YES to No Mow May!

I’ve never been much in favor of doing yard chores. Every time I mow the grass, it just grows back. Every time I trap a pocket gopher, within weeks another one takes its place. When we lived where most of the trees were maples, raking leaves was a once a year affair. With mostly oaks around our house these days, leaves are dropping about six months a year and blown around even more than that. Fortunately, for me and those like me, pollinators may well rescue us but it means developing an increased tolerance for a yard that looks less than tidy and manicured. I think I can handle that but only time will tell. We’ll now defer cutting grass until May has come and gone, although, at the rate spring is arriving here in the North Country this year, we’ll be surprised if the grass has grown at all by the beginning of summer.

unmowed, grass becomes violets

Photo by J. Harrington

As is often the case, however, we’ve encountered a slight complication. This year we’re planting a “bee lawn” in front of the house. That means we do need to do some raking and harrowing to prepare the ground for seeding. We’ll leave some of the yard cleaning until June, but have no way of knowing which, if any of the leaf covered areas were actually used as overwintering habitat by pollinators. All of this means that we’re going to have to pay more attention to what’s actually going on in nature instead of following routine chores by rote, like cut the grass every two weeks.

I’m not sure we’ll ever forego burning the brush piles we accumulate over the course of a year or more, but we’re burning them less frequently, and dumping more of the leaves and twigs into the woods. The buckthorn we pull definitely gets torched every so often. If anyone knows of books about maintaining a natural landscape instead of hiring a lawn service, please mention the titles, authors and leave a link in the comments. Thanks.

Against Lawn

By Grace Bauer

The midnight streetlight illuminating

the white of clover assures me

I am right not to manicure

my patch of grass into a dull

carpet of uniform green, but

to allow whatever will to take over.

Somewhere in that lace lies luck,

though I may never swoop down

to find it. Three, too, is

an auspicious number. And this seeing

a reminder to avoid too much taming

of what, even here, wants to be wild.

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