Kill Your Grass: 6 Smart Reasons to Delawn

The delawning movement is gaining serious strength and speed in Portland. Just look around town—in nearly every neighborhood this week, people came out (with the sun) to uproot tough turf, readying the parking strip or front yard to plant veggies and herbs, digging in the dirt to make way for more native species, creating gravel Zen gardens and designing outdoor patio space in anticipation of warm evening dining. My neighbor rototilled her front yard yesterday. Another built raised beds in her parking strip last weekend and it’s already loaded with starts. I’ve sliced another section of rapidly disappearing grass (er, weeds) to make room for a cut flower garden. Delawning is de rigeur.

As we welcome spring and summer, consider these six smart reasons to lose that (not-so-perfect) established icon of the American homestead: the lawn.

This parking strip in Concordia has been converted to a vegetable garden.

Grow Your Food

One of the most popular reasons for delawning is to make way for vegetable gardens. By digging up that turf, you can create space for food. You can build raised beds more fancily framed by wood, stone or metal, adding mounds of nutrient rich soil and compost to focus on vegetables and herbs. But don’t limit yourself to the back yard—the front yard and sidewalk/parking strip offer opportunities to feed your family (and your neighbors, too!).

Conserve Water

Lawns take a tremendous amount of water to grow and keep looking lush. In the Pacific Northwest, we are fortunate to have a long rainy season so we don’t have to water our lawns and gardens much (except during those roasting summer days), but by mid July, if you’ve got a lawn, it undoubtedly looks ratty and brown unless the sprinklers are doing double time. Save money, conserve water: dig up that grass.

Avoid Overdose

To keep a lawn looking its best, not only water, but pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers are often (over)used. Treating lawns creates serious toxic runoff that ends up in our storm drains, and thus, our rivers and other critical water systems. When you delawn, you can easily give up the use of these harmful chemicals, creating a healthier environment for us all.

Go Low Maintenance

Maintaining a “healthy,” beautiful lawn is hard work. As mentioned above, there are weeds to pull and kill, most often with toxic chemicals. There is major watering to do in the summer months. And, then there’s the mowing. Many people use gas-guzzling mowers on larger lawns because it’s a lot easier than electric or push mowers. But gas mowers don’t do anything positive for the CO2 levels in our atmosphere except allow them to increase. And, the noise pollution these mowers produce certainly doesn't add to the calm of a spring Saturday morning, either.

LeAnn Locher and her partner began delawning at their North Portland home 12 years ago. “We wanted to get rid of the weedy, nasty lawn as it was taking a lot of time and energy to maintain and still wasn’t looking good.” (Hint: mowing and blowing aren’t the solution.)

Create a Thriving Habitat

When you delawn, you open up the possibilities for creating a healthy habitat in your yard and in your hood. The grass monoculture requires a lot of care—water, power tools, energy, amendments, time—and, gardens with diverse, native plant selections mostly take care of themselves once established. Replacing high maintenance grass with native plants that attract pollinators creates a refuge for local wildlife, mimics the natural environment and offers benefits galore (see our previous article on going native). Create a low maintenance woodland garden if you enjoy shade. Plant a clover meadow that attracts bees and butterflies to pollinate profusely. Design a space with native grasses and herbs for edible options for birds and your family.

Use your yard to connect with your neighbors. Photo: LeAnn Locher

Expand Your Social Circle

When you choose to delawn your front yard or parking strip, you’ll be amazed at social opportunities that arise. Locher’s front yard veggie garden provided more time and space for social interaction and, as a result, she feels more connected to her immediate community. “Because we put in a bench and a path, too, we meet and interact with more neighbors.” She designs the garden with neighbors in mind, creating beautiful space with edibles as the main focus, to tend and to share.

PNCA students delawn the strip next to the main campus building, prepping it for native plants. The project was conceived and paid for by the students.
 

Ready to Delawn?

Check out this fab online urban gardening resource for tips on lawn replacements, organic choices for yard and garden care, best practices for delawning (like the lasagna technique of layering cardboard and compost/mulch over grass in the fall for rich soil come spring!), cool pictures and more.