With water at a premium, it’s time to re-evaluate caring for that lush property. I recently learned that, on average, 50-70% of home water is used outdoors watering lawns and gardens and nearly 85% of all landscaping problems are due to over watering. Properly designed yards can reduce water use by up to 20% or more each year.
Located in the desert, (above), there’s not a cactus in sight. A fresh and green, water-hungry lawn is all I see! Yet with a little ingenuity (below), we’ve got a modern beauty to behold.
Our word of the day: xeriscape! It’s a sustainable landscape and gardening method that reduces the need for excess water irrigation. Let’s greet the warm summer season with smarter and greener (no pun intended) yards and lawns.
Xeriscape to grow and maintain an aesthetically beautiful garden. In addition to the traditional cactus garden, there are plenty of drought-tolerant plants and gardening methods that are easy to implement with the help of your local nursery or Home Depot, and can save you big bucks on the monthly water bill.
Here are some quick to-do’s for your lawns and yards:
- Use mulch around plants, bushes, and trees to retain moisture and prevent runoff
- Plant in the spring or fall when watering is not needed as much
- Use porous materials for walkways and patios to prevent runoff and to keep water in your yard
- Avoid planting on steep inclines or isolated turfs that may be difficult to irrigate
- When choosing plants, try “drought tolerant plants”, particularly perennials, that grow well with LESS water.
Happy gardening!
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Even if you aren’t willing to go totally xeric, just switching out grass for plant beds can drastically cut down on your water usages too. It’s also good to keep in mind that xeric plants aren’t limited to cacti and clumping grasses. In addition to being drought tolerant once they are established, plants like lavender, agastache, clematis vine, irises, salvia, and yarrow have luscious foliage and beautiful, long-lasting flowers.
I live in New England, so cacti aren’t a good option. I’d recommend plants that are native to your area or native to an area very like the one you are in. And use fewer pesticides and fast acting fertilizers. Planting clover in a lawn with grass adds fertilizer naturally, and helps retain moisture as clover is very hardy.
Hey Kenn,
You’re right. Also, a move away from annuals can save a lot of money. Just think about how much energy, transportation and water are used to grow and distribute ornamental annuals each year.
For those native plants, it’s important to remember to place each one in their appropriate environments – shade lovers in the shade, sun lovers in the sun…
also love the idea of planting clover in a grass lawn. Thanks, Felicia.
This is a very interesting article but if you already have a grass lawn you can actually train your lawn to use less water. By reducing the amount of fertilizer recommended, there will be less growth and less demand for water.
Mowing is the most misunderstood part of lawn care, and the most often incorrectly performed part of lawn care. Far too many people will set their mowers too low or “scalp” the lawn. How many times have you spent time mowing your grass in hopes of a beautiful result only to end up with brown spots? Cutting too much off the top leads to thinned out grass, and shallow root systems.
When you mow make sure one third of the leaf blade is removed at a time and the height is allowed to increase slightly. It is also important to keep mower blades sharp, damaged grass blade edges turn brown quickly and make your lawn appear to need water. Most importantly, only cut when necessary, your lawn will slow or even stop growing in times of drought.
Don’t apply more water than the soil can hold in the root zone. A quick and easy way to test the moisture level is to push a long screwdriver into the ground – if you can do this easily to the depth of the roots then it has adequate moisture.
If you are thinking of sowing a new lawn during the summer-don’t.
The soil is too dry and you will need to water daily in hot weather. Postpone sowing until early autumn when your new lawn has a much better chance of success.
Beautiful photos! I am a landscape architect in Colorado and have talked to many people who are now seeing the importance of xeriscape in water savings. Thank you for your article!