Less Lawn, More Diversity

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A smaller lawn means you will have more room for visually pleasing attractions like a butterfly garden.

 When we moved to Florida, much of our property had been sodded with St. Augustine grass. Some of it wasn’t doing very well, so we began gradually reducing the amount of lawn on our property, section by section. We also changed strategies from the previous owner’s method of poisoning and fertilizing to “If it’s green, it’s probably a welcome addition to our yard”–catbriar and poison ivy notwithstanding.

The EPA estimates that 30 to 50 percent of the potable water in urban areas is used to irrigate plants, mostly lawns. In these days of water restrictions, reducing your lawn and modifying its care makes good sense. Lawn reduction saves water, money and time, and improves the quality of our rivers and streams.

Lawn reduction is also the first step to enrich and diversify your landscape. Below are some strategies we’ve used to start our landscape diversification, but first here’s a little history.

Read the entire article in the Summer 2007 issue

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