn to keep low the population of mosquitos and tics.
Which denies food for the things that eat the ticks, leaving no predators for the ticks, making the ticks worse since they’re not having their population controlled. And then those predators of the ticks, that were food for OTHER animals, have less food themselves and slowly the whole ecosystem collapses.
There’s a reason that once you start heavy pesticides, you basically always have to do them from then on in that area. In a few years you’ve removed all the natural checks and balances
Remember how everyone was talking about bug populations dropping? Guess what’s dropping now? Their predator, birds. The cycle is already here
https://nautil.us/a-third-of-north-americas-birds-have-vanished-340007/
Mowing makes it easier for birds to find the bugs. The problem you cite is from chemical lawn and crop applications.
It’s a good thing then that humans finally came around after a hundred and a half million years of bird evolution to make things easier for them…
The first year I moved into my current home, the yard was very well maintained. We had so many mosquitos and ticks during the spring and summer months! I had to check my dogs every time they came in from the back yard. And we just stopped sitting outside during the spring and summer.
The last two years I have sown seed for wild flower and other native plant species in my yard, replaced all of my lawn grass with rye, clover and alfalfa and mow maybe two or three times in a year. This year I have found two ticks on my dogs and have been bitten by zero mosquitos on my property. Last week I visited a colleges house not terribly far from where I live and their yard was infested with mosquitos. No ticks though since they regularly mow their entire lawn nearly down to the soil. We both live near lakes and ponds in the rural Southeastern US.
Each night my yard is visited by a handful of Opossums, each day a wide variety of bird species, in the late evenings bats and a significant and widely varied population of spider species. Those are just some of the organisms that I have seen and can identify. I’m certain there are many more playing equally important roles.
Some folks think it’s ugly, it’s beautiful to me. The lack of pests is just a bonus.
