Keeping a useless ass lawn is the most American fucking thing lmao
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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Bigger than the pasture but you gotta mow it lmao.
Lawns are useful as a free area where you can do all kinds of activities like sports, social gatherings, religious ceremonies, an area to build large things, and also just hang out and look at all your plants.
I mean, yeah, but it's also a pretty central part of this yard plan, so the yard is kind of functioning as a pathway here. If you imagine a bunch of lil paths going in various directions instead of plain grass it doesn't seem unreasonable.
Yeah I think if you got rid of the lawn and just had narrow paths with everything densely planted with “useful plants” then it would feel less like a homestead and more like a jungle.
What's wrong with some greenery to frolick around in?
It’s fine but you can’t really play sports or have a picnic or a barbecue or set up a slip n slide or many other fun activities that lawns are good for!
Also a dense jungle of food-bearing plants like tomatoes is highly susceptible to disease. Tomatoes need a lot of airflow to keep their leaves dry so they don’t develop powdery mildew.
Plant clover. Doesn't need mowing and puts nitrogen into the soil.
Idk what kind of wimpy clover you've got, but the kind around here grows as tall as the grass. Definitely need to mow.
Not if you eat it.
oh no, ground cover that's more than half an inch is so scary
How high do you like stuff before you think you need to mow it? Real question.
Here's one that tops out at 6 inches.
What kind of wimpy grass do you have? The stuff near me will grow over a foot if you let it
Mines all mint. It's wonderful lol
there's like 300 plants called "clover", the kind in my yard will get to ass-height if i let it.
Sometimes when people say "you don't need to mow" they mean "you don't need to mow except once or twice a season" lol
My lawn is clover for the bees
I always wonder about these. My parents had 120 acres when I was a kid, and we raised corn, veg, 2 cows, and sooooo many chickens.
There's no way you're feeding cattle on less than a hundred acres, even if you dedicate most of it to pasture. We had to supplement our cow and calf (because you have to have a cow with a calf to keep milk production) with bales of alfalfa/hay every week and they still managed to keep 40 of those acres nice and trimmed.
However, you can definitely get a tremendous amount of corn out of a few acres - more than you can easily eat yourself. Chickens are an amazing use of space, you have 30-40 of them and give them the run of the place and you'll have eggs for days and a chicken for the pot every month (depending on how your replacement rate runs, we had about 20 hatch and survive every spring).
You have to rotate your growing production regularly to make sure the soil gets what it needs, and it's so much freaking work. A saying when I was a kid was "If you're bored, there's always a fence that needs mending"...
The best part was when the foods I liked were in season, because we had loads of them. The worst part was when I got soooo tired of canning :D
I'd do it again, but I'd prefer a close knit neighborhood so that I could trade things. All of our neighbors raised the same sorts of things we did... well, and/or meth... so we still had to go to the grocery store every week. Just not for squash, potatoes, corn, blueberries, etc.
yeah i think people don't understand the scale needed to support a family's worth of cow versus a family's worth of corn or wheat or rice
I think you're absolutely right. I suspect people, in general, don't really have much grasp of ag. There's mega industrial, and they understand that. There's backyard/community, and they get that, but livestock? That's probably outside the exp of probably 70% of industrialized nation people.
The cornerstone needs to be potatoes. There's a reason so many cultures use potatoes as their stable crop. Highly nutritious, stores very long, more pest resistant then grains, doesn't need paddies like rice.
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The acreage per cow is very dependent on where you are. I have a friend with a mother who just wanted to raise cows in her retirement (and reap the sweet tax breaks of having a 'ranch'), and they support roughly 1 cow per acre with slight supplementation of food cubes during the winter. Go out to someplace that's famous for cattle like west texas, and suddenly it's a lot less,but they have so much range out there that they can let the cows go nuts.
what the fuck kind of super space efficient micro-farm has dedicated LAWN space‽‽
That farm could almost make 1 sandwich.
I invite anyone who dreams of self sufficiency to start by planting exactly 1 row of chard. I tried it once after it was mentioned in an article in a gardening magazine. The article recommended, if you want to produce literally all your vegetables yourself that you plant 8 rows of chard.
The article didn't lie, chard is ridiculously space efficient, easy for beginners and continuously produces leaves for harvest. I had maybe 6 big, healthy plants and was sick of chard just 1 week later. I just let them shoot and flower as they now owned that dirt.
Gotta do vertical farming with that sorta space
Not with the price of energy these days! I can just about grow enough to feed my axolotl on a diet of fresh worms.
No you gotta have kids and make them do all the work. We have giant hamster wheel turbines that we use for our kids for "exercise time" before bed time. Best way to get those wiggles out and also power your grid. The best part is, the kids are so tired afterwards, they sleep right thru you playing your boombox all night
From what i know this is actually pretty bad set up with the garden because it destroys the soil
how many stalks of wheat is a reasonably year's supply in the modern era? 126 stalks of corn would easily be enough for a family that also has other food sources
that also has other food sources
No idea how reliable this is but suggests that 1/2 to 1 meter squared if crop is needed for a loaf of bread: https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/how-much-wheat-make-loaf-bread
No idea what the scale is in that picture, but it'd be a lot more efficient to grow potatoes or some similar riot veg if space is a concern.
This comment has a super rough scaling algorithm, and using it I'd eyeball the grain patches at 20x50 ft each, so 2000 sq ft or about 185 square meters, which, if the grain was wheat, would make between 185 and 740 loaves depending on yield.
Which is frankly more than I expected, though given how much effort it takes to process wheat into bread flour, I'd go with corn or potatoes 100%.
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