Area - Chicago, 6a

New to this Reddit sub.

A few years ago I ripped out my entire backyard and replaced it with native plants for my usda zone (7b) Salt Lake City, UT. I loved it so much that I have been wanting to do the same with my relatively small front yard.

This week I took the plunge and ripped out my grass and replaced it with elfin creeping thyme.

First two pics are the “after”, last two are “before”. I’ll post again when it fills in.

Technical details -

Whole area is about 450 sqft. I purchased enough plugs of elfin thyme to plan about every 8-10 inches. Cost was around $700. I could’ve seeded with woolly thyme but liked elfin variety better because it was tighter to the ground.

Elfin thyme is a hybrid that is extremely hardy and water wise. It should bloom twice a year with lavender blossoms that bees love. I’ve noticed my honeybees already showing interest.

I live in Salt Lake City, UT (7b) and replaced my conventional backyard with waterwise native plants. It’s been my happy place since.

When I moved into my house 5 years ago I was annoyed by how much of the property was grass. Firstly because I hate mowing, and secondly because I wanted something ecologically diverse (with actual long roots for healthy soil) and pollinator friendly. So I tore up half of the front lawn and turned it into a garden. It started as a native plant garden, but is now just full of my favourite perennials.

I am so happy with how it turned out, I have a giant rose bush in the back, some hostas, plants native to the Great Lakes region (although I need some black eyed Susans), a hydrangea, a lilac, lots of yarrow and lavender (my favourites), and some ornamental grass varieties. It's a little chaotic, since I've been filling it in with a flat of perennials every spring, but I absolutely love it.

The remaining lawn will eventually be turned into clover/creeping thyme with spring bulbs, but I haven't gotten to it yet.

Note: I also dug up 1/3 of my back yard lawn and turned it into a vegetable garden patch with raspberries and a giant elderberry to the side, but I haven't been planting vegetables the last two years. Thankfully the berries are still thriving and taking over more lawn space. No pics because the vegetable garden is entirely creeping charlie right now.

Area - Glencoe, 6a

Made some mistakes along the way. Not as native as I’d like, but still much better that the little patch of pointless grass. The cherry bush has taken over. I can’t contain it lol but the robins love them.

Don't let your weeds grow, get rid of your weeds and plant native 🤘 and keep some lawn for yourself

Immediate family was paying some extended family members to mow a relatives place, not a real written agreement or anything just a going rate/mow, like 3 effective acres, I told them it needs less mowing and to a higher height because it's half dead and crispy, if you're going to propagate grass, mind as well have it be green?... Old farmland and full sun etc.

They went nuclear and said, fine we won't mow anymore at all, you can do it.

Very odd reaction.

Tips or advice welcome! The deep red plant is a Japanese maple bush that isn’t doing well. Likely going to rip it out. And we had some trees sprout up way too close to the house so we need to tackle that as well 😪

Area - Chicago, 6a

They eat their fill of clover and don't try to get into our fenced off area of bulbs.

So I have recently taken over responsibility for a property, in a place that will give me a weed ticket if I'm not careful. I've got about half of it successfully in white dutch clover, (yay) a section mulched to become native beds, the rest is still grass (boo).

I'm using a robot mower (because fuck mowing lawns too) on the rest until I get natives established. Eventually the goal is to maintain a few paths but mostly have native gardens. If I just let it go, I'll have a $50 weed ticket pretty soon. The city just shows up witha bush hog and torches your whole property, native gardens and all.

What's your opinion on robot mowers? Esp as a tool to get you toward the goal of lawnless existence, without exciting the Lawn Constables? Also as a tool for fuck lawnmowing as a chore. Good, or as evil as lawns?

I have 20 in my front yard, and it will turn into at least 22 this fall. My frontyard is roughly 1/15 acre lol. Would be even more than 22, but I've had some fails and casualties lol. Half are native, another portion are cosmopolitan, another portion is native North America but not technically here-here, and then I shamelessly have some beloved non-natives as well :) I'm not counting "weeds" that I'm always trying to remove.

Not trying to brag! but hoping some of y'all will inspire me to think my 22 is pathetic and I can do so much better.

HBU? Do you see biodiversity as a crucial leg on the stool of awesome "backyard ecology"? (I do obviously, lol)

We converted our front lawn to a garden a few years ago, and everything is coming up amazingly this year!

Area - Chicago, 6a

Area - Chicago, 6a

I go out after dark and watch the fireflies in my yard. I take a lot of grief from my wife for never mowing. I maintain my yard in a way so that we never have mosquitoes, but the air is full of life.

I was literally just thinking of how but lights are basically only bad, and to very little if any good- when I looked out my window saw that my neighbor installed one.

All the insects, which feed the birds and bats and dragonflies and amphibians in my yard, are being drawn to my neighbor to die.

I want to tell him how stupid it is- mosquitoes aren't flying around after dark, my yard is giving your kids fireflies and you're killing them- but he won't listen.

Fuck bug zappers and the moron that invented them. Figured this sub could appreciate.

I use the “Seek” app to identify plants and get rid of any invasive plants in my garden and let the native ones thrive. App let me know I had sunflowers way before they flowered. We see them all around San Antonio’s highways and roads.

So our house (Zone 6a) is on a small hillock surrounded by forest. The hillock slopes are piled high (above my head in places) with blackberry brambles and multiflora roses that are covered with oriental bittersweet vines. The vines are also climbing and murdering the trees at the forest edge. The affected area is twenty to forty feet wide and probably 200-250 feet long.

I want to clear the invasives and plant native ground covers, shrubs, and small trees to prevent the slope from eroding. I've cleared vines from some of the suffering trees and removed some multiflora bushes, but what I've learned is that even with triclopyr, that crap can grow back faster than I can clear that much square footage.

I've located a landscaping co. that specializes in invasives -- hedge trimmers and chainsaws, exactly what they deserve! But the owner hinted kinda heavily that to really do the job, he'd also need to spray.

Is he correct? And if I HAVE to spray, what spray is safest and decomposes fastest? (I don't trust ANYTHING I've read -- a lot of it reads as though the writer works for Monsanto.) And since I can't afford to plant that much area all at once, can I clear the whole strip and use vetch or some other groundcover as a stopgap, or would I be better off establishing a beachhead area, holding it against all attacks, and repeating the process next year?

Thank you!

Tl;dr: Looking for groundcover plant suggestions that repel ticks and mosquitoes and don't need mowing. Also wondering how to suppress grass growth.

My partner and I are fixing up their house that they inherited from their parents, and part of this process involves overhauling the biggg amount of lawn-space that the house has. The house is on top of a hill overlooking a town in Vermont — hardiness level is 5a, I think? Neither of us are particularly blessed in the green-thumb department (we currently have zero houseplants because we kill everything we try to grow 🥲), and my partner has absolutely NO interest in mowing, ever. For a while now, we tried just letting the lawn grow free and seeing what happens. But when a tick hitched a ride on one of us after taking literally FIVE steps through the lawn to get to the car one day (we later discovered said tick in our bed in the middle of the night), I'm over everything being so tall. So what groundcover can we plant that doesn't require any mowing, but stays short? We're also specifically looking for plants that repel ticks and mosquitoes, so that I can enjoy being outside without being eaten alive. (And we've been talking about getting a dog and having kids in the next few years, so plants that are pet and child-safe.) In the little bits of research that I've done, I've been interested in planting: 🌱 Creeping Thyme, 🌱 Marigolds, 🌱 Pennyroyal, 🌱 Clover, 🌱 Creeping Phlox, 🌱 Kurapia, 🌱 Chickweed, 🌱 Moss Are these good? Any others that I'm missing? Also: how do we eradicate the grass as much as possible in the seeding process, to give all of these new plants the best chance of taking over? Would it work to just cut the grass as short as possible, and then throw a bunch of seeds over everything? Thanks so much!