How to Decrease the Size of Your Lawn (click here for full article)
Lawns are the dominant feature of most of our home gardens, but they do very little to provide ecosystem services (i.e. benefits to wildlife) and they carry a large carbon footprint when managed with traditional methods. We 'produce' a LOT of lawn in the United States. Estimates place the amount of lawn we cultivate between 3 and 4 times the amount of any other crop.
Did you know that: Each hour of gasoline-powered lawn mowing generates as much pollution as driving a gas engine car nearly 100 miles!
There are ways to decrease the size of your lawn and increase the biodiversity of plants and animals that use your home landscape. A first step is to start thinking of lawns as "area rugs" and not "wall to wall carpets" and keeping lawn only where you use it most by "mowing where you go" and transitioning less used sections into non-lawn areas.
These articles provide great tips for how to get started:
