A good reason to NOT cut your grass. Yay!
Help nature, help yourself. Win-win. Reee-sult! (First added to the site in 2021, updated twice with additional links in 2022.)
Confession time. I’m not a fan of cutting the grass. To me, it’s one of THOSE jobs. You do it, and then you have to do it again. And again. And again. Etc.
So, ‘No Mow May’ crossed my radar and seemed like a jolly fine idea. It involves what it says on the tin (as it were). And that’s what I adopted.
And it’s been grand. My patch of grass has become so much richer in all sorts of flowers, and hence all sorts of insects. Brilliant. I mean, everything else aside, giving wildlife a better place to thrive in has to be a good thing. Leaving the mower in the shed is a bonus!
Now, I’m no expert – far from it. As the summer has gone on, I’ve stuck to not mowing and it’s all been fine, but that might just be what’s right for my house.
As for later in the year, I have this dim and distant recollection about it being necessary to cut even ‘wild’ meadows once or twice a year, otherwise one or other plant will end up dominating. And logic says that what’s going to do well on one patch of mud won’t necessarily do well on another. The quality of the ground – the quality of your garden – will vary from house to house.
And I’ve also read that different insect and birds like different length grass, so you can also try have a lawn to reflect that.
Experiments aside though, overall, not mowing any more than it turns out to be wise to seems a good thing to me.
Below, there’s an Item from the Guardian in 2022, explaining how useful – and successful – not mowing the lawn is.
And, below, there is information from The Conversation in June 2022, about making your lawn wildlife-friendly all year round.
And these links might be useful/interesting too:
