Aw snap! I knew it was coming, the only thing I don’t like about the brand-new house nearing completion next-door, they are now delivering a truckload of sod to “pave” the yard.
One of the first things we learned in Permaculture design class was: What looks very smooth and tranquil outdoors is often very violent and intrusive, requiring steady inputs of huge inputs of fuel and human energy and other resources to maintain. And what looks messy to the human eye is actually the consummate order of nature and all living things. The self-organizing property of systems.
Not that there’s anything wrong with adding our human touch to the system; just that working so against nature creates work for us in addition to disrupting necessary habitat for other species.
I knew it was coming. It’s almost as bad as paving, in a way. But I can still hold out hope that the homeowner will not opt for the hard-core chemical maintenance. Please send good vibes for the protection of my sweet little food and native plant and wildlife refuge yard!
It always twists my heart to see a big sod truck on our beachside yards, But really at the end of the day, Starshine House / jenny’s corner / Trailhead 501 is a laboratory and we operate with the understanding that we’re in an urban area and we meet the surrounding circumstances with creativity and low tech ingenuity. And, we will love our neighbors! I know we will. Because loving our neighbors is what we DO!
PS. Here on the beachside, unless people opt for seriously chemical intensive landscaping and extreme irrigation, the wildflower + other native plant seedbank does survive in the soil and eventually manages to come back through!
PPS. This is copy pasted from a post I made on my deep green Facebook page the other day, regarding buzzcut sodgrass medians in the road: Can we pretty please maybe someday stop having mini lawns in the middle of the street? While buzzcut sodgrass may have its place, certainly it shouldn’t be on islands in the middle of the street. It’s a good surface for playing ball, walking, playing golf etc. but otherwise we need real plants. Eliminate non-functional turf grass! Bring back lush vegetation! Give mow and blow businesses other ways to earn good income! De-normalize noisy intrusive “landscaping”! Make landscaping landscaping again!
#RethinkLandscaping #SodOff