With warmer temperatures come waves of lawn care mandates. One of the big ones in the spring is to treat weeds. Lawn care companies claim weeds are “threats” to your lawn, that they must be “controlled” to keep your lawn “healthy”.
But how healthy is it if you have to regularly apply toxic chemicals? Herbicides (a form of pesticide1) are heavily applied to lawns at rates much higher than they are used in agriculture. And the most commonly used herbicides were recently shown to have a negative impact on children’s memory and attention.2
So let’s talk about how you can maintain a truly healthy lawn that also maintains the health of your family, pets, neighbors, and wildlife.
No such thing as a weed
Ecologically speaking, there’s no such thing as a weed. We’re told that certain plants are weeds, but a plant isn’t a weed simply because it’s a certain type of plant. It becomes a weed when it grows in a place we don’t want it. That’s it. It’s a purely human-centered designation.
If a dandelion in the middle of your lawn is a weed, so is turf grass in a flower garden. Same goes for every other plant out there: The volunteer maples that pop up after maple-copters have fluttered to the ground. The oak sapling that sprouts after a squirrel forgot where it hid dinner. We’ve been taught that a lawn can only be healthy if it contains nothing but turf grass. But that’s simply not true.
Nature abhors a monoculture
A monoculture is an area in which only a single type of plant is grown. Monocultures are common in agriculture, with a single crop planted over many acres of land. They make for easy maintenance and faster, more efficient harvesting. But the single most widely grown monoculture in the U.S. isn’t corn, soybeans, or cotton. It’s turf grass, covering an area three times that of any other irrigated crop.3 Why is that a problem?
In the natural world, ecosystems contain a wide variety of plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria. These species interact with each other in ways we’re only just beginning to understand. But one thing is clear: Ecosystems with a greater diversity of species are more robust. They can rebound from stressors better than ecosystems with a more limited make-up. They are, to put it simply, healthier.
No need to “treat” the “weeds”
Lawn care companies like to say that anything other than turf grass is a threat to your lawn. But that’s only true if you buy in to the idea that your lawn has to look like an outdoor carpet. Why sell this idea? Because you need their services to create that aesthetic. But that’s literally all it is—an aesthetic. Stop to think for a moment: Why use chemicals that are harmful to people and pets4 just to make your lawn look a certain way? No, really. Why?
I’m not saying to tear out your lawn. Instead, stop to evaluate why you maintain your yard the way you do. What is its purpose? If you want a lush, green lawn, that’s fine. But instead of coating it in preemergents and other herbicides to prevent plants from growing, do the opposite: Overseed with a mix of grasses. This will increase the diversity of plants, making the lawn more resilient to stressors and allowing you to maintain a truly usable outdoor space where people and pets can run and play without exposure to pesticides.
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EPA. What is a pesticide? https://www.epa.gov/minimum-risk-pesticides/what-pesticide
B.N.C. Chronister et al. Urinary Glyphosate, 2,4-D and DEET Biomarkers in Relation to Neurobehavioral Performance in Ecuadorian Adolescents in the ESPINA Cohort. Environmental Health Perspectives. October 11, 2023. https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP11383
C. Milesi et al. A strategy for mapping and modeling the ecological effects of U.S. lawns. Environmental Science. 2005. https://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXVI/8-W27/milesi.pdf
Abbie Shrew. Current Research: Pesticides on residential lawns. https://scienceinthemedia.org/2017/04/28/current-research-pesticides-on-residential-lawns/