Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Well that's 20 hours I get back.

Stolen from SkyNews.

No more lawnmowing for me this year. I am all in on supporting bio diversity?

Couldn't agree more - got rid of all my lawn years ago. Life is too short to mow grass,

I suspect for some it may also provide very necessary exercise which they may not engage in, other than either their better half or their own sensibilities cause them to get motivated with the mower...?

Unfortunately lawns neglected in however worthy a cause just look scruffy. We’ve been trying to wildflower our paddock for three summers - at least two more to go before it begins to look good and it’s hard work. A robot mower may be the answer (except for the butterflies) but our neighbour has one which spends most of its time on its back - it can’t negotiate the path between the front and rear gardens.

Those robot jobbies munch a lot of 🦔 they are a menace.

Totally in favor of this wish we would do it over here too, also ban all the chemical weedkillers and fertilizers that are used in gardens. The millions of acres of gardens could go a long way to protecting and enhancing our wildlife habitats. When we had our small holding in Herefordshire I stopped using chemical fertilizers and weedkillers in the garden and paddock, planted native wildflowers and only cut the lawn and hedges late summer after the second brood had been raised. We had an amazing array of wildlife come visit and live in our patch of nature. Here in the mountains we have never used any chemicals on our 7 acres of forest and do not cut the alpine meadow, again we are rewarded with the diversity of wildlife and especially Butterflies that visit and stay with us. The Hummingbirds will arrive shortly after the April snow which signals the start of our summer. SCRUFFY is best.

There's a lot to be said for letting nature do its thing

When we had half an acre of garden, we inherited plants that had been treated with sprays to feed them & kill the bugs,

We instead gave the soil some love - 4-6 inches of mulch on flowerbeds and natural feeds for the plants. It took 2-3 years, but the ecosystem reestablished itself. Bugs got eaten by birds, rabbits by foxes. The whole place was a lot healthier.

Somehow, though, I still got to cut the lawn.
If robot mowers had been around I'd have been tempted - I've seen them do a fabulous job, even on steeply-sloped lawns.

Will

That's the problem it takes time and effort to reverse the damage done and we humans are inherently lazy, always looking for the easy option even when we know it isn't the best. I feel for the Hedgehogs who are one of the best animals to have in your garden better and cheaper than any bug/slug killer but are being assaulted from every angle imaginable including robot lawnmowers. One way to look at it is they won't be assaulted much longer as they are close to becoming wiped out anyway.

Yeah, same here. We still mow our main lawns because the place looks a complete tip if we don't, but we're re-wilding the paddock which is a couple of acres so on balance there's plenty of opportunity for the butterflies and such.

Bruce spot on, friends of ours in the village run Prickles in a Pickle voluntarily and have over a 100 in at any one time. Judy is a nurse so can diagnose and treat the bonfire, strimmer, RTA and Robot Mower victims.

Most gardens have a hedgehog box in them for them to overwinter in, sadly down here with climate change they tend not to hibernate but run short of food so saucers of cat food are around together with fresh water.

Our Son and his wife have 2 acres they rewilded 12 years ago in Cornwall and planted indigenous (Cornish traditional) fruit bearing trees and often deer visit and one day they witnessed a Stoat take a young rabbit and fox sightings common.