How does a yard replenish mass when grass is constantly being cut and discarded?
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Yards also get dust deposited from the breeze, and the bodies of burrowing ants, insects, small mammals, any leaves or grass missed by the rake, cat or raccoon poop, and any thing else.
Intensive farming can cause soil in a field to shrink, maybe partly because it blows away or is washed away by rain due to being broken up, but since the turf in the lawn is usually not too disturbed, there’s less of that.
Yards also get dust deposited from the breeze, and the bodies of burrowing ants, insects, small mammals, any leaves or grass missed by the rake, cat or raccoon poop, and any thing else.
Intensive farming can cause soil in a field to shrink, maybe partly because it blows away or is washed away by rain due to being broken up, but since the turf in the lawn is usually not too disturbed, there’s less of that.
Lots of microbes in the soil can flourish since people don’t till their lawns. The microbes can grab all the other nutrients out of the air for the plants who give the microbes a place to live. Just like a forest, needs no fertilizer
Green lawns get a bunch of fertilizer. Often it is minerals mined in open pit mines. The other half of the equation is broad leaf herbicides to get rid of native species.
Collecting grass clippings and taking leaves robs the soil of nutrients that are part of tree and plant life cycles. Replacing those nutrients with minerals from mines and pesticides makes a lawn that looks like a golf course.
For more information, see r/fucklawns .
Yards also get dust deposited from the breeze, and the bodies of burrowing ants, insects, small mammals, any leaves or grass missed by the rake, cat or raccoon poop, and any thing else.
Intensive farming can cause soil in a field to shrink, maybe partly because it blows away or is washed away by rain due to being broken up, but since the turf in the lawn is usually not too disturbed, there’s less of that.
Green lawns get a bunch of fertilizer. Often it is minerals mined in open pit mines. The other half of the equation is broad leaf herbicides to get rid of native species.
Collecting grass clippings and taking leaves robs the soil of nutrients that are part of tree and plant life cycles. Replacing those nutrients with minerals from mines and pesticides makes a lawn that looks like a golf course.
For more information, see r/fucklawns .
Green lawns get a bunch of fertilizer. Often it is minerals mined in open pit mines. The other half of the equation is broad leaf herbicides to get rid of native species.
Collecting grass clippings and taking leaves robs the soil of nutrients that are part of tree and plant life cycles. Replacing those nutrients with minerals from mines and pesticides makes a lawn that looks like a golf course.
For more information, see r/fucklawns .
It mostly doesn’t, at least not on its own. This is why fertilizer is such a big sell for people who like lush green lawns. The lawn will use up the growth-limiting nutrients like ammonia, nitrate, phosphorous, perhaps potassium, fairly quickly (over a few years, usually) and the grass will start to struggle (thin out) and get invaded by “weed” plants that have different nutrient needs (can thrive where the grass struggles).
Basically, the weed invasion is part of the effort of nature to get the ground into a more balanced condition, where plant activity complements itself, some making nitrates that others need, and getting maybe phosphorous,potassium, or something useful, in return. Some of the elements can be obtained from the soil (the rock bits that make up the soil have many elements that can be extracted by some plants).
This nutrient problem is one reason that mulching when cutting grass is favored by many people over removing the clippings. Recycling is better than removing and making you get more to replace it from somewhere else.
The ground starts with a fixed amount of everything, more or less. If you remove some, then the ground has to supply more to the plants, and eventually, the ground starts to run out. However, some plants do take nitrogen from the air and put it in the ground (self-fertilize, in a away). I don’t think grasses are very good at that.
A healthy, self-sustaining vegetation really benefits from the return of dead matter back into the soil, where bacterial breakdown releases nutrients back to the plants to keep them growing. Taking that stuff away is slow starvation, basically.
It mostly doesn’t, at least not on its own. This is why fertilizer is such a big sell for people who like lush green lawns. The lawn will use up the growth-limiting nutrients like ammonia, nitrate, phosphorous, perhaps potassium, fairly quickly (over a few years, usually) and the grass will start to struggle (thin out) and get invaded by “weed” plants that have different nutrient needs (can thrive where the grass struggles).
Basically, the weed invasion is part of the effort of nature to get the ground into a more balanced condition, where plant activity complements itself, some making nitrates that others need, and getting maybe phosphorous,potassium, or something useful, in return. Some of the elements can be obtained from the soil (the rock bits that make up the soil have many elements that can be extracted by some plants).
This nutrient problem is one reason that mulching when cutting grass is favored by many people over removing the clippings. Recycling is better than removing and making you get more to replace it from somewhere else.
The ground starts with a fixed amount of everything, more or less. If you remove some, then the ground has to supply more to the plants, and eventually, the ground starts to run out. However, some plants do take nitrogen from the air and put it in the ground (self-fertilize, in a away). I don’t think grasses are very good at that.
A healthy, self-sustaining vegetation really benefits from the return of dead matter back into the soil, where bacterial breakdown releases nutrients back to the plants to keep them growing. Taking that stuff away is slow starvation, basically.
Plants are made mostly of Carbon, and while it will suck water and some trace nutrients from the ground, the vast majority of the plant is from Carbon.
Where does the Carbon come from? from the CO2, Carbon Dioxide, in the air. So the vast majority of the plants mass never came from the yard, but from the air.
Look at a tree, think about how much it weighs. That is roughly the amount of CO2 it needed to convert out of the atmosphere to grow that large.
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