To ask about your artificial lawn

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Do you love it? Pros and cons? Considering doing ours. Lawn is extremely wet and mossy. Would like it nice for DC to play on. Would be interested to hear from anyone who has one. thanks

Wow lots of great answers here thanks very much. The "grass" in the photos looks lovely, not fake at all.
We definitely need it to be practical I want somewhere DC can play that looks decent too.
We need to dig down about a foot to lay stones and sand underneath for drainage.
We have other garden areas for any potential hedgehogs, toads, butterflies etc.
I think we might try and salvage it this year but if it gets into a state again next winter, we'll do it then.
Also looking forward to the suggested "people with good taste" laughing at my fake grass

Love mine! So easy with dogs. I also have raised dogproof beds plus a pond, so lots of wildlife here!

Love our fake lawn. my son has played football all year round - no mud!

It's also a lot softer than I expected it would be. Really nice to play/lie on

No wonder our planet is fucked with people coating it in plastic and spraying it with weed killer. We have a major catastrophe looming - insects are dying out - they go, we go. I despair at this thread.

I think they're an abomination. Artificial, sanitised, adding to the plastic, cartoon world. Not for me.

But it's not an either/or is it as you'll see from my photo. In my tiny garden I have a flower border with a mix of wild and cultivated flowers and shrubs down the side and along the back, going behind the shed. My side return is full of planters and pots . The grass area replaced a mud patch which would have just got much worse with 3 dogs zooming on it and digging it.

We love ours, we had drainage laid underneath and you get what you pay for. Ours was a few grand 3 years ago. we also have raised beds and pots of real flowers, real bushes and a courtyard so it doesn't look really fake. best thing we ever did and use the outdoors so much more

Depressing thinking of all those potential plastic gardens, it might be convenient but it's not good for the environment however you dress it up

I hate it too, I despair for this planet sometimes

OP I had a thread about this a short time ago.

I found the people that had it loved it and those that didn't hated it.

I do think you pay for what you get so be prepared for it to be expensive. The preparation of the ground as others have said is key.

Plastic grass might not be wonderful for the environment but we didn't have any wildlife in our garden beforehand (was all gravel) and now with raised beds, pots etc it's better.

I'm sure the people 'despairing' at the damage to the environment don't own cars, buy anything made in Asia, fly long haul etc etc. Even though I know I'll get responses from people denying they do anything harmful to the environment

I love so much better than the sunken, weed filled ‘lawn’ it replaced. Our garden is cat proofed so I don’t encourage wildlife so it suits us. We still get a lot of bumble bees though. DH did ours to save on cost and I think it cost about £600-£700 for our small garden.

@NerrSnerr - it doesn't have to be all or nothing though when it comes to choices that have environmental impact.

Every decision made should consider the environment. I could reel off a list of things that I do to be green but I can't be perfect in every possible way.

It's cumulative. Every step taken is good.

We need to replace our drive. One of the key considerations is to make sure it's new drive let's water drain through it.

OP if you do go for turf (and it sounds like you might) could you do something to balance out the choice - maybe an hour of volunteering of litter picking or similar?

We have grass and found it got trampled up and muddy under the swings, until we got special mats that the grass grows through. Could that be an option?

@SciFiFan2015 I completely agree it doesn't have to be all or nothing. I reckon most of us do brilliantly in some areas, whether it's not driving, never using carrier bags, mooncups, only buying second hand etc and most of us have areas we're not so good like driving when you can walk, long haul holidays, buying plastic shit etc. What frustrates me is people berating others for their choices when I'm sure they're not perfectly eco themselves.

My weakness is gadgets. Love a gadget. So I buy them all (yep, all of them) second hand. Cheaper and ever so slightly greener. I also recycle my old gadgets.

Not having to bother mowing means we have more time to work on the interesting bits of our garden and allotment.

It’s a fucking crime aginst the environment. And it looks awful, I can see it a mile off.

Some of the justification on here is horrific.

I despair at the world in which we live.

Our neighbours invited us round to see the 'improvements' to their garden.All the hedges gone.The real lawn gone.Replaced with artificial grass. Solid fences right down to the ground.Decking and paving everywhere.Some very indoor /outdoor looking furniture.Not a garden,and outdoor room IMO.Each to their own but no gaps for hedgehogs,no grass for birds to rummage after the rain ,no more nesting spots for birds.And our steeply sloping road already has problems with
drainage.We muttered some pleasantries and returned home feeling strangled depressed.Today I topped up the bird baths and feeders watched the hilarious colony of house sparrows chattering in the hawthorn .Checked the scruffy area at the bottom with log piles and some leaves for signs of hedgehog activity and thought the world's gone mad.Everything has to be easy,convenient and sanitised. That's my oppinion but I seem to be in the minority on here.

No doubt I’d be told I was cruel if I tried to encourage birds (which incidentally I don’t like anyway) into my cat proofed garden.

On the environmental front as others have said just because you have artificial grass doesn't preclude other things. My bird feeders are huge (I went for the largest I could buy online as the ones in store are tiny in comparison) and I have to top them up every few days because we attract so many. Also I have to avoid a lot of the plants in the summer because if I knock into them all the bees on them get upset and when around 20-30 suddenly get upset I don't want to be near even though they probably won't attack me (I love hebe plants).

So my bit of artificial grass isn't great for the environment but then again I don't have children and the environmental impact of having children is high.

I can't get my head around why someone wouldn't like birds. What have they ever done to you.

Birds are nasty pecking things that crap all over my car! In all seriousness, I like them at a distance but not too close in case they fly at me.

To be fair I don’t think my cat would ever catch a bird but I wouldn’t want to take a chance, it seems a bit like the Christians in the lions den. Before we had the tree cut down (before anyone jumps on that we had to as it was causing damage) the birds used to throw twigs at him!

With the impact that plastic is having on the environment getting so much media attention it astonishes me how people can even consider this. It's unnatural, unneccesary and unethical.

When I moved to the UK I was shocked to see that people had fake grass in their gardens. It’s just bonkers.