What is it about Americans and their lawns?
I don’t get it.
As I sit here writing this, one of my neighbors is out mowing his lawn, for at least the second time this week. Like the rest of us in this area, he can’t have much more than a quarter-acre plot, and yet to take his grass down maybe an eighth of an inch requires he use a four-wheeled self-propelled tractor with the horsepower of a Sopwith Camel, replete with headlights. It’s like floating a cabin cruiser in a tiny pond: the thing is so outsized he has trouble making the turns. It’s loud, it’s polluting, and it’s terrifically annoying, and I know he’ll be at it for the better part of an hour. So instead of sitting on my porch to do my work on this beautiful summer day, I’m driven inside, where I have to close my doors and windows to cut down on the noise and the stench.
And he isn’t alone. He’s part of a growing cohort of people in my neighborhood who seem to devote ever-increasing amounts of time, money, and natural resources to making sure their little plot of heaven looks just like a golf green. Riding mowers, weed whackers, leaf blowers, along with regular doses of fungicides, pesticides, and fertilzers, all used to produce an environment that looks to me as antiseptic as a mortuary. The overall impression is of something embalmed: lots of makeup and injected plastic, but what’s underneath is mostly dead or dying.
This seems to be the new standard, not only for homes, but for parks, municipal grounds, cemeteries, banks, what have you. An escalation, if you will, in the war on grass, so that in my formerly tranquil little neighborhood, at least one in three households now have riding mowers and all the other carbon-spewing paraphernalia, and uses them religiously. We have a mix of people here: some young families, some single workers, some retired folks. The retired folks do their mowing and assorted nature-taming during the day, the working folks during the evening or weekends. It’s getting so it’s a rarity to have a solid hour of summer daylight unaccompanied by the song of the two or four-stroke engine.
But there’s more. This morning another of my neighbors was serviced by one of those “lawn maintenance” companies. This too is becoming more and more common. Three guys arrived in a four-by-four, dragging an extra-wide trailer. The equipment on this included an even more massive riding mower, along with the requisite weed whackers and leaf blowers, and a diesel powered block of hardware that is used, as best as I can tell, to punch little holes in the dirt. The noise generated by these machines (especially when they’re all being used together) is simply incredible, so much so that these folks are required to wear the sort of headphones you never used to see outside of a factory floor or airport runway.
We’re talking about cutting the grass, for Chrissakes. Have you looked at a blade of grass lately? Really, it’s not that intimidating. And so the scale of the technology being used to cut the stuff seems ludicrous, absurd. And given what’s happening to our climate, even obscene. I can’t help but feel that a hundred years from now people are going to look back at this compulsive and bizarre use of petroleum—this terrific overkill—and shake their heads with wonder. And disgust.
But right now it’s the noise that’s getting to me.
Am I over-sensitive, a crazed eco-nut tree hugger?
Is it too much to want to hear the birds sing on a summer afternoon?
Help me out here DU. Tell me what you think.
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Manly Suburban Man.
You should trademark that before SNL gets it.
don't even get me STARTED on weed eaters 
Love that stuff - Loving Spoonful too. 
He left the military, bought a house in the country - and immediately went to back to war with the lawn. 
But - he never used pesticides. Our neighbors were doing chemlawn in the 80's - and he noticed they never had birds or bunnies. He would go out with a small hand rake and shovel and gloves. Our house had underground streams so even nw - my mom doesn't water the lawn. They ony watered flowers and te garden.
Their children are playing on that. 
Show me a little kid that washes their hands after touching the grass before putting their hand in their mouth and . . . We can't find one NCarolina. That creature does not exist. 
with this,once a week.I don't like mowing and have no neighbors close by.I missed a week a couple months ago and 2 people stopped to check if I was alright because the grass was high.
in my neighborhood. 
All we need is a rake.
that my yard will die in the summer. I am in Texas and with no rain and severe water shortages we have no yard. It's mainly dirt may-sept.
I think I cut it twice this year. I rake leaves when needed to make sure my french drains don't get clogged, otherwise you could live next door to me and enjoy many birds and wildlife! We are quiet!
Maybe we should move to a desert island somewhere! But then we would complain about the coconuts falling out of the trees.
We don't understand why anybody chooses to live there.
We live in the rural woods of the Ouachita Mountains of west/central Arkansas.
However, we do regularly mow with a 42" Craftsman Riding Lawn Mower,
and keep the grass mowed short around our cabin and veggie gardens.
There are several reasons:
Reason#1) This area of rural Arkansas had an unfair number of ticks (Lyme & Rocky Mountain Spotted fever). Keeping the grass mowed under 4" around your home or in areas that are frequented will greatly reduce the number of ticks, and make it easier for the Free Range Chickens to find those that try to migrate out of the brush.
Reason #2: By close mowing and leaving the cuttings,
it is possible over a few years to build topsoil,
and rehabilitate a mostly barren, eroded, and unproductive red clay field from something that will only support thistle, briars, and long weeds to a fertile field that will hold the rainfall, and grow short grasses and clover.
Our Honey Bees LOVE the clover.
Reason #3)
We like to be able to see these little guys before we step on them.
All non naturally occurring pesticides, fertilizers, or herbicides are
forever banned from our little hill top,
along with any and all Genetically Modified plants and seeds.
Get off my lawn.
Yeah, it's annoying. I personally fertilize organically and avoid any Creative Chemistry whenever possible. The mower is electric and nearly silent (you can talk while using it in a normal voice).
Warranted, the place is full of flower gardens and healthy, rich green lawn. But I work at it because I enjoy doing so and endeavor to do so in harmony with nature instead of fighting it.
However, don't smell the compost bin when I over-do the greens. Just a warning.
Bad bad stuff, in so many ways!
Let's face it. Mostly it's a male obsession. I've read a theory that says it's mostly about control. In these ratrace times where everyone is running around like a chicken with his head cut off and getting nowhere, people have lost a sense of control over their lives and at least they feel they can control the weeds in their lawns, how green it is, how neat it is, etc.
I have a brother who spends most of his free time mowing two places. He's obsessive about it. He's the kind of person who can't just sit and enjoy a nice summer day or read a book in a lawn chair. He has a summer place which has state park property (woods) behind his place and he has spent the last 8 years "cleaning up the woods". It's freaky. He has a couple acres and it's not enough that he tries to control that, he has to go into the woods behind his property and rake the woods, take out all the little saplings that don't line up with the other tress so that when you look at the woods behind his place the trees are all in a row with a cleanly raked ground. It's so obvious because the neighbors on either side of him don't do that. I think he was actually warned by park rangers. I also think it's called OCD
I see people with leaf blowers (I hate those things) blowing a total of 15 leaves off their lawns. Whatever happened to using a rake?
I'm with you. The obsession with lawns is crazy.
Xeriscape.
BTW, aeration is good for the soil. It helps water penetrate better, and lets the roots breathe. I need to have someone come and aerate here. The alleged front lawn needs it.
In the back, it's a riot. 
water
It was there when we bought our house in 2004. So, I have a lawnmower. I mow it when it gets too long. I work at home, so I usually mow after about 10 AM, so as not to wake my neighbors.
I do not dig up dandelions. I mow them. I do not spray the plantains. I mow them. I don't kill the wild violets. I mow them. When it rains, the "lawn" grows. When it doesn't, the "lawn" goes dormant. Everyone on my block has a lawn. Everyone has a mower. They mow their lawns when they need mowing, but there aren't any "manicured" lawns around in my neighborhood.
Mostly, people are good about mowing at reasonable hours. Snow removal, though, not so much. The snowblowers get fired up very early in the morning. People have to get to work and it's dark when they get home, so the 5-12 hp gasoline engines are heard on my street, starting as early as 5 AM. So be it. I usually get out there around 10 AM and clear my driveway, my neighbor's driveway, and about four houses worth of front sidewalks. After the snowplow comes by, I clear four driveways of the mound of nasty snow the snowplow leaves behind.
It's a city. People have lawns and it snows here. I'm 68 years old, so I'm not much into hand-shoveling of snow off a driveway, nor do I wish to use an old-fashioned lawnmower.
Noise. Yes. Oh, well...
about how much water they use. Be it reclaimed water, city refined water or just plain damn water all for a never ending quest for a "green" lawn.
I'm working toward xeriscaping but have a hard time convincing my wife we should pull out the sand spurs, crab grass and other weeds that pass for our front yard. The back is mostly mulch and bird/bee/butterfly attractors with some veggie beds as a bonus.(watered from rain collection barrels)
you're not over sensitive.
