The picture that accompanies this post is looking out my back window this afternoon. The glare from the window makes it a not so great picture, but you get the idea. I heard their hoofbeats before I saw them, but I’m not worried, because yes, they are supposed to be at the back of my house.
The basic reality is, that I’m just not a believer in lawn mowing. Don’t get me wrong, I can appreciate a groomed lawn, but it really doesn’t come to the top of my list of priority tasks, like ever. I think it gets mowed once or twice in the spring, just to sorta even everything out, but then summer gets busy and we don’t think about it anymore.
People may think we are just crazy rednecks that don’t care how we look to the neighbourhood, and that may be true to some degree, but we are far enough off the beaten path that the neighbourhood can’t really see us anyway, so this isn’t an issue. My reason for not mowing the lawn actually goes a lot deeper than just being a general slob. I actually have three reasons for letting the grass grow.
- Mowing takes a lot of time, especially when you have like, acres of lawn. It’s probably a stretch to say we have acres, but the area of our property that could be considered lawn is pretty vast. If I had an urban postage stamp, I’d mow it, but it takes a minimum of 5 hours weekly to mow all the lawn we have. This is just too much time to use on a cosmetic experience.
- Mowing is downright wasteful. We have a plethora of animals who can utilize the grass and weeds in our yard. So why would we spend money on fossil fuels, then spend our time pushing a lawnmower around to chew up precious forage? The animals can walk and chew up the grass for us. This turns our lawn from wasteful, to profitable.
- The frost will get it. Regardless of how tall the grass grows, this is Canada. We have winter. In winter, the grass goes away. We recently read “Good Call”, by Jase Robertson of Duck Dynasty. In the book, Jase mentions how Phil’s response to questions about why he didn’t mow his lawn was ‘The frost will get it.’. And guess what folks, this is as true in Canada as it is in Louisiana. When fall arrives, and we get a good frost, all that grass lays flat, regardless of how tall it was to begin with.
So, regardless of what people say, I’ll be here with my unmowed lawn, watching my horses out my back window, maintaining a sustainable existence. If you like mowing your lawn, and take pride in having a groomed yard, that's great. We won't judge.