this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
31 points (100.0% liked)

No Lawns

2027 readers
2 users here now

What is No Lawns?

A community devoted to alternatives to monoculture lawns, with an emphasis on native plants and conservation. Rain gardens, xeriscaping, strolling gardens, native plants, and much more! (from official Reddit r/NoLawns)

Have questions or don't know where to begin?

Where can you find the official No Lawns socials?

Rules

Related Communities

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I live in the Kansas City area which is comfortably Zone 6 from my understanding.

We've recently purchased our first house and the yard work is super time consuming! With .5 acres just mowing alone takes like 2 hours with my push mower due to all the trees and hills in the yard. I would like to have a pollinator friendly yard while also not having to spend so much time mowing. Using less gas in general would also be neat.

What I am thinking of doing is prior to first snow fall, over-seed with wildflowers from American Medows for most of the yard, and then in areas with some foot traffic, plant a mixture of clover and native grasses and then only worry about mowing in that area periodically.

Has anybody else ever over seeded with wildflowers? A lot of stuff I see posted here (and formerly on reddit) seem to be a bunch of elegant but hard and time consuming work like ripping up the yard, putting cardboard and mulch down, and then planting over that. However, I don't really have the time and money to do all that ๐Ÿ™. Would I have desirable results with just over-seeding?

top 2 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Don't bother with mulching, and start small, with the size of an area you think you can handle.

Peel back the sod, till up the topsoil a bit, and then seed with competitive wild flowers at a high rate.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'll be establishing a meadow next year. You can always do the cardboard and wood chip method of you want, should make it easier and cleaner to start. But wildflowers usually grow a lot taller than grass and "weeds" so they'll out compete them anyways.