They are letting it grow to support healthy root growth. They've been reading this forum and know with a warm summer on the way they'll need a drought tolerate lawn...

We had a neighbor who said he was just letting it die. You can't control your neighbors. It is what it is. Buy a home with a HOA and then you deal with that mess. No getting around it.

You could offer to cut it for them. Take the high road.

Neighbors are like friends you don't get to choose

Carla, I already responded with a joke, but seriously I don't see anything wrong with calling the town. I would call and make it more of a question than an accusation. Ask them what the ordinance is for grass height and have they looked through the neighborhood lately? In our town they are supposed to put a ticket in your mailbox or on your doorknob as a warning before fining you.

Tell the owner you have been noticing poisonous snakes partying in their grass.

Hi everybody. Thanks for your replies. Coincidentally, my neighbor cut their grass a few hours after my original post.

It would be funny to tell someone I saw snakes in their grass. If that won't get 'em to cut their lawn, I doubt anything will. Also, if someone wanted to let their lawn die, I'd think they'd cut it and then turn off the irrigation system but maybe it'll vary by region.

I'm not going to offer to cut grass for able-bodied people. They'd see my offer as condescending and patronizing. An elderly or disabled person would be different, but most people are totally capable and some have teenage children who could do it (but don't). As a young girl, I cut the grass at home and I lived on a 1+ acre lot. So I know it's totally possible for just about anyone to cut "postage stamp lawns."

The ordinance for grass/weed height here is 8 inches. I called the city code office once and got voice mail and left a message. It was on a foreclosure that was overgrown with weeds and it was actually weed-whacked to my surprise. Don't know if it was a coincidence or not. I suppose I don't want to be that citizen by reporting everybody, but asking them to drive around the neighborhood couldn't hurt.

You sure do seem to know a lot about who's able bodied, how many kids everyone has and who cut their lawn when.

I'm sorry if I came off as rude. That wasn't my intent. I really only know the people who live on my street and I don't know when exactly everybody's grass gets cut. I really don't pay that close attention. I do notice my immediate neighbors because of the close proximity, though.

I just noticed a lot of lawns that need serious TLC when I went for a walk Friday and just wanted to get people's thoughts on why this might be the case. There are mostly 4 & 5 bedroom floorpans in this neighborhood and tons of kids waiting for the school bus each day and lots of them always out and about, which leads me to believe there are lot of families with children.

As I mentioned in my first post, I understand there might be the occasional person who's lawnmower broke, might be ill/disabled, out of town, etc. But I doubt this is the case for half the neighborhood.

Carla, Carla, Carla. So it was YOU who called the lawn police on me!!!

Why...you ask? Why would I grow my lawn 32 inches tall? It started with this picture.

That is St Augustine grass growing in pure sand in the dunes at Port Aransas, Texas. The area is the dog walk area next to a condo complex. All they have done there is mow. It's had no fertilizer or irrigation water since the late 1980s. You can see how the grass has escaped from the mowed area into the dunes. I measured that dune grass at 32 inches tall. It has survived many prolonged periods of severe Texas drought and seemed to thrive. Being an inquisitive kind of guy, I wondered what it would do in my yard. I lived in a fairly restrictive area of San Antonio, but I bought a house in George West, TX on one acre in 2011. George West is 100 miles closer to the coast than San Antonio, but on the edge of serious Texas desert. With such a small town I figured nobody cared about what I might do to the lawn. The house and yard were set back 100 feet from the street, so someone would really have to be staring at it to be offended. It seemed perfect to conduct an experiment. The experiment was to see how long I could go without watering if the grass got up tall like that. I stopped mowing in October and only watered the grass where it was stressed. By February 2012 one part had grown up to 32 inches. That part was in the shade all day long except for an hour at sunrise. Here's a pic from that time frame.

Just outside the shady area several hundred square feet of grass was
struggling to come back from the dead where a sprinkler failure went
unnoticed for months. It was also full sun for most of the day, so it had to deal
with a lot of heat stress.

After about a year of moderate success I got notified that I needed to mow it down to 18 inches. They used the amorphous term, manicured, which did not appear in the city ordinance on weed control. I used a string trimmer and took it down in the front where they could see it. Surprisingly, mowing grass down to any height does make it look like it was manicured. As long as it is all the same height, they seemed to be happy. I'm certain people came to measure it. A year after that I got notified again that it had to come down to their new 12-inch limit. Ok. I think it was clear they were targeting me, because I could go anywhere in town and find clear violations where weeds had grown up to 30 inches or higher. So I mowed it down to 12 inches. All while this was going on the grass was spreading and getting much closer to the road. By the time I sold it was only 50 feet from the street and very dense. I trimmed it down every week to 12 inches.

One of the interesting things about this is that I appeared before the city council to talk about what I was doing. One of the councilmen raved on about how nice his lawn was without water and he mowed it every week. I visited his house and he was living with a weed patch. At least I had no weeds at all. My dog and I walked through the grass all the time without encountering a snake or rat or anything. When the grass is that tall, anything moving through it looks like gophers, so I'm fairly confident it was just the lawn growing there. Another council person claimed that my lawn was breeding mosquitoes. Clearly she knew nothing about mosquito biology. My yard was dry as a bone at the surface, because it never got watered (except for rainfall). Mosquitoes need pools of standing water to breed.

Here's another picture of my dog walking through the grass. You can see the tops of her ears and tail.

To summarize how this turned out, tall grass needs much less water than short grass. Even after I started mowing it down, I never watered it. I'm thinking that 12 inches is a sweet spot for St Augustine. If you go lower than that you might have to water it between long dry spells. Also my St Aug was green 12 months of the year and never showed any sign of going dormant in the winter.

When I sold it the new owners immediately mowed the lawn down to 2 inches. Well, they tried. The riding mower either broke or bogged down so they stopped (and just left the machine there). I explained to them that if they took it down slowly it would survive. They just mowed it anyway. It's no longer St Augustine. It's weeds.

It turns out the people who were complaining about my letting it grow up tall all knew the lady who built the house and garden. She was apparently one of these fastidious gardeners - one of the "GET OFF MY LAWN" people. Seriously! Since I was not keeping the lawn in her memory, they complained about it. Now it looks horrible by any standard.

DC, I hate to water grass. It just seems like such a waste, almost blasphemy to use sparkling clear water on grass. That's why I like bermuda so much, and why I may convert to it. Mind you, if I lived in an arid area like you, I may think differently. I presently have centipede, which I normally cut 1-3/4 - 2". Starting in mid summer, I usually cut it 1/2" higher so it will hold in moisture and shade its own roots.

You are legit, my question is this WHY GET A HOUSE IF YOU CANT OR WONT MOW, APT OR CONDO IS WHERE YOU SHOULD BE

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/6-reasons-not-cut-grass-let-lawn-grow-wild/

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/6-reasons-not-cut-grass-let-lawn-grow-wild/