Clovers are far superior to grass. We had them mixed in pretty thoroughly growing up on our brand new property with the shittiest clay dirt imaginable. The farmland it all replaced was undoubtedly packaged and sold somewhere else.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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I grew up on an American farm and I cannot comprehend the suburbs. Grass just grows, it was there before developers bull dozed whatever forest / farm / wetland was already there to install impossible to walk cul-de-sacs everywhere. Less massive yards and more public parks would be better for everyone.
As someone who lives in the San Bernardino foothills I can assure you grass doesn't just grow it dries out and gets replaced by an invasive species of central Asian plant. The housing tracts must be baptized in hundreds of invasive tumbleweeds followed by an inferno caused by a Bic lighter.
Grew up in the countryside where our yard ended where my dad stopped cutting the grass, one time I messed up his line and we found a horseshoe pit while fixing it, so we got a bigger yard with horseshoes 😂
Fake: Anon goes outside
Gay: Gardening (? idk this one is a struggle)
Gardening is gay because of roses. Gardens often contain roses, the Japanese word for rose is bara. Barazoku, meaning the rose tribe was Japan's first gay magazine. The magazine was named so because the rose is a prominent symbol of male homosexuality in Japan. This is because of the Greek myth of King Laius who would have affairs with boys under rose trees. You might argue that gardening is not gay if the garden includes no roses but you would be wrong. Roses grow in soil, the word soil is gay. Therefore any form of gardening is inherently gay.
Fellas, is it gay to garden?
I was listening to some good EDM while gardening yesterday. Just grooving around and then saw a spot that needed a bit of hand weeding.
ACCIDENTAL TWERKING
all that bending over? getting dirty fingers? getting heads off plants? sowing seeds? hell yeah
sowing seeds?
I think this is significantly less gay than you think
Some people are more versatile than others.......
If anything I think paying close attention to a lawn is classic heterosexual male behaviour
As a hetero male I can confirm. I live in the northern hemisphere, in mild continental climate. In this time of the year everything dries up. Grass retreat to their roots/rhizomes. Wild flowers curl up their cute little leaves while bees visit their tiny flowers that defy the heat. This shit is lit!
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is everything else on this site also true?
Only when greentexted.
This is 100% true
Admen for companies like Monsanto in the 1950s pushed the idea of the “green lawn” and rebranded clover as a weed to push herbicides and nitrogen fertilizers
Clover is resilient with lower water needs, it’s softer, it naturally deters pests, and most importantly it pulls nitrogen from the air and pushes it into the soil.
What’s funny and sad is now they’ve come full circle and today’s admen realized they could capitalize on the instagram trend of undoing the damage of the admen from 70 years ago
Once again advertisers prove that they are absolute scumbags with no ethics whatsoever who will value making a dollar over destroying ecosystems
advertisers prove that they are absolute scumbags
I honestly didn't believe that until, one day, a scumbag came calling with a 'brilliant IT idea' that only myself and my colleagues could build. I'll put it this way: we realized that this guy would literally not stop until he covered the entire world with advertising, as though we were supposed to live in an environment modeled after a college dorm corkboard. No thanks.
Have you not seen how advertising destroys everything it touches and co-opts every space, continually intruding further and further to become more “effective”
I know you have because you are here on the internet. Depending on your age you have likely seen the decline of sites like reddit, youtube, google, etc. if your older you’ve probably seen newspapers get destroyed in a similar fashion, television, etc. outdoor advertising (billboards, in stores, signage, etc) has only become more obtrusive, offensive, and ever present through the decades as well
Admen find a space where people are, shove themselves into it, take that space over, then demand control of that space to enforce that their ads are “respected”. With the modern internet they shamelessly steal tons of data about you so their ad spends can be more “effective” because again, they have no ethics whatsoever. They don’t care if that complete violates your privacy and they don’t care if that data continually gets breached when it’s handed through 80 brokers. “Well, I wasn’t the one that did it! Doesn’t matter that I perpetuate a system that’s totally fucked” Except for cases like Google and meta of course where they absolutely were the ones who were. But again, no ethics whatsoever
Fuck advertisers. Advertisers are the bane of existence. They dont believe in their products, they just believe in soulless consumerism. They fight unfair; if you create systems to evade their bullshit they use their power to destroy those systems (going back to things like tivo). They are the devil, the antichrist. Kill all admen and make the world a better place. If you work in advertising take a long hard look at your life and figure out where it all went wrong, and then go work a more respectable job like being the person who changes urinal ice in strip clubs.
Decided to go with clover this summer. Fuck me it's expensive! And now I learn it used to be filler?! Robbery.
How am I supposed to use my Turf Builder® every 2 months, 4 times a year?
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When I got a lawn, I didn't do anything to it. It gets mowed every two weeks, but that's it. After a particularly nasty drought most of the grass died. A few months later, clover started popping up on its own. It's much better than grass, and now a bunny likes to visit us.
She's #4 all time on there! I took this better picture this week but hadn't posted it yet because it's "babie week" there.
Everything about this comment brings me so much joy
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There was this study, I think it was German, of fields for hay (herbivores eat it). They had monocultures and then fields with mixes. While some monocultures did very well some years the mixes did best on average - better defined as producing more biomass. The same probably goes for lawns.
This has been known for quite a while now. I've seen US Ag short films from the 1930s on the benefits of pasture blends and the increased tonnage of feed it produces and how best to manage it to maximize the feed values for greater profits.
Growing up on a small dairy farm we used a mix of alfalfa, red clover, and timothy or maybe fescue. It's been few decades. It was pretty much up to providing decent forage even in dry years or on light ground.
this makes sense from a mathematical perspective, because you're diversifying risks so in a year where one type of plant doesn't grow well, another can take over. so it's more likely that there's a plant in there that can grow well that year.
Yeah, it didn't blow my mind but I'm glad that people do the science so we can actually quantify these things. They had big improvements up to 4 species and then the gains were less as they increased it.
Of course this doesn't mean you can drop monoculture in agriculture. You still need your grains to mature at the same time so you can harvest mechanically. Buyers don't want mixes of stuff either. All that jazz. But lawns would probably be much better off with mixed plants.
big improvements up to 4 species
interesting. is that why we plant 4 different types of plant on a field in a row? i.e. year-on-year cycle
Three Sisters in native american agriculture. (three is approximately four)
Grass isn't inherently a bad idea for a lawn, it's just specific to your individual climate. The main issue is that most of the grasses people plant are native to much cooler climates in Europe.
I have a grass lawn, but it's a native Buffalo grass. It's much more drought tolerant than clover, flowers a couple times a year, doesn't require any maintenance, and provides a natural habitat for native wildlife.
Clover isn't actually much better than most grasses if you are trying to support the natural biodiversity. It's not native to north America, and thus only supports a small range of wildlife that's adapted to it.
A Lot of America's natural ground cover is actually low lying shrubs and flowering plants.
Most people just cut the grass too short. If you can't put foot under the cutting deck, it's too low.
Grass has very little leaves. So they need to be longer to stay green.
Heat wave coming? Cut the grass even longer. Longer grass keeps the moisture in the ground too.
One of the things I remember when I visited Florida as a kid from the UK was how weird their grass was. It's all spiky.
And kept trying to point this out but for some bizarre reason my parents weren't interested.
It’s called St Augustine grass and it’s everywhere down there since it’s supposedly very hardy, heat resistant, and salt resistant, which is important in hot, wet, and salty Florida. And I know exactly what you mean about the spikiness; it’s not soft at all.
In my region (Tennessee) the most popular intentional lawn grass is Tall Fescue, which is very soft, but it doesn’t spread laterally, so when gaps happen due to heat and such, spiky/hard crab grass fills in the gaps, and isn’t killed by broad-leaf herbicide since it’s also grass, so semi-maintained lawns quickly get taken over. The lawns with no herbicide regimen get taken over by clover instead, so you end up with a horseshoe of sorts where the completely un-maintained lawns (fescue and clover) and meticulously-maintained lawns (pure fescue) are soft, but the lawns in the middle are spiky.
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Just wait till this guy hears about moss...
Just in case people are wondering about this, it's true. Clover is a legume. Meaning it gets nitrogen from the air and puts it into the soil. This effectively means the clover is fertilizing the soil. Seeing lots of clover can be a sign that the soil lacks nitrogen and can't grow much else.
Slight clarification: Dutch Clover (trifolium repens) under nitrogen deficient conditions, at temperatures above 50F and below 95F, and with the correct rhyzobium species present, with soil pH between 5.5 & 8.0, can produce nitrogen that is stored in its tissue.
When clover is mowed and the clippings mulched back into the soil, the decomposition of the leaves adds nitrogen to the soil. If you remove the clippings the nitrogen goes with it.
Clover doesn't just release more nitrogen into the soil, it takes a bit of work.
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We really need to outlaw advertizing that double as disinformation campaigns.
OMG... Are you saying nature has better solutions than chemical companies?
Blasphemy.
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Anon is right, but ONLY ABOUT THIS!!! I've heard Nevada has been using this to conserve water. Im gonna put some on my lawn tomorrow.
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