You've seen those lush, green lawns that are more manicured than a poodle.

My lawn isn't one of them. I let my lawn fend for itself.

You won't see me watering the lawn or feeding it with nutritious fertilizer. I leave that to Mother Nature.

In many neighborhoods, that makes you a second-class citizen.

But thanks to a Southern Illinois University sod scientist, we don't have to feel like pond scum any more, even if our yards look like it.

SIU scientist Kenneth Diesburg says bugs love tender, lush, new growth.

The time and money you lavish on your lawn will earn you the undying gratitude of fungi and bugs. Now, there's a real incentive for you.

Imagine, slaving away on your yard just so a bunch of insects can camp out in style.

So all those lush lawns you see are really nothing more than insect jungles full of fungi.

That means more bug spray and fungicides, unless, of course, you have a yard like mine.

Diesburg says the easiest way to fight fungi and bugs is to quit pampering your lawn and spend your weekends at the pool or the golf course, or take a long nap.

That's my kind of yard work.

If you're going to provide a salad bar for bugs, you've got to water your lawn.

Some bugs dine on a virtual banquet of a lawn. Those are the places where the sprinkler systems run constantly and the grass gets more showers than a football team.

Of course, most people just do the occasional watering thing, hooking up an old, rusted sprinkler to the leaking garden hose.

This allows you to turn your front yard into a mud patch which your children will run through, trampling the grass.

The occasional watering ritual can weaken the turf, according to the sod guys.

Mowing can be bad too. Diesburg says that you should set your mower at its highest point and then mow when the grass is half again taller than that.

You almost need a calculator to get it right.

This trim, of course, makes your place look like "Little House on the Prairie" unless you have totally neglected your lawn, in which case there is nothing growing.

A lot of people simply mow their grass when it gets shaggy. Diesburg says that's bad.

"You have to remember that mowing is an injury in progress," he says.

In other words, you yard hounds are murdering your lawns.

Short grass lets more sunlight through the canopy, which allows the soil to bake the lawn until it's extra crispy. That's bad too.

Fortunately, there's a solution: dormant grass.

That brown stuff doesn't need mowing and yard work's a breeze. It's environmentally correct and come fall, it will perk back up again.

You can't ask for more than that unless, of course, you are a finicky fungus.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.