Another Reason to Eliminate Your Yard

In the Midwestern city we live in, the Japanese Beetle is starting to encroach on our lands and way of life.  I may or may not battle the JB, I may continue to change our way of life, so to make our land, home and garden as inhospitable as possible, and thus minimize their effect on what I hold to be really important.  I wish to make the nurseries for their young small and undesirable.

Now, the GOONS have come up with a bacteria that kills them, but it takes 1-5 years to take hold and thrive in your garden, and a side-result is that you will likely have to hand-pollinate your flowers.  The drift I get from that is that Paenibacillus (formerly Bacillus) popilliae is going to kill much more than the JB, it will likely kill most everything else, although I do need to perform more research on this to be certain, the research coming out of Ohio State is that it is not terribly effective anyway.

I think instead of putting milky spore on my lawn, I will simply continue to eliminate my lawn.  Lawns as we know them are urban deserts and wastelands that suck resources that really ought not be sucked.  As our neighbors have gifted us with our very own batch of rapidly spreading creeping charlie, the side lawn will fall this autumn to the raised garden bed plan.  Very likely the front yard will get terraced and garden-ized when there are funds to do so.

With no grass to have larvae in, I hypothesize that I can minimize the JB right here and right now.  The neighbors to the west are turning their lawn over to garden, and the neighbor to the east is all thistles.  It is the expansive neighbor to the south that is the most concern, and for that, I shall increase my garden totals of garlic, kale, nasturtium, and anything else I can find that they do not like.

As though we needed another reason to eliminate the urban wastelands of lawns, I encourage everyone to start taking away their habitat, creating a friendlier habitat for all else concerned.