Start to Grow Food Not Lawns!
It seems that most Americans only care about image not substance; about keeping up with the status quo and their precious neighborhood & community cliques.
Our addiction to lawns means that grass is the single largest irrigated agricultural “crop” in America, more than corn, wheat, and fruit orchards combined.
In a 2005 NASA-sponsored study, it was estimated that the area covered by lawns in the United States to be about 128,000 square kilometers (49,000 sq mi), making it the nation's largest irrigated crop by area. Keeping all that grass alive can consume about 50-75 percent of a residence’s water.
Lawnmowers suck up gas and pollute the air: Every year, U.S. homeowners spill some 17 million gallons of gas while filling up mowers. We use tens of millions of pounds of chemical fertilizer and pesticides on our lawns.
All this effort, of course, isn’t cheap. Americans spend more than $36 billion every year on lawn care, four-and-a-half times more than the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency.
It’s time to culturally stigmatize the classic over-watered, over-fertilized, over-mowed American lawn — a symbol of excess that’s persisted for far too long.
“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
A food forest filled with native perennial fruit & nut trees, berry bushes, and all supporting plants like nitrogen fixers and insect attractors...even fences can be covered in fruit-bearing vines giving you a beautiful food fence and privacy from the neighbors.
When growing your food forest you will attract healthy Biodiversities such as smaller animals to more butterflies and bees and all kinds of birds. Your yard will come alive with nature at its finest plus it will provide you with an abundance of food.
A lawn that’s used to produce food could feed your family, boost neighborhood-level community, and provide jobs. (such as designing & installing edible landscapes and food forests) Not only that, you will help make an impact on the environment by changing the Environmental Quality of the soil by using natural systems and growing without poisons and chemicals.
When you run the numbers, and weigh the pros and the cons, it turns out that almost anything is better than a grass lawn — except pavement.
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Don't shoot the camera guy. He is still a work in progress!