How Doing Less Yard Work Saves the Planet - Part 1
Embracing soil health over perfect lawns. A guest post by Jessi Roesch.
When I first moved to the arid environment of Texas, my Midwestern soul was in for a shock. The green landscapes and my dream (rather, what I had come to expect as a fact of life) of a lush lawn died as fast as grass in Texas July. A water-thirsty lawn was impractical, time-consuming and costly working against my context.
Learning the Context behind Improving Soil Health
That’s an important part. The context I grew up in was Central Ohio, which averages about 40 inches of rain per year. The summer of 2024 brought a record-breaking heat wave to Columbus, about a month before the world broke records for its hottest day in modern history. Link. Despite those conditions, my mom (who is the backyard “farmer” of the family) was able to maintain a garden and green lawn. She wanted to show you pictures. I’ll tell her you liked them, and you agree that her dog is the cutest thing you’ve ever seen.
Photos of a green lawn in a high precipitation context. Courtesy: Jessi’s mom
For me, in Central Texas, it’s a little different. Central Texas recorded its hottest fall in 126 years, the driest fall since 1999 (26% of normal precipitation) and the latest triple-digit temperature day on record ever. The plants and animals that thrive in each place are acclimated to that context. Heat waves and record-breaking temperatures or rainfall or droughts are relative to the places they occur. For Ohio, 100° days are rare, and in Central Texas, 30-35 days over 100° days are typical, but that number has topped over 100 days over 100° in recent years.
Climate change is here, we’re seeing its effects now, and we can actually do something about it in our own backyards by fussing a lot less, and making our lawns into biodiversity havens and carbon sinks pulling in up to 1.5 tonnes of carbon per hectare. Link, link.
The notion of a green, uniform lawn originates in Europe as a symbol of wealth and social standing, precisely because it required a level of effort that clearly divided the wealthy class, armed with workers to maintain the aristocratic aesthetic. This style was purposefully pompous, and in stark contrast to the utilitarian land uses of the working class. Fast forward to the World Wars, a surplus of new poison gases and chemicals were in search of a new uses - just in time for the American Dream to remind us to keep up with the Joneses. Lawns in the US cover 40 million acres, an area the size of Colorado. Managing these lawns in the traditional way requires more work and more expense in the form of water and chemicals, to the detriment of local species. Link, link.
Detail of a Penn Salt chemical advertisement in Times Magazine, 1947, claiming that DDT is ‘good for’ people, pets, and gardens. Courtesy: Crossett Library
What is Regenerative Agriculture?
Nature is not to be subdued. She is to be wooed. If you haven’t been up on regenerative agriculture, consider stopping reading now if you don’t have capacity to get obsessed over something new. Learning about regenerative agriculture could possibly change your life. It did for me. If you’ve been up on the regenerative agriculture movement, you may have come across the six principles of soil health. They are my go-to date ideas:
Minimize disturbance
Keep the soil covered
Increase diversity of plants and insects
Keep a living root in the soil
Integrate animals
Context
Regenerative agriculture prioritizes healthy soil as the base of a healthy ecosystem, working with nature instead of against it. Its elegance returns to indigenous and ancient practices that reduce chemical inputs and support healthy soil as the foundation for growing nutritious food, something that has been depleted over the last 50 years as soil erosion has increased and nutrient density has declined. In other words, because of soil loss, a tomato today doesn’t give you the same nutrient bang for your buck as it did mid-century. Link, link, link.
Transforming my Backyard
The journey to transform my backyard into a regenerative oasis began in 2021, after life-changing encounters with extreme weather and a regenerative ranch in the same crazy spring. You can read about that wild experience here.
Before starting this journey, our backyard was a typical casualty of quick fixes—sodded over with store-bought grass that died off faster than we could water it. But the more I learned about regenerative practices, the more I realized that I needed to change my perspective. Instead of fighting, we began applying these principles to great effect, less cost and less work. There wasn’t a “right” way to manage our yard, and the stakes weren’t too high if we did something “wrong” - mostly because we were just going to do less. This mindset of curiosity and wonder laid the groundwork to see our lawn as an experiment and gateway to our local landscape.
This post was all about context, personal and cultural. In the next one, I’ll share more about the principles of soil health have played out in our yard. Stay tuned for Part 2.
About the Author
Jessi Roesch (rhymes with “fresh”) is the founder of Downland, a marketplace that helps landowners protect their legacy and get an aspiring farmer on their land when the kids don’t want it. Insiders can get in on the ground floor of Downland's mission by making an early investment through Wefunder for as little as $100. Learn more here.
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