Australian Bush Life

Lawn free entertaining area with leaf litter ground cover.

We like a little grassy area to sit on around our home but have decided that having large areas of lawn is unsustainable.

Firstly maintaining a lawn is energy intensive, it uses lots of water and many people use a lot of fertilisers and other products to keep them soft and green. Lawns are typically a monoculture, 1 grass species and this is not a biodiverse habitat.  Then there is all the other energy needed to maintain it such as mowing, what a waste of time and energy mowing is! We have better things to do like growing vegetables than run around with some noisy machine which chews through fuel annoying us and that doesn’t even account for the impact of fuel on climate change.

Weed free bush track with indigenous grasses.

To avoid lawns we ensure that we have maintained the quality of indigenous bush plants on our bush block. Once the weeds are gone and the indigenous ground cover plants in place the bush looks after itself, minimal further energy required and the local wildlife love it. We maintain small trails through the bush purely by walking on them, the trampling effect maintains the trails. Leaf litter also helps cover the ground and keep the weeds away. We have set areas aside amongst our bush for human enjoyment, growing our vegetables and then we have partially paved areas and a small area of lawn (about 10m2) just next to our home.

We spend weekends through spring and summer watching and unfortunately listening to the noise of our neighbours mowing and whipper snippering away to keep their lawns beautiful while we are busy planting and harvesting our vegetables. We feel we get a much better value for our time and energy as we prepare our meals with organic vegetables from our own garden.

On our bush block we use indigenous grasses for lawns to minimise weed impacts on the indigenous bush plants and maintain paved areas around our home to minimise bushfire risk…

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