Maintaining a lawn is more than just mowing it. There's aerating/seeding, watering, pulling-weeds/pest-spraying, etc.

The mowing is the easiest part, at least for my relatively small lawn.

Let's say we have a super well maintained lawn here in Denmark. You would have to do the following once every season:

  * Aerate/seed (realistically not necessary to do every year). 
  * Fertilize.
  * Pull weeds (mostly dandelions).

For a normal house that amounts to at most one weekends work.

Compared to a well established bed of flowers, which every season at the very least needs:

  * Fertilize
  * Trim plants that begin taking over.

For a garden with flower beds the size of the typical lawn I'd say there is at least the same amount of work required. And you need to have quite a bit more knowledge for it to be easy, compared to a lawn anyway.

For a vegetable garden there is significantly more work involved.

  * Germinate
  * Ready the soil
  * Work in manure
  * Plant / transplant
  * Keep weeds down.
  * Some plants need a trellis.
  * Mulch.
    * Keep weeds down where the mulch failed.
  * Continuously maintain the vegetables health to ensure good harvest.
  * Harvest
  * Clean up the beds
  * Plant green manure
  * Plan next year, rotate crops ect.

There is realistically something to do every single week.

If you live a place where it rains enough for the grass to make it on it's own, it's the path of least resistance only bested by a concrete slab, or perhaps tiled that you spray to kill weeds.

The traditional vegetable garden is slightly more human work than a lawn, but the perennial food garden is significantly less work than a lawn (for example apple trees with mulch, requires only harvest in the fall and pruning during winter)

A woodchip mulched strawberry patch uses requires zero human labor except from harvest and the occasional propagation of runner plants which 4x each year. All you have to do is cover with leaves, straw, or evergreen branches to help the crowns over winter and they will be back each year.

Raspberry canes will literally walk all over your property and only need to be mulched (with leaves, grass clippings, or woodchips) to keep them looking tidy)

The gas used to power mowers is a huge subsidy. A vegetable garden bed uses a lot less energy and time. Remember to cover vegetable garden beds in fall and winter.

All of the bullets on your list are optional in a veg garden and perennial garden. I don't rotate my crops unless I have a compelling reason to do so (like a pest eating all my potatoes)

Having greenhouses, vegetable garden, perennial food, and a lawn - the lawn is what requires the least amount of work for me, and I don't even have a robotic lawn mower.

For perennial crops, you still need to do more work. Manure (and you have to source it too), mulch and pruning is a bare minimum. If you care about the harvest, you have to continuously keep an eye on it and treat various problems. For apples in particular it's imperative to remove monilia infected fruit continuously, and especially after harvest. You also have to prune the crop to ensure a larger harvest.

A garden is as much or as little work as you make it, but a lawn is probably the lowest bar of minimum work if you get enough rain to water it. It didn't become popular because it's more useful that everything else, but because you really don't have to do much work to keep it.

You don't really have to do any of that if you just want to support the environment. Plants have managed just fine so far without human intervention.

> There's aerating/seeding, watering, pulling-weeds/pest-spraying, etc.

If you have a grass that matches where you live and don’t mind your lawn occasionally being brown, none of that is needed.

Agreed, apart from mowing it fairly regularly from April - October I've never done any of those things to the area of grass we have. Mind you we are in Scotland so water supply isn't really a problem.

It was interesting watching people complain about the grass not growing on The Walking Dead. Little do they know, that's normal. Especially when it never seems to rain on the show. It can jump after rain, but it stays short and brown for months in an especially dry year.

I've never done any of that nor do I know how. I've only mowed it, that's it.

I am amazed I've only seen one of these ever. First saw it maybe 15 years ago, and would pass it on my way to school.

When Roomba came out everyone flipped like it was an amazing invention that nobody had thought of. All I could think of was that little yellow lawn mower diligently mowing its grass. Cute little guy is still running today.

Why don't more people have these? I'm gonna buy one when I have a yard.

edit: I see they are decently expensive. If they work still totally worth it.