Rants and Raves

I love a pretty lawn. I spend hours in my. I don't care if it have some herbs growing in it, cuz I like to use the herbs and make teas from them. Like the red clover and the dandelion and the little wild strawberrys that grow here and there. I even planted some chamomile under the oak tree so there would be a soft carpet of apple scent to rest upon.
There is mostly St. Augustine all over our property and it's beautifuly soft to walk on too. It seems to keep the house cooler in the summer months oppossed to the dirt yard that was here when we moved in 16 yrs ago. Just as long as t green it's cool with me.
sh

 

i love working in my yards too and keep them looking good. i don't like the polished look, but more natural like the woods. this last summer i planted everything in 5 gallon buckets my husband brought me home from his job. i just put holes in the bottom of the buckets and then some rocks, soil and the seeds or plants. it turned out beautiful and i didn't have to dig the ground up and the bugs didn't even bother my plants, guess it was hard for them to climb the plastic buckets. i love all kinds of herbs and always have a herb garden and also make my teas from my herbs. gardening is so theraputic to me.
hippiewise

 

I like to use containers and raised beds too hippiewise, it conserves on water and it really does keep a lot of the pest away. The weeding is practicly nil. I use a lot of big pot and tubs, in fact I have an old bathtub painted dark green in my front yard and a bathroom sink fastened to a tree by the bathtub. I was thinking of , yes a toilet, but I didn't want some drunk getting mixed up on his way home..heh heh..

 

yeah, it is more the polished look that I am talking about (that I don't like)...the lawns that are full of pesticides so that the natural plants (dandelions,etc) can't grow. There is a lawn that is close to where I live that has all kinds of plants growing in it. It looks wild, yet has an organization about it that says that someone is taking care of it, watching over it. No pesticides there, for sure....and very nice to look at. I wouldn't mind having a yard like that...

 

I too am turned off by anal lawns.
The ones that look like the owner would run out in the middle of the night because a dandelion seed blew in from across the road and grab that seed while their face turned every shade of red, then went down the next morning and talked to their lawyer about sueing those damn neighbors because not only do the wispy dandelion seeds blow over, their trees actually have the nerve in the fall to shed their leaves and THEY blow over also....something must be done!!!

These houses are easy to spot...they're the ones with the chem-lawn truck out front in the spring...

 

in my community there are people who have planted wildflower lawns, in keeping with Mother Nature, and they get reported to the authorities for having "rodent breeding grounds" it's so pathetic. We're talking prairie grasses and the like. It's a great alternative to mowing twice a week.

I love to see dandelions when they're in flower, I know they are considered a pest plant, but the greens are very healthful to eat, and I would rather have the dandelions than the poisons to kill them.

 

right on Mimosa.

And thank you for he kind words in the other thread...

 

Yea, what she said....

Hi voided 37, Mimosa, Sus & SH. I hate that I've been away for soooooo loooong. I've had computer, health, farm, family, and other problems. For a while I'll be borrowing computer time from one of the friends of one of my sons.

The talk about lawns reminds me of what happened when I lived in Toronto in the early 1980s. I like the natural/wildflower lawn too. I was doing that there, well trying to. Turns out they are so dandelion-phobic that your neighbors will report you to the "lawn police". The city will then come out and cut your lawn and add the fee to your hydro (combination water & electricity) bill. Don't get me wrong, over all I loved Toronto, but that one part sucked.

Peace,
poor_old_dad

 

Hehehe ... heh!

Don't knock the company of a shitload of cats. They make far better (bed?) fellows than the abundance of consumerism-and-otherwise-fucked-up overcivilised airheads knocking about the world these days.

(And I thought it was bad in 1973, ah bless my sweet naivity .... )

I'm with Voided. I'm all for harmony, peace and against globalisation and senseless, profit-driven wars, but definitely NOT one to hold the other cheek.

Post scrotum: And I sure hope I can swear like a motherfucker here, if I feel the urge though hugs are on the menu, too.

 

ZZZ...
haha...yes swear your heart out.
Welcome aboard.

Our cat has been holding down the mole and mice population...
bless her little soul.

 

mimosa,

that is truly sad isn't it? people reporting someone for having a natural lawn, man, some people need to get a life.

shameless heifer,

i used to have a really cool toliet in my front yard when i lived in the wilds of idaho back in the 70's it was so cool, i had a ivy growing all around it and i painted it bright red, loved it. would love to have an old porceline tub outside too, hell, i'd just like to have a old time porceline tub in my bathroom, the kind that had the legs on it, they were so big and held so much water.
hippiewise

 

Maybe I will just go ahead and put the toilet out there by the tub after all. Thank you Hippiewise for the inspiration.
sh

 

mmmm....honey and lick all in the same sentence...

there was a story on the news recently about a man who lived on a corner lot and wanted to put up a privacy fence as his whole backyard was exposed to the traffic. The township said "nope, we have rules regarding the fence 'oh yee of little fence wisdom'...."
"you may put up a chain link but not a privacy fence."

So he put about 13 toilets all across his front yard down by the street with signs pertaining to what he thought the powers that be could do with their silly fence rules. He would everyday go out and sit on one of those toilets and wave at the passers by...I didn't get a follow up...

we have an old turquoise bathtub we drug home from the dump and will sink it next spring for a little pond.

Yes toilets full of ivy.....what a wonderful world.

 

hahahahha.. that's funny teepi, thanks for the giggle.

 

HA! The "lawn police", LOL! And here I always thought Toronto was so hip, I guess every place has it's idiosynchracies...

I do own a lawn mower, but I don't use it much, and it's usually a serious undertaking to mow the wheat field that is my lawn, I do it so I can walk around, and sometimes my wife walks our goats for the "mowing".

But seriously, what is it about lawns anyway? I guess it's a control issue, if your lawn is impeccable, you're perceived as being in control and "orderly", but what if it's a mess of weeds like mine? I guess I'm just a "lawn anarchist". I'm not a complete anarchist though, I do a little work in "selective weeding" and "weed relocation" when I have time. The other day I took a number of globe thistles (one of my fav's BTW) and moved them out of a path to a hill side that's now plagued with a bunch of thorn bushes I keep trying to cut back. I figure if I keep cutting back the "bad weeds" and replace them with "good weeds", eventually there'll be no place for the bad weeds to grow. Speakin' of "good weeds", it sucks that I can't legally grow hemp, one of the most useful "weeds" known to man...

 

I've killed at least half my front yard's grass by pissing on it. The back and 2 side yards add up to close to two acres-- I wish I could piss enough to kill the whole damn thing.


I hate mowing grass-- always did. It may look nice, but I'd rather be sitting on my front-porch swing, drinking beer and vodka, reading the newest issue of "The New Yorker", Cormac Mc Carthy or some of the Russians: Turgenev, Tolstoy or Gogol.

I wasn't put on this earth to be a mechanized sheep-- I was put here to write and admire Lisalovelight! (And Angelgodiva.)

 

Sloth Outta Here...

 

mellow yellow, that's a trip that they do that in toronto, man, big brother is always watching that's fur sure.

your story of the lawn police in toronto reminds me of a seinfield episode about the library police did yu ever see that one? it was so funny, the library police dick comes to jerry seinfield's apartment to arrest him, for an overdue book from jerrys high school days. it was so funny, man, i wish we had some lawn police here where i live, we share a yard with some lazy mother fuckers who never mow their lawn, hey i like natural but when there's all kinda shit all over the lawn it really looks poor white trash and i hate that (i mean all kind of garbage) . can't wait to get our own land somewhere and not share a lawn with anyone, just let it grow natural with all kinds of wild flowers and trees and natural stuff.
hippiewise

 

Definitely wild about Toronto. I remember it being clean and pristine, yet I remember drooling at the pot plants growing in everyone's windows...

...I'm with you on the trash thing, I can totally dig a natural wild flower/dandelion weed lawn, but I gotta draw the line at the white trash look, that sucks, we had some neighbors who were like that, and it was unsightly, old bed frames, junk, and bags of trash on the front lawn, I was glad when they moved, the whole neighborhood was.

I can visualize the Seinfeld thing, though I never saw that episode, but I do remember the soup nazi (remember him?). Much of Seinfeld's humor is about control issues, making fun of obsessive-compulsive behavior in one form or other, good stuff...

 

Sloth, you want to go drinking with the big-leaguers? Hell, you're welcome, but consider this: One beautiful May morning Wes and I stopped in at farmer Larry's house and we started on 16 oz. beer,. Then we began home-made wine. Then, still drinking beer and wine, we started doing shots of whisky. Then, still doing all three, we began swilling 120 proof moonshine right out of the jug. After about two hours of this pleasant relaxation, my buddy Wes jumped up and said. "I CAN'T DRINK LIKE THIS! JESUS! I'M HEADING HOME!"


Home, in this instance, meant 400 yards down the road to my house.

He never made it.

A neighbor, Larry's cousin, stopped and said (this was before the age of cell-phones),"Let me use your phone--there's a dead man laying in the bar-ditch!"

Wise and learned dudes like me and Larry just chuckled, knocked back a few more snorts and said, " Hell, he ain't dead, just dead-drunk."

We recovered his intoxicated body, took him home and, then, drank for five more hours.

Is THIS the kind of drinking you have in mind?