What experience you have with no mow may? I did it while ago but as our commercial lawn was too vigorous there wasn’t much of wildflowers.
I decided to remove the lawn and sow native wildflowers. So now I do No-mow summer :D
i just mowed the lawn - had already let it grow too long!
front lawn anyway, i'm a little more lax with the back one (but the front lawn is much better for flowers)
I used to be big into tightly mowed lawn :D ! Not anymore, got tired of being slave to mowing… Now I can spend hours relaxing and enjoying the meadow :)
I find just leaving an otherwise well kept lawn uncut for a month does nothing for biodiversity in the garden. No wildflowers establish in that period and it lets coarser grasses get a hold. Personally, I'll keep the lawn neat and enjoy the wildflowers in their designated areas and pollinators throughout the flower and shrub beds.
I have areas for wildflowers and for nettles.
I don't feel guilty mowing my lawn.
There is room for all sorts of gardens.
Each to his/her own.
The half acre under wild flowers is enough for me I think. I'm keeping the other half under a nice pristine lawn that can actually be used.
If I left the rest of it unmown for May it'd be some chore to cut it again.
...just done with no mow april, not out of any ideological stance, but the fact, i was up to my eyeballs....
...might get a wild flower garden this year, as oppose to my normal wild weed garden....
Same happened to me but I guess it also depends on the location and soil seed bank, some people might be lucky and have some wildflowers.
got a nice flower garden first year i tried, been sh1te since, but i have some buds now appearing, so heres hoping....
Wow half an acre is awesome. I’m not fan of lawn but then there is huge green community space in our estate so I don’t need any lawn in garden, kids play out there but they bring other kids for garden tours and you should see the faces :D
If I would live in countryside with large space I would keep some for playing etc, but I find the many country houses with massive golf lawns sterile, boring and useless. As long as the lawn is actually used and lots of areas are left for wildlife there is nothing wrong with keeping lawn.
My lawn is mowed but I find that lots of small flowers appear almost as soon as it is mowed, also there is a good deal of wild stuff round the edges, we seem to get lots of bees in the garden anyway.
i doubt you're the target audience of the initiative so.
I'm not entirely convinced by the No Mow May thing. We live rural, disadvantaged type land, lots of habitat and not much spraying if any. Have lots of nettles and other common wild flowers in ditches and about garden. And yet, we still see only a small fraction of the number of butterflies and moths that were here 25 years ago. You could step outside the door then and hear the steady drone of bees feeding on the currant bushes. Not anymore, the bushes are still there and flowering away.
So something else has done for the insects and me not cutting a bit of grass every week or two will make not a blind bit of difference I think.
its a collective effort, not just you
you could be an island surrounded by farms who do spray for instance
or a flower garden in the middle of an estate full of cut grass
I think the target audience is more for the average 3 bed semi.
With 1000sqm of grass in rural Wicklow and two large dogs, there's no chance i'd leave it more than 2 weeks, let alone a month. We have plenty of flowers for the 6-7 hives on the lane and so I think they'll be ok.
I think the bigger environmental impact especially in urban areas is not whether to mow or not mow but people ripping up their lawns and gardens to put in concrete etc for parking cars . It is much better to leave lawns in place for nature and as a way of allowing rain water to soak away. Whether the lawn is mowed or not is a side issue . I've noticed that alot of gardens in Dublin have been ripped up for concrete or tarmacadam in the last decade. Putting a wildflower patch in beside a concreted garden does not negate that
Did you read my observation? "We live rural, disadvantaged type land, lots of habitat and not much spraying if any."
So no spraying of note, lots of habitat and far fewer insects. Whether I leave the bit of grass mown or not wouldn't make any difference.
As techman says, the emphasis should not be on 'no mow' but 'no concreting' or 'no tarmacadaming' Too many urban dwellers now want the easy life and as little garden maintenance as possible :)
did you not read your own post, you aren't convinced by the no mow may... in general
its not just about you
its a collective thing, an ecosystem
if you live on a bog this isn't targeted at you is it per say, unless you mow that bog
its not a dont mow do concrete over
a tightly mown lawn isn't much better than a concreted one for the likes of bees
Grand but if you're so convinced by the idea, explain to me why we rarely have to repatriate a butterfly or moth from the house. Or why there are practically no bees in the way there were? Despite there being ample habitat and food sources. Plenty of birds and wild mammals about. And that's not just here, 25 years ago you'd be cleaning the debris of insects off the car windscreen and headlights frequently in summer, anywhere you went.
I'm all for wildlife and habitat conservation so maybe 'no mow may' is a good PR thing, but that's all it is I think in reality. A bit of PR and virtue signalling. Might as well call a spade a spade. But YMMV and that's grand.
I left mine for the last 3 weeks out of laziness.
Did it yesterday evening and what a pain in the crack.
If I wasnt to mow it for all of May it would be some horrible job to do the next time.
its an ecosystem, small pockets of habitat just don't work
how do you explain that even thought you have a fine habitat there, there are no insects in it?
bees need some way to get to your pocket of land, birds need to migrate to it, you remove that and you dont have any birds or bees
no mow may is just part of a solution
Whils I agree that concreting a driveway is not good from a drainage perspective, unfortunately much of our urban gardens would be quite poor as habitats - most would be fairly crap from a biodiversity perspective. Far too many ornamental plants which provide feck all for insects, lawns mown to be like golf greens, etc.
Part of the idea behind No Mow May (in my view) is to help condition people into the mindset that a more natural garden is actually a good thing.
From a national pespective, we have seen a huge amount of our natural habitats removed in the last few decades. Hedges removed or pared right down, more and more monoculture (whether crops or grassland) is having a massive effect on our insect populations which obviously has an effect along the food chain...
I mow around the edges leaving an island of untouched lawn and there's enough room for the garden furniture on the cut part.
We live in the countryside with rough grazing fields, forestry and ditches, rivers below in surrounding valleys etc. Whatever is causing the loss of insects in particular round here is not lack of habitat. Only a few years ago you'd be plagued by flies buzzing about your head in summer as you walk the road. Derek Mooney and his friends discussed it last year in general and they seemed a bit mystified as well.
the countryside is as much monoculture as the city at this stage, nothing but grass, spraying, fertilizer, silage and slurry run off actively making things even worse
forestry is one of the worst offenders
ditches cut every year just as all the wildlife is blooming
rivers mismanaged, lands drained
undoing this is the big picture
it is lack of habitat, the suitable patches end up islands in a sea of grass
Farming in ireland has radically changed the land in the last 40 years, and even more so in 80
A mowed lawn maybe poorer for the birds and bees but it is not equivalent to a concreted driveway because you still have all the soil with worms and everything. If you see what happens to put down concrete or tarmacadam , up to a foot of top soil and subsoil is removed and taken away, that is a garden that will never grow anything again , no urban garden, no growing vegetables, no birds , no bees. Trying to tar someone just for mowing a lawn is completely over the top.
I think you didn't read what I posted. I didn't say that a mowed lawn was equivalent. I said that it was a poor habitat, which it is. Most urban gardens are shite from a biodiversity perspective - do you really disagree with this?
With respect, you keep trying to shoehorn what I'm writing into your own agenda!!
Yes, parts of the countryside are heavily managed and partic those associated with intensive tillage and dairy operations.
But that's not everywhere - the land around here is mostly classified as 'disadvantaged' in old money. There is forestry nearby, planted 25 years ago and if it was sprayed then I can't recall but certainly not since. So forget that.
About a third of the roadside ditches are cut anyway regularly. Mostly around December and into January.
Rivers have fish in them, dragonflies in summer and wildlife along the banks. I know because I swim in them in summer.
There is no lack of habitat here for insects, yet they have declined notably. I think the local honey bees might have been affected by virus, all we see now are the solitary types.
So why is there a small fraction of the number of butterflies & moths say that there once was when conditions were very similar? I really don't know.
I think it's more to get people out of the tidiness mindset.
I haven't mown yet and we've had loads of bees feeding on the dandelions and then goldfinches eating their seeds.
i'm not shoe horning anything
it may be disadvantaged, but it is still farmed, the landscape is shaped by it
i've given you the reasons why this has happened
its not rocket science
the forestry nearby is an offender, it is monoculture at its worst
rivers have seen a massive collapse in fish life and water quality
when honey bees die off theres nowhere for them to come from, same with butterflies
this is why habitat areas and lots of them in proximity are important and why not mowing is a good idea, rather than a bad one
these are the answers to your mystery
Can I ask how you went about it? We have a large garden and want to turn a half acre corner into a wildflower garden with some apple trees. We let it (grass) grow a bit wild last year and it was mostly weeds including dreaded gorse started growing so we're back to mowing!
I've dug a few wildflower beds (6m x 1m) on banks around the garden and did the native wildflower seeding and they're coming on great but no idea how to do a large area covered in grass and weeds. Thanks
