There are many urban residential areas in Minneapolis/St. Paul that are chalk full of what I would call mow-free yards. Many of these houses basically take the entire surface of their yard (anyplace anything can grow) and simply turn it into a either a flower garden or a vegetable garden. If they were in it for the flowers or vegetables I wouldn’t have a problem with this technique because well maintained garden looks nice… that’s where my problem comes in.

Many of these people simply change their yard into a garden of sorts, so they do not need to mow anymore and simply neglect to maintain the green space on their property. So most end up being an overgrown weed patch with some sparse non-noxious weeds barely hanging on. I can understand if these people truly enjoyed these gardens, but I find it would most likely take them twice as long if not longer to maintain these then just buying a lawn mower and going to grass. One of the things that bothers me about this is in all of the respective cities regulations they do not have anything to cover the propagation of these weed yards, yet in St. Paul I need to ask my neighbors permission (and pay fees) if I want to keep an animal other than a cat or dog.