Welcome to this issue of Stumped by Nature, where we notice nature lurking just beyond our screens, curate a list of outside-y events in Austin, and build community with other folks in the thick of the startup ecosystem.
In this week’s issue:
🌱 Lawns
🌤️ Upcoming outdoors events
🎃 Pumpkin-adjacent fun
Let’s dig in!
-Nicole
PS. Have a nature-related business or nonprofit? I’m creating a directory. It’s free to join, and you can plop your business details in here. Have your nature-based buddies fill this out too!
PPS. Come meet great people who go outside together: join ATX Outsiders.
Upcoming events I’m hosting:
Sunday, October 11: A private event just for members of ATX Outsiders. It involves 80± bats.
NATURE SPOTLIGHT
In honor of Halloween season, I’ve been collecting horrors.
Our focal horror of the day is a Type 2 Horror—potentially very pleasant in the moment, with a sense of terror that sets in later.
Today we’re digging into lawns.
Growing up in a suburb (with no associated urb) in a state that doesn’t know the word drought, there were few middle school delights more potent than flashlight tag at Hayley’s house, a dozen pre-teen girls scurrying through the bouncy, dense grass of her yard for optimal bush concealment. There was a particular concealed grassy area for the C- hiders where we could sprawl and let ourselves sink toward the soil for pre-cell phone sky-gazing while the spotlight beams annoyed the neighbors and/or signaled for the neighborhood boy contingent to join the hunt.
The mornings after, we’d slouch to the driveway, toe the lawn as the adults complimented this specific breed of robust yard that would make an HOA weep with joy.
It would be decades until I wondered what in the New Balance was really happening here.
What is grass?
Ground cover. Its job is to keep the soil from eroding from rains and winds. Watered grasses have a process of evapotranspiration that cools the area, especially compared to concrete or asphalt, making summer yards much more tolerable than summer parking lots. (This cooling effect doesn’t apply to dormant, crispy September lawns.)
Grass also absorbs sound waves, which might be why people don’t listen when you tell them to get off yours.
We like grass for its photosynthesis skills, which pull carbon from the air, until we started mowing it.
In a world similar to ours, but pre-European settlers, Central Texas had biodiverse prairies and savannas. The natural grasslands stored huge amounts of carbon in their deep underground root system. But now the Blackland Prairie is one of the most endangered ecosystems in North America.
Fun fact: I once received a free snake in my sod delivery
The most common local grasses
have entirely lost the plot. In Central Texas, we’ve swapped the grasses with beneficial several-feet-deep-soil-hugging roots with their evil cousin: shallow-rooted lawns on compacted soil. Not great for performing their intended job of absorbing rain, which has provided the opportunity for a whole irrigation business world to be built around these yard design incompetencies.
The lawns in Central Texas are usually warm season grasses (because it’s hot), but only one of the top four is from here:
Bermudagrass- for full sun and high foot traffic, this spreads with runners and will creep into flower beds
St. Augustinegrass- tolerates shade, likes it moist, demands water
Zoysiagrass- dense, part-shade. Reluctant to root, and when it’s hurt, it doesn’t bounce back quickly
Native Buffalograss- low maintenance and drought-tolerant local. Survives on natural rainfall alone and pivots to dormant brown instead of throwing in the towel
Also present in the region:
Artificial grass: this is plastic. It does save water. It does not act as an ecosystem. It does shed microplastics that make researchers get quite wide-eyed. It does heat things up. It does starve the soil below of air, light, and organic matter. But it looks nice.
Johnsongrass is on the naughty list because it refuses to play well with others a la allelopathy, with a side note that it was Type 1.5 fun to pull it from the ground as a post-Valentine’s Day treat
So we’ve got grass
And that grass has enlisted human intervention: water, fertilizer, gas-powered grooming.
Perhaps the horror here is that the default/autopilot lawn choice is the ecological equivalent of consuming Nerds Gummy Clusters for all of your dietary needs. Because these shallow grasses are widely adopted, they’ve been grandmothered in, and we’re societally complacent + perpetuators of the early morning lawn mower chorus.
The main offenses:
the scale of lawns. A NASA-adjacent study puts lawns as taking up three times as much land as any irrigated crop
grass lawns are monocultures, and we need biodiversity to meet our ecological needs
the grass is greener where you water it, and grasses’ water use is incompatible with drought—it requires more water than the seven greatest water-using crops combined. And we don’t even eat it, unless you’re a toddler and your parent doesn’t intervene in time
if this were an Eat This, Not That diet strategy, there are not-cut-lawn options that are substantially less thirsty and much more supportive
chemical use. Like, several million metric tons of fertilizer, much of which funnels into storm drains to make this a water pollution problem to solve
And then there are the machines that maintain lawns
which are just horror personified.
Using a gas-powered leaf blower for 30 minutes in an Edmunds test produced hydrocarbon emissions equivalent to driving a 6,200-pound truck from Texas to Alaska. The two-stroke engine is missing some key mechanical details, so up to 30% of fuel is expelled unburned, heaving known carcinogens and particulate matter that are particularly competent at burrowing into human lungs.
Stephen King’s 1975 “The Lawnmower Man” short story doesn’t quite capture the essence of the problem, but a true lawn-based horror story = artificial turf + gas leaf blower.
There are shockingly few electric-powered lawn companies in Austin, so a couple I know has a battery-powered leaf blower on standby for their lawn service to use.
Technically, a corded electric leaf blower is the most enviromentally friendly opton because it doesn’t require chemical batteries to manufacture or dispose of, so perhaps an option for small-scale needs.
But because I’ve met big lawns before and the idea of being governed by a cord feels like a hard no for me, the battery-powered version is still a significant, meaningful improvement from the hell incarnate that is a gas-powered two-stroke.
If your romantic partner’s love language is gifts, pop an electric leaf blower under the tree this year and let me know how well that’s received.
The terrain we’re working with
Beautiful lawns aren’t inherently bad. They’re a localized and cumulative environmental drain, and overall-problems-in-the-world-wise, there are much worse offenders. If we Pareto this problem, the heavy hitters are folks who wield an inordinate number of gas leaf-blowers.
And there’s an escape hatch: a dead patch of grass in our yard can become a pollinator bed. A lawn can become Habiturf. We have some individual power over our lawns (unless you’re in an HOA, in which case, I’m always happy to chat plans to defund/overthrow the HOA).
Folks are already leading the way—on a Deep Tech Week-adjacent patio, a conversation shifted to guerrilla gardening, including a ritual of planting a tree at every rental home, of adopting a median for sowing wildflower seeds.
My daughter stalled bedtime this week with a mission that involved her bare feet on crushed limestone, stepping around the prickly pear and a new fire ant mound to reach our crispy grass. She’s collecting ants, agreed these ones will live outside, and no, she can’t take them in her backpack to school, even if we have the perfect vessel for ant transport.
Still worth it to go touch grass.
Still worth it to daydream about grass that’s greener because it’s drought-tolerant.
UPCOMING EVENTS
🗓️ October 1: Fortlandia Grand Opening Party: eight new forts to explore
🗓️ October 1: Texas Venture Fest Block Party: spend some time at The Red Fridge (still on, even though some of Texas Venture Fest rescheduled to October 15)
🗓️ October 2-4: Austin City Limits, Weekend One: you might have heard of this one
🗓️ October 3: The Board Walks: BYOTopic for a walk + great conversations
🗓️ October 3: Plant Walk at Festival Beach Food Forest: get the tea, spill the tea
🗓️ October 3: Raccoon Appreciation Day: my chickens will not be attending this
🗓️ October 3: Horses and Pilates: bridles and bridges
🗓️ October 3: Kids on Bikes in Parks: ditch the training wheels
🗓️ October 3: Build-a-Birdhouse: expand your real estate portfolio
🗓️ October 3: Wildlife Rescue of Central Texas Grand Opening: with a chance to tour the raptor flight enclosure
🗓️ October 4: Hobbit Brunch: eat Farmers Market cheese dressed as a hobbit because why not
🗓️ October 4: Porsche Car Show: cars + coffee + croissants
🗓️ October 4: Paws & Prejudice: Paint Your Pet Like Royalty: a frictionless reason to send a photo of your pet to a stranger
🗓️ October 5: Myco Materials Workshop & Happy Hour: Create a skull that grows fungi
🗓️ October 5: National Geographic Live: An Evening with Jaime Rojo: get a new perspective on Monarchs
🗓️ October 5-12: Scarecrow Contest Drop Off Window: as if you needed another reason to have an elaborate, pole-required craft project
🗓️ October 6: Hill Climbers Tuesday Ride: ride at dawn
🗓️ October 7: Plant Swap: let your pothos play in someone else’s windowsill
🗓️ October 7: Music on the Trail: sprawl for some live music
PUMPKIN-ADJACENT FUN
🎃 Indian Springs Ranch: Includes a pumpkin patch + exotic animals + a corn pit south of Austin
🎃 Pumpkin Nights: Explore immersive pumpkin lands in East Austin. It’s legit.
🎃 Sweet Berry Farm: Mazes, rides, and pumpkins with three exclamation marks in Marble Falls
🎃 Sweet Eats Fruit Farm: Pig races, apple cannons, wagon rides, and pumpkins with two exclamation marks in Georgetown
🎃 Mama Mary's Farm: What you’d expect from a pumpkin patch, this time in Creedmoor
🎃 Uhland Fall Fest: Weekend two involves Trick Riding
PANTRY MOTH UPDATE
I wrote about my pantry moth infestation on June 25, 2026.
I’m aiming for at least 45 days without a moth to reclaim my pantry.
Sighting is the wrong word. it’s with moderate distress I report that I consumed unsolicited protein.
That’s all for this week!
In the meantime, get off the lawn.
-Nicole
OPTIONAL SIDE QUESTS
🪵 Need to metabolize something? I help people write. Let’s chat.
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