water usage
Watering the front yard alone uses about 3K gal/month 🤯
(Our normal usage, before we started trying sprinklers, is 2K-3K gal/month: to clarify, usage for the household w/o any watering, even by hand)
Back yard as well adds 2K gal. Fucking hell that's a lot. I do not even want a lawn
water usage
@greyor time to replace the lawn with drought resistant plants?
water usage
@Satsuma i'd love to, I just don't know where to start and it is stressful. Need to look into it but we have other pressing issues too.
Just a disturbing data point. I do not understand the desire to have a super green lawn in a drought-stricken state...
water usage
@greyor happy to offer some suggestions if you’d like! and you can definitely start small by just putting a few things in—my experience was that it was a lot easier and more rewarding than i’d worried it might be
water usage
@Satsuma I would love that, you are very kind!
We have looked at the university extension for info but just need to systematically dig into it too.
Yeah I worry about $$ mostly, trying to triage what needs to be done around here based on that and severity
water usage
@greyor happy to! your local university extension is definitely a goof starting point.
if you’re trying to keep costs down, your best bet is either seeds or landscape plugs. I used a mix of both for my garden — i got a set of 25 plugs from https://www.thepollennation.com when i moved into my apartment and had pretty good success, especially with the drought tolerant goldenrods.
I planted milkweed from seed (a friend collected some seeds from their plants and started them in an egg carton for me) as well as black eyed susans ( these i think? https://www.southernexposure.com/products/rudbeckia-cherokee-nf-ecotype/ ). the milkweed was doing pretty well until the bunny moved in and decided it was best thing ever lmao and i got soooo many plants from the black eyed susan packet even though i literally just planted them midwinter and hoped nature would do the job okay.
water usage
@greyor if you’re planning to keep any lawn, even in the short term, you could try overseeding it with more drought tolerant and pollinator friendly turf plants — MNU did a good study on plants for bee lawns that might be useful in that respect, which included not needing irrigation or fertilizer on their list of desired characteristics: https://extension.umn.edu/landscape-design/planting-and-maintaining-bee-lawn they link to some places you can buy bee lawn mixes that met their standards online as well as tips for how to establish, etc
water usage
@Satsuma I really appreciate all this, thank you! Will have to dig into it, lots of food for thought!! 💙