Americans use about 59 million pounds of pesticides on their lawns and gardens each year, and about 9 billion gallons of water each day. Changing up lawns, even a bit, could have a huge impact.
Dorchester resident Estella Mabrey had another motive: she grew up in rural Alabama and longed for that proximity to nature."My mother had flowers all the time. Big, beautiful flowers. And we always had the monarch butterflies coming and hummingbirds," she said.
Her house in Dorchester had grassy yards on the front and side. They were small, but there was enough room for a vegetable bed. She installed one a couple years ago, and over time added another, then another. Then two pear trees, grapes, strawberries, flowers for the bees, and peppermint under the flowers.Racy Cardosa picks a cherry tomato from her garden in Dorchester.
But most of the lawn around here is non-native turf, so it needs a lot of water, fertilizer and pesticides to stay green. And it doesn’t offer much food or habitat to native animals, especially when cut very short. So far, social science research has found that most people want mainly two things from their lawn: They want it to look neat and they want it to be easy. Lerman's most famous study is a case in point., she convinced 16 families in Springfield to let researchers mow their lawns at different intervals — either every one, two or three weeks. She found that mowing every other week increased the number of bees and wildflowers in the yards.
There are lots of small things people can do to make their lawns more eco-friendly. For instance, clover helps enrich soil with nitrogen, so maybe you don’t need to kill it with pesticides? That part of your lawn on a hill that’s really hard to mow, maybe don’t mow it. And if you get really ambitious, put in some native wildflowers.
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