Excellent article, all good and easy things to do. Personally, we’ve swapped our lawn for a veggie garden and in it, we don’t use any pesticides or herbicides, and we’ve mulched heavily using Chip Drop.

You wouldn’t believe the explosion of different types of insects we’ve seen since adding that mulch, worms and grubs and millipedes that used to be rare are now everywhere! This has in turn brought more birds, including an annoying crow who repeatedly yanked out my pepper seedlings to get at tasty morsels below. We ended up having to put mesh from old window screens around them, which thankfully was enough discouragement.

Our cat also gets supervised yard time, and my fiance has managed to train her to respond to “inside!”

I’d love to see some of those things catch on around here (southern Indiana suburb), but I’m not holding my breath. In this area, weekend monoculture lawnmowing is practically a competitive sport. I’ve moved a part of my front lawn to raised beds and veggies, and even that is enough to draw the evil eye from neighbors.