Frazz by Jef Mallett for July 23, 2016

And then the HOAs get on your case.

Frazz, tell him to stop asking unanswerable questions and start thinking about girls. Well, on second thought, maybe a few years too young.

I drove through Oregon a few weeks ago. It’s the grass seed capital of the world. That’s right, there are BIG farms that grow grass JUST so they can collect the seed and put it into bags that YOU can buy and scatter around your house to grow grass on your lawn.

I say both. There’s people who can get too obsessed with their lawn, and there’s people don’t take care of it enough (dead grass,needs mowing,etc).

way too much fertilizer, insecticide, and weedkiller. my neighbor pours enough Roundup on the weeds to kill an acre

I turned mine into rocks a long time ago. I still have a few flowers and a couple of bushes to water, but it doesn’t take much water and I enjoy doing it by hand. :)

That’s a bit misleading. They are trying to compare irrigated crop acres, not total acres. There are an estimated 40 million acres of turf grass and 94 million acres of corn in the United States. But only about 10-12% of the corn is irrigated. The comparison is only valid if you assume that all the turf grass is irrigated. I wasn’t able to find any good estimates for that number. The point of the original study was that lawns probably use more irrigation water than any other crop, but it kinda got lost along the way.

Ashburn, truth be told…..

The reason for a short grass lawn was originally fire control: if the house next door was burning, the flames would have a hard time reaching yours through the short grass. That purpose has, however, has pretty much been lost.

olddog1I don’t know if it applies to your jurisdiction, but Fritz v Dallas may help. Ned Fritz removed his lawn and put in short buffalo grass. It grows only to about 7" high, turns a beautiful bronze color in the winter, and doesn’t need mowing. The city called it a weed and demanded it be removed; Fritz used the argument that a weed is an unwanted plant and he wanted a beautiful carefree lawn. Fritz won (he was an environmental lawyer!). They did require him to hide it behind a hedge, but the last time I was in his block, there were two yards with hedges around them. Unfortunately, I have too many trees for a prairie grass or I would have done the same.

Richard S. RussellSo it is claimed by major polluters. While it is significant, it pales statistically against electrical generation from fossil fuels. We do not have bison herds as far as the eye can see (which produce far more per head – or the other end combined – than cattle), but the pollution leading to global temperature rise (also denied by those causing it, against all scientific evidence and reason) dates only from the last two and a half centuries.

Man, it is written (somewhere), is the only animal that plants a crop he can’t eat and still has to mow twice a week.