AIBU to ask you to cut your grass?

[BadEyedManiac]

I know there's a movement around not cutting grass and not trimming hedges and so on which I have to say our local council has enthusiastically embraced to the point that road signs are partly obscured by various shrubbery.

However although this might be lovely for bees (although the absolute benefits are probably limited in the context of the age of industrial farming which no one is doing anything about) it is hell on earth for people with pollen allergies. And is particular hell on earth for people like me who have pollen allergies and a corneal condition.

I've just woken up due to corneal pain and have spent ten minutes pouring eye drops into my eyes and I know it's only going to get worse as summer goes on. The environmental benefits from people failing to tend their greenery in urban areas are negligible while the effects on the people around you can be absolutely brutal. Please, please cut your bloody grass. This is awful.

If you keep a lawn then you should mow it only once or twice a year.

You couldn't mow a lawn "once or twice a year" - you would need to take a scythe to it!!! In the growing season I mow mine once or twice a week. Sorry, but I don't want to have waist high grass in my garden. If you are all so concerned about bees plant some flowers.

Yours must be genetic then, DPs is too.

Sorry I should have been clearer it was late night posting and at first I honestly thought OP was part jesting and part sleep delirious / part in giggles.

For some people it is lack of exposure. For kids in cities this could be a problem the more we become urbanised. Thankfully we are going the other way. To me it’s more than hay fever. Imagine being a kid who grows up somewhere where everything around you is set in stone, and the only things which move naturally are clouds in the sky - which you can’t touch. It’s a philosophical thing to me but I think part of the reason I always grew up thinking I could do what I ever I wanted - was because when I was playing in nature I generally could. I don’t think city kids can say the same and I think that may be where parkour came from.

More armchair hypotheses 🤣

If you keep a lawn then you should mow it only once or twice a year.

If you keep a lawn you should mow it WHEN YOU WANT.

Whats super weird about the OP and some of the replies is that it is for others to decide what they do with their own stuff. I will decide when to mow my lawn, thanks. And insects will be a factor in that decision.

Next year (and you will get more next year) tap near them.
they all scatter really quickly from their little tight ball and you see just how many are there.
a few seconds later they all ball up again in their tight snug.
its incredible to watch.

I’ve done a poor job describing it. It’s more fascinating then I’ve made it sound

My hayfever is only really a problem when people are cutting their grass! 5mins around a lawnmower or freshly cut grass and I'm streaming.

YABU, without the bees and other insects we're all fucked.

We cut our grass yesterday for the first time this year, it'll probably get cut a couple more times before summer is over but that's it, enough to stop it getting too long for the children to play in but plenty of time in between for everything to bloom for the bees and butterflies and all that - the bees love my garden, there's one bush in particular that they seem to like, and we have lots of stingy nettles that the butterflies like to lay their eggs on. Hedges full of berries for birds too.

My cat is allergic to harvest mites and I'm dreading this year with all the long grass about.

Sounds lovely! I will definitely try that, thanks!

I'm on your side OP. DH is the gardener in our family and insisted on that No Mow May. By a week into June I had a very rare hissy fit and we had one of our once in five years rows. He cut it next day.

In his shoes? I'd have told you if you wanted the grass cut to do it yourself. You had a hissy fit? Grow the fuck up

as for pp who said all the people trying to address climate change should stop: get in the sea.

I hope you op and all of the others who don't give a damn about keeping insects alive to pollinate crops to create food for us will be the first to opt out of eating completely when we eventually destroy this planet to the point of no return. Really you should give up eating anything created by insects now, as you don't agree they are necessary. Good luck to you on your journey, when you can prove to me you are doing that, I will cut my grass. 🙂

Yes, yabu.

YABVU - you are better off looking at why you overreact so much to natural phenomena - do you have mast cell issues, a high histamine diet, methylation problems? It shouldn’t be normalised, it is a sign something is out of balance!

Thought this was interesting :- news.sky.com/story/uk-weather-particularly-potent-pollen-causing-worse-than-usual-hay-fever-symptoms-met-office-says-12631812

YABU, my hedge isn't being trimmed until bird nesting is over and I like seeing the wild flowers in my lawn so mowing has been reduced. Sorry but my priority is the wildlife in my garden.

@Stath it doesn't seem to want me to post pictures. No idea if it's MN or me! I'm going to try to post without pictures and see if it's me!

Once more with feeling.

Return to the tropics then

The council can order it to be cut down because of rats, people shouldn't encourage rats so close to houses. You can keep the garden neat and tidy and grow things that the helpful wildlife likes. I'm fed up of hearing how much being a slob saves the environment, I don't want rats next door to me. Thanks for the sarky reply though, enjoy your rats.

This is ::chef’s kiss:: – thanks for the inspiration!

This year does seem to be bad for it. DH has never really had hayfever before but he's been really suffering. People are generally quite on the ball round here with mowing, so I'm not sure how much that is to do with it.

We mow our main lawn as we have a dog plus the odd visiting cat and I want to be able to see to pick up any poop, but we do have a wild patch that we just leave as it attracts loads of lovely bugs and DD absolutely adores beasties. The other day we watched a really fat hairy caterpillar emerge from the wilderness. Not sure which of us was most excited!

@EvilPea and @ofwarren the baby garden spiders are adorable aren't they. I have them too and they've now dispursed all over the place. Here's a piccie of last year's nursery 😍I sometimes wonder how they got on and how many survived.

Saw something both fascinating and gruesome today - a parasitic wasp carrying a spider through the grass and up a wall! 😮😎Apparently the wasps paralyze the spiders with a sting, lay an egg in them, and when the larvae hatch they eat it from the inside out, often whilst it's still alive! 😬

Yes let's screw the natural world to make you the self appointed dictator of the world happy.

there is a convoluted snowball if reasons was to why, in this age of plastic, we are already in the sixth mass extinction. DH cannot free himself from the idea of a lawn, so we have wild swathes, and the flowerbeds are rewilded. Today i had a toad, frogs, wood wasps, mason bees and dozens of birds in my suburban garden.

no i wont have a passé green desert, nor will i have decking or get rid of the wildness. I grew up in a dense city, i had never seen a cow or picked a redcurrant. My hayfever was debilitating. Years later, after having children, and being in the wild garden everyday, it has 90 percent gone. Perhaps with age, perhaps , or exposure. But i still planted trees and flowers and helped the wild things wherever i was.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I find my hay-fever is much worse when I'm around cut grass 🤔