Well, how about it everyone?  Let's get rid of grass and grow edible plants instead.  Robusticity varies with the level of care one can put in.  

Or if not, rock gardens.  My uncle lives in the desert and grows rocks in his yard, with the occasional prickly pear.

I have actually considered this.  We have a pretty small backyard, maybe 20 by 25 feet give or take.  Plus, I hate mowing the lawn, it just seems so pointless.  

We're "renting" a chicken and a duck in the spring from a local farm.  For a small fee you raise them from babies for a few months and then give them back.

would prefer gardening over cutting grass

I couldn't agree more. I fail to see the point of having lawns at all, when I have the means to get my own place, I'll rip it up and use the space to raise a nice crop of poppies, and food.

I prefer the plants I grow to have some actual USE, be it food, medicine, spices etc. Lawns are just pointless and boring IMO.

This is actually something me and my dad considered doing since it would be less expensive to grow your own food then suffer with groceries going up slowly at a time....

I've always wanted to have a lawn that was wild, with trees and wild berries, maybe some herbs and spices.  Peppermint is notoriously virulent, but when we had it, it would only take over the garden, never the lawn, since the soil just wasn't fertile the way peppermint liked.  Or maybe there were herbicides on the lawn, I was younger then, but I don't think there were.  Sad, too, since it would have required practically no maintenance if it did run wild over the whole yard.  Other herbs would get a little strident, but not like peppermint.  A peppermint garden would never need weeding, since it's nearly a weed itself.  And I planted the stuff everywhere I could, but it didn't take except in the mulched and fertilized areas.  Probably a good thing, actually, since my state has a ton of problems with invasive species.  There is a large biodiversity here that goes underappreciated by the state's hyper conservative citizenry.  It could end up lost forever because everyone in power is on corporate payroll.

This post was last modified: 08-05-2012 11:03 PM by Lang.

We've mulched our entire front yard.  We don't have a back yard, just a long thin strip fronting three sides of our house, since we're on a corner block.  I have an orchard instead!  The whole area is taken up with trees.  It was not a conscious decision at all, since I wanted something drought resistant and got some small decorative guavas.  They were supposed to be non-fruiting, but ever autumn I get a nice crop of tiny, sweet guavas, only about three centimetres long, but lovely served fresh with vanilla yoghurt.  I've had to start netting them though, since the birds like them as well.  I also have a frost-tolerant lime tree, a lilly pilly, and a strawberry tree, all prolific fruiters.  Add to that my little plum sapling that began to grow by the fence two years ago (I think it was the birds again, leaving a plum seed in the mulch, or maybe somebody going by outside flicked the stone into our yard once they'd eaten the fruit, but at any rate, it's another fruiter.)  And the neighbours have an untrimmed apricot tree and orange tree both of which overhang my garden.  I always think if Teh Apocolypse comes, at least my place is self-sufficient with fruit!  Not bad for a medium-density block in the suburbs!

I used to have a passionfruit vine and tomatoes as well, but the winter frost killed them off.
Alison


Mmm, lilly pilly fruit!

This post was last modified: 08-05-2012 11:19 PM by Alison.

The "soil" around my house is really just a thin layer of sand over the top of sandstone. When we move back there we do plan to grow stuff - just not sure what would take. I've mostly got the same palm trees that were there when I bought the place (the eucalyptus trees were blown over).

My father-in-law grew chocolate and bamboo around his house. My mother-in-law has coffee growing wild a few feet from her back door.

Wow, wild coffee.  Can you smell it in the morning?   

Alison: that sounds great having wild fruit grow on your property.  I remember when I was a little kid we lived in a place in Maryland with wild raspberries growing all along the driveway--and it was a long driveway.  We moved away, and the few times we tried to plant raspberries at our new house, they died.  One year, we visited the old house, and it turned out they'd ripped up all the underbrush along the driveway, including the rasperries!  I just don't understand some people.  To this day, I can't eat raspberries from the store, they just don't taste right.  My parents have talked about planting a few apple trees, but not seriously, more of a "what if we bought the vacant lot behind our house" kinda thing.

Leighton Green pines are good, if you don't mind the height.  They're really good for breaking up the rock with their roots.  We had a similar problem, our house is situated on mucky slate with hardly any soil cover.  But we put Leighton Greens in all around the perimeter and soon the ground was fractured enough to take other less-tough trees.  Plus the Leighton Greens make a great windbreak.  I used to think they were Aussie natives, since we had forests of them growing wild back home in amonst the eucalypts when I lived in the Riverina - Binya Forest was full of nothing but!  But I researched them and found out that they're a hybrid species from the US, two pines on opposite sides of the continent got together with human intervention and did really well, then got transported here.  But they seem to be one introduced species that doesn't seem to do any harm (probably the ONLY one!)  The native birds love them, and native insects munch them.  Plus they're drought and frost tolerant.
Alison (who obviously loves her trees... XD )

I wish we actually had somewhere to grow food... our small yard is very cluttered, and doesn't get much sunlight. I'm trying to persuade my parents to turn it into a garage, so that we can have a decent garden on top.

I'd like to plant a medical garden, to provide the raw ingredients for the home lab I want to set up. Not just to make strong painkillers that the government doesn't like you having (though I'd like to grow some poppies), but also plants which produce salicylic acid, and if possible a cinchona tree. That would be my personal garden, of course.

Just a question, how is fruit or tree's drought and frost tolerant ? I mean do they store extra water like cactus's do ? I'm interested in how these plants can survive in the frost cause I always though of the seasons like this:

Summer: Half way point of fruitation
Fall: Beginning of renewal
Winter: Death
Spring: Life again - Fruitation begins

But I understand that plants such as Pumpkins and Squash (or fall vegetables) are best planted (I think) in the spring time (or something like that).... I think ? Aren't most vegetables the opposite of fruits in the time they produce and die off and renewal themselves ?

You can do a little of both, gardening, plant some food or herbs, but only like craftwork. For feed a lot of people , you have got "how" to produce enough, transport and distribute and always will depend on large and serious projects.

Wow, wild coffee.  Can you smell it in the morning?   

No. It doesn't smell like coffee until it has been roasted. They do drink an enormous amount of coffee though, it grows like a weed. When my wife was a kid she used to collect wild cashew nuts in the jungle and sell them for pocket money.  

@Alison, I will have to remember to plant some Leighton Pines. I assume that I would need to keep them away from underground pipes?

This post was last modified: 08-05-2012 11:56 PM by 142857.

Our PVC pipes seem to be unaffected.  I think it's only the old-fashioned terracotto ones that you need to be careful with.  Leighton Greens grow to a HUGE size, unless you grow them as a hedge and keep them trimmed.  But they are beautiful.
Alison