Too bad HOAs are far more concerned with making sure everything looks plain and perfect to the 70 year old humans walking on the street rather than giving any craps about wildlife.
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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You think anybody is walking on the street in the US?
I'm not American but my understanding is that many of those "suburban" residential blocks have sidewalks and you can walk around withing the confinement of your block. However blocks are isolated from each other and you need a car to go somewhere else.
My block of suburbia growing up only had a sidewalk for the last 2 houses on it, everyone else didn't get one
So that's nice
I'm increasingly seeing neighborhoods where there's only a sidewalk on one side of the street...and then it terminates for no reason...and then it starts again...
It's so bizarre.
There are places in the US, that when you buy a house or property, you are given a choice. You can build a sidewalk for it yourself, or you can pay the city/county for a sidewalk.
The thing is, if you pay the city/county for the sidewalk, they stipulate that they can build that sidewalk where ever they want. This does not have to include in front of, or anywhere near, your house
The US is a very strange place.
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Absolutely. There’s a lot in my neighborhood… And it’s annoying when there’s a perfectly good sidewalk right there.
America build the suburbs as a big fake playground where you can walk your dog.
Plenty of them do. And I hate it. They need to be on the sidewalk, not the street.
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Don't worry, they're also hostile to humans under the age of 70
In a previous house I rented, the HOA ladies would drive around the neighborhood roughly 3 times a week. There were less than 200 homes in the whole subdivision. Even if you walked slowly, it would only take an hour to walk the whole thing, but instead they drove.
I've decided to leave the leaves on my yard and I swear my neighbors are mowing and leaf blowing twice as much just to spite me.
IDGAF. I'd rather have fireflies and bumblebees than human neighbors
And then they complain that their fruit garden isn't working.
Fireflies were spectacular this year.
In the front yard I let the wind take whatever leaves it takes. In the back I rake a path to the gates. Those leaves get put in a large open bin along my fence which makes nice soil in a year of so. Everything else is as nature intended.
I’m hoping I can stem the collapse. I saw three fireflies this past summer. Which is a 3x improvement over the summer before that.
But coming from a place where I could walk through the woods on a dark night just by the light of fireflies it hurts my soul to be somewhere so sterile.
We don't get fireflies where I am, and one of my brothers took his kids on a trip to the Statesian South, his motivation being so they could see fireflies before they go extinct. I kind of wish I'd tagged along.
Or realize that there is still tons of land that isn't maintained and is actually a better habitat for bees anyway. Even in your own neighborhood ther is plenty of places that don't get tended to. This is really just a diversion to redirect people from all the things the ag industry does that harm the bees on a scale us individuals, even collectively can't hold a candle to. Remember when they tried to convince us that leaving the water running while we brush our teeth was a major usage of fresh water. But again, compared to the ag industry, all household water use is a drop in the bucket.
Sure but.. It's still a really good advice and I'm glad someone posted it. I rarely rake away leaves for reasons like this, and this gives me one extra reason to not do so.
That doesn't mean you're wrong, but we can all be right : fight the important battles for large scale effects while enjoying the small scale effects of individual actions.
I think that they're just railing against the smoke show that would have us believe that our individual actions are more to blame than industry as a whole. You can recycle, you can drive a electric car, you can even generate your electricity and store it locally in a battery and not even use the grid but even if we all did that without change to heavy industry we are still screwed.
One small example of this is how big tobacco and big oil have used exactly the same tactics to distract us from what's really going on and protect their profits regardless of the harm to us as a species.
Would you like to know more? https://www.eenews.net/articles/big-tobacco-had-to-pay-206b-is-big-oil-next/
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For insects, pristine lawns are a huge problem. This isn't quite comparable.
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I'm pretty sure if I didn't do any yard work by May I'd have the city repossessing my home.
Start a movement to stop the city from forcing people to cut their yards. It creates smog, kills the insects we need for food, damages the native plants, wastes money, and looks ugly. Natural yards are awesome.
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I don't view this as a "pick up the leaves or not" false choice. I leave the leaves in some areas and mow over/pick them up in others. They're literally free mulch and compost
If you leave them all in place they all turn into free mulch and compost anyway. And you avoid using the fossil fuels to power the mower you don't need in the first place.
I have a battery powered mower and utility has done a pretty good job of incorporating renewables into their mix
I also have some small spots where I want grass
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Just remember that month suggestions online are for certain geographic areas. You might need to move them earlier or later. (The best rules I have seen is when nights are above 50 F in North America)
until it snows, then it becomes a slip-n-slide for all.
our yard and sidewalks / pavement becomes slime slick if they're left around. I doubt there are many bees in my leaf piles, it's been raining for a month straight.
As a Brit we were always taught to gently disturb leaf piles before jumping in them or throwing them into the fire, just in case hedgehogs were in there. The habit has stuck, although I now just rake our leaves up onto the mulched beds and leave them. The chickens will then pull them apart and consume any living thing unfortunate enough to live there.
I'll (electrically) blow leaves off of walkways, but the vast majority of them stay put. Fuck a fucking lawn.
I deal with 3 massive city-owned (and admittedly beautiful) chinquapin oaks and two privately owned red maples on a 1/3 acre lot. If the leaves don't get removed then everything dies as a result of the acidity and thick leaf cover that also wont fully decay before the next autumn. There is no room for a compost pile of that size considering that the leaves couldnt make up more than half of it. I'm not a fan of grass lawns but the city and the HOA have to give the 'okay' before a lawn change can be made.
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In other words, leave nature alone and let it do the thing it designed itself to do
And now I'm even more glad that where I live they leave the leaves under the tree. Didn't know that bumblebees live under that leaves left under the tree. Now I wanna leave a commest about the cute bumblebees that live under the leaves that someone left under the tree.
P.S. sorry, couldn't hold myself, sorry:)
I always mulch mine with my mower. Only bugs that might be in them is scorpions, grubs, ants, or the odd snake sometimes
Brings nutrients into your soil so you have a healthier lawn
That has not been my experience. The leaves wreck the ph of the soil and block light from letting grass grow.
Not much grass growing when it’s -20 out but you might have too many leaves so they don’t decompose fast enough during your winter
Yeah that's definitely the issue here. There's still a layer of wet leaves by the time the grass wants to start growing in the spring.
Let those leaves kill the grass and replace it with moss, clover, walkable thyme, native grasses, or any number of more interesting ground covers. I'm working towards a no-mow lawn. It's fun finding creative ways to thwart a pesky city ordinance: "A minimum of fifty percent (50%) of all yard areas shall be comprised of turf grass".
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