You can eat dandelion greens, but be careful where you pick them. Some people use pesticides for spiders and ticks around their homes, or weed-killers. You can also boil the greens and flowers to make tea.
Not (frequently) mowing your lawn is one of the best things you can do for your local bee population. Dandelions and other meadow flowers are great sources of nutrition for them. Obviously, don’t use pesticides either.
The spiders are optional. Honestly, you’re more likely to encounter their egg sack under a dandelion than the actual mother spider, unless you pluck them early in the morning dew when momma spider might be at home…
I don’t use pesticides, but when my dogs start coming inside with ticks, I spray flea and tick killer in their fenced area. I imagine others probably do the same.
Yeah, people that can afford fences can usually also afford to tend to their lawn. Not everyone can afford such luxuries, many folks can just barely afford dog food, to feed their security guard animal.
Come discuss at !foragingI’ve eaten dandelion before and I’m still hear to tell the story. I’ve made side dish of the stem. And it taste good. It’s a vegetable without a strong taste.
The leaves are grow and sell as salad even if it is not as common as lettuce. It has much more flavour than to stem.
Dandelion leaves can be bitter but some people actually cannot taste bitter. One way to reduce the bitter taste is to pick the youngest and fastest growing leaves out of direct sunlight, as sun exposure increases bitterness.
I don’t see why it would have to be though. A bunch of oddballs could certainly get together and create one to protect diversity in their neighborhood from a normie invasion.
For the same reason why very few companies are worker owned co-ops: people suck and capitalism doubly so. That’s why we very rarely can have nice things.
In the case of HOAs, the bad ones (which are the vast majority of them) exist to extract profit (in the form of increasing property values, fining anyone who doesn’t follow their petty rules, and sometimes even take someone’s home for breaking the aforementioned rules) and exert as much control over people as possible.
In the US at least, laws regarding HOAs are a grotesque combination of under-regulation and regulations specifically crafted to FACILITATE abuse rather than discourage it.
Perhaps, but as long as there is no law that says you can’t have an HOA that fines you for having a McMansion with a monoculture lawn instead of a natural one, it’s at least possible in theory.
I pay an HoA, its like $30 a year. While they dont encourage it, they dont care either. They really dont do anything except twice a year they bring out garbage trucks/dumpsters to the nearby school to dump/recycle things too big for a trash can.
In Germany the city does that at least in smaller cities. Twice a year you can put all stuff that doesn’t go into regular trash out at the street and it gets collected. Think broken furniture, old electronics etc. People empty their garages and basements of all the stuff that accumulated. It’s common to have a walk through the neighborhood on these days to see if there is some cool stuff in there. Got my first skateboard that way as a teenager.
Lawns became symbols of the elite in England, as wealthy landowners sought to show off their gains via the most ostentatious displays possible outside stately homes.
Colonizing landowners were keen to replicate the look of a manicured English garden. As such, English imperialism is somewhat to blame for lawns being created around the world, where they became a status symbol, and a sign of wealth and well-to-do.
That is the point. You’re basically trying to say “Look how rich I am, I can afford to have all this land dedicated to looking pretty and not being useful for anything else”
It goes back to the origin stated here. It was desirable because they could afford to effectively waste a lot of acreage on a crop that had no benefit. Simply for show.
The point from from old England’s perspective is that keeping the grass at 2 cm requires a whole bunch of resources and people, so only the rich could afford it. Even today, any neighborhood with weeds growing instead of a 2cm lawn is instantly classified as lower class. There often is no practical use or sometimes use for games or walking is when forbidden because it’s a status symbol only.
It’s like asking what’s the point of owning a Bugatti Chiron that can go 400 kph when you’re stuck in the same traffic jam anyway.
Maybe overall, but my little Chihuahua/dachshund is too short to deal with taller plants. When we go for a walk by areas with natural growth or even unmowed lawns, he either has to leap through it or walk in the road. I’m sure there are some other options he would be fine with, I don’t think grass is necessary, but he is definitely not just as happy with any other kind of nature.
Dandelion greens are really good for you. Plus as others have noted monoculture lawns are pretty bad for the environment. Better than impermeable surfaces but still not great.
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