By David Pogue
Hello. My name is David, and I hate lawns.
It’s an instant monoculture. It provides no habitat. Grass roots are only an inch deep, so they can’t reach down to find water, so you have to irrigate a lawn to keep it from turning brown. (Some native plants’ roots grow down 12 feet.) Fertilizer is a carbon-emissions nightmare, and the mowing is a noisy, gas-burning CO2 factory.
So when my wife and I moved to Bedford a year ago, we had grand plans for our 4-acre property: Lose the lawn. We’d meadow this baby!
We dreamed of waking up to a glittering, colorful explosion of wildflowers, teeming with bids, butterflies and bees. We could help the planet! We could reduce our carbon! We could quit paying a lawn crew!
Hello. My name is David, and I’m a naïve idiot.
Meadowing, as it turns out, is not cheaper or lower maintenance than a lawn, at least not for the first few years. The very first step, getting rid of the grass itself, turns out to be a huge, fraught project.
According to Kathy Moreau, our landscape designer, you can kill the lawn in any of three ways: Smother it with plastic or cardboard for a year. Dig up the sod with earthmoving equipment. Or spray Roundup.
Hmm, tough choice. I’ll bet plenty of my followers on Facebook have been through this process. I thought maybe I’d ask them which method they’d used.
The result was internet civil war; 615 commenters, ripping each other to shreds.
— “It is obvious that some of you have zero experience.”
— “That is the surest way to failure for a meadow. Clearly, you’ve never done a meadow yourself.”
— “What you propose is not supported by the science.”
— “I love pseudo environmentalists that don’t know what they’re talking about.”
People suggested all kinds of alternative approaches:
— “Controlled burning! Feeds the soil and clears the area.”
— “Put a couple of horses on it. In a couple of weeks you’ll have mud.”
— “Go with artificial grass.”
There was one thing everyone seemed to agree on, though: Don’t use Roundup.
— “NO ROUNDUP! You will poison the soil and nothing will grow and it will take a long time for nature to return.”
— “Oh my. No no no no no.”
— “Bad idea! Kills grass, bugs, birds, snakes, people.”
Well, you know. It’s the internet. Everybody’s got an opinion. The real question is, what do the experts say?
At Bedford2030.org, you can sign up for a free Rooted Solutions coaching session. Landscape experts come to your place, study your property, and offer a plan for making your property more sustainable.
Our coaches, Andrea Good and Fiona Mitchell, had a surprising answer to the “how to get rid of the grass” problem. None of the above.
“Let the turf grass grow and go to seed; it will flop over,” their report said. “As it becomes weaker, it becomes easier to pull out some tufts, creating room for seeds or plugs of full-sun, medium-moisture meadow plants.”
Wow! So maybe we don’t have to get rid of the grass in order to … get rid of the grass.
We also called in Pennington Grey, whose firm specializes in installing gorgeous, organic, native meadows. As a bonus, he’s on the board of directors for the Ecological Landscape Alliance.
If the goal is doing the right thing for nature, he’s not such a fan of the smothering-the-lawn approach. “You’re going to take that entire area out of service to nature for a year. Because it’s not draining water, it’s not insect habitat, it’s not doing anything.”
What about scalping off the sod? “You’re going to be running a two-stroke engine all day. That sod all gets hauled out. You’ll pay $70 a yard to dispose of it in a landfill.”
You can probably see where this is going: Grey prefers to spray. He uses glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide — and the active ingredient in Roundup. (He doesn’t use Roundup itself, which contains enhancing agents he doesn’t care for.)
“Using herbicide is a very personal decision. It needs to align with the homeowner’s goals and ethos for their land. But it’s a really inexpensive, low-impact way to change your environment from being nonproductive to being exceptionally productive in the shortest time,” he says.
“In a residential setting, it has no impact on water quality. It doesn’t impact insect life. It doesn’t impact you or me. At this low rate of application, it doesn’t move in the soil. It doesn’t get caught by water and get washed off down the road; it binds with the soil. It’s seven days in the soil before it’s degraded by microorganisms.”
But wait a minute — then why is Roundup banned in 28 countries? What about the lawsuits that have cost Monsanto, the maker of Roundup, $10 billion in settlements? And above all, what about the World Health Organization, which categorized glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic”?
Those, Grey says, have to do with using Roundup for agricultural use, where farmers spray their fields multiple times in vast quantities. (The FDA has found Roundup residue on oats, soybeans, cranberries, grapes, raisins, oranges, apples, cherries and beans in the U.S., at levels the government considers harmless.)
A single application in a backyard, he says, “just doesn’t do anything.”
Well, hasn’t our government made a ruling?
Why, yes. The EPA has studied all the studies, and its conclusion is emphatic. Glyphosate poses “no risks of concern to human health,” and there is “no evidence that glyphosate causes cancer in humans.”
So why did the WHO rule differently? Because, the EPA says, the EPA researchers “considered a significantly more extensive and relevant dataset” than the WHO did, including “studies EPA identified in the open literature.”
The EPA also found glyphosate safe for “terrestrial and aquatic plants, mammals, and birds.” It’s “uncertain” about bees.
Penn State’s agricultural scientists agree. “Glyphosate has lower acute toxicity to humans than 94% of all herbicides and many common household chemicals, including vinegar and table salt,” it says.
Oh. So glyphosate is actually OK?
Not if you’re the authors of a 2022 peer-reviewed article in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences. “Although there are important discrepancies between the analyzed findings,” they wrote, “it is unequivocal that exposure to glyphosate produces important alterations in the structure and function of the nervous system of humans, rodents, fish, and invertebrates.”
Well — GAHHHHHH!
At this point, my brain is mush. I just wanted to do the right thing. I just wanted to minimize my carbon, to rewild a big patch of monocrop, to quit mowing and blowing.
And now it turns out that I can’t get there without dealing damage to the very planet I set out to save?
I’ll keep digging away (at the research, not the yard), and I’ll keep you posted in this column. In the meantime, I’m keeping this data point, from one of my Facebook correspondents, in my back pocket:
“Four to eight goats can clear an acre in a month.”