My father, and mother after he died, spent 40 fucking years raking the leaves from under the shrubs and throwing them away. Our house was surrounded by lush bushes, entire house, entire back yard. Took little me and dad 4 hard hours to trim all that.
Got back from taking botany related classes in college. Tried to explain that bagging the lawn clippings and raking the leaves would kill everything. She wouldn’t hear it.
Anyway, dad’s dead, mom’s dead, entire fucking yard is dead. Lost it all but some barely hagin’ in there grass. It’s a fucking desert.
Old lady on the corner religiously rakes and burns her leaves, goes after it like it’s her fucking job. We got a max of 2" of topsoil in NW Florida, max. Her entire lot is nearly all sand.
tdawg@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Bro if ur using a leaf blower to remove leaves from your lawn and not from your driveway you gotta be extra special
reallykindasorta@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
A lot of people love their lawn toys (and hate municipal workers and well draining streets I guess).
I lived in Massachusetts for a while and the city I lived in directed people to blow/rake their leaves into the road so a giant vacuum truck could collect them.
tdawg@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yeah that’s true. There are a ton of arbitrary defined and applied lawn laws in the states. The “no weeds” ones are always funny too, bc more often then not the grass you imported from Asia is more a weed than the native flowers
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Where i grew up you could have an edible native plant that mosquitoes hate, fixing nitrogen as your ground cover, but no the hoa says grass not mint. I wanted to do guerrilla gardening with wild strawberries there too, but never got around to it.
That said, one non native plant belonged there, the earth made the dandelion one of her greatest and most beloved children, and who am I to disagree.
shalafi@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
There was a little old black lady in Tulsa many years ago whose entire front yard was a mix of native plants and garden. It was very nice and organized, nothing tacky at all. City rolled up and razed it flat. She was crying on TV, I was some mix of enraged and crying.
One winter I lost every plant I owned, and that loss kept me away from houseplants for over a decade. I cannot imagine her pain.
Anyway, where I’m at now I’m basically free to treat our house like white trash. No one can say jack about how I’m keeping it and I’ve shared some ecosystem success stories in this thread.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
plus the soil can carry invasive weeds, and diseases, or pests too. and ornamental plants often come from places like asia,etc.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They don’t want the leaves covering up the unnaturally green grass, and if they clog up the storm system that’s someone downhill’s problem.