I Fought The Lawn...(Reprise)

When I lived in Northern California, I had a beautiful Fescue lawn that I watered, fertilized and mowed faithfully.  (See I Fought The Lawn).  It was beautiful, but it did suck up a lot of water.

Southern California is a different climate, one that has been experiencing a fairly severe drought for the past several years.  Native grasses in this area tend to spring to life in the fall and winter, go to seed rapidly and then die off or at least turn brown in the Spring when the rains stop.  Unfortunately, this cycle doesn't sit well with a lot of people who have been conditioned to the idea that every house MUST have a green lawn, an idea derived from the landscapers of 17th Century English estates and  fostered today by the companies that sell grass seed, sod, endless varieties of fertilizer and weed control products*.

San Diego is currently under fairly strict water restrictions governing how much, how often and when lawns can be watered.  So I did a little informal survey the other day to see how our neighborhood, where the streets are named after English counties and every house has space for a lawn, is coping with the drought.

Some people have gone to plastic grass, which looks pretty good most of the time.  The down side to plastic grass is that it's not permeable by water, so a hard rain like the one we had a couple of weeks ago just has to run off into the storm drainage system and can't get down to water tree roots underneath it.  It also tends to be hot and may end up baking those tree roots and ultimately may kill the trees.

Plastic.  Needs to Be Dusted

Other people have tried painting their lawns green.  I kid you not, paint.  Green paint.  The only problem with that is that the paint fades in the sun and has to be redone periodically.

Green Paint Over Bermuda Grass

Some people have gone with drought-tolerant ground covers, such as the silver-gray Dymondia, although that plant seems to work best where it won't get a lot of foot traffic.  It also takes a while to get established and spread out, and it does need at least some water.

Dymondia

Some have gone with rock or bark as ground covers.  I think this one is very attractive because it incorporates succulents and different sizes of rocks.

Rocks and Succulents

And then there are those who seem to be pretending that there are no water restrictions anyway.

It's Pretty Obvious Who's Still Watering

We live in a Mediterranean climate; we need to adapt to it.



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*The ads I find particularly irksome are those featuring the phony Scotsman, conveniently named "Scot", who relentlessly pushes his company's products, shaming those whose lawns look less than perfect because of their lack of devotion to the ideal lawn.  Enough, already.

The Corn Is As High As... What??

Indiana Corn

Well, the corn in Indiana was definitely not as high as an elephant's eye in late July.  Far from it, in fact.

It looked to us to be about 2 to 3 feet high in most places and was already tasseling.  The leaves at the top of the stalks was reaching up like the leaves of agave plants.

The soybeans weren't looking much better to our eyes, but we couldn't tell much about them.

It was a different story in fields where there was irrigation; that corn was looking pretty good, tall and green and looking like corn should in July.

Irrigated Corn

There wasn't a lot of it available for purchase.  Cindy loves sweet corn but she had to hunt to find some for dinner.  The Amish farm near her sister's house usually has some for sale, but none while we were there this year.

She finally found some at a roadside produce stand; the ears had been cut in half because the birds had apparently gotten the seeds on the top of the ears.

Is this year's heat and lack of rain an aberration or will it continue?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Drought Monitor website indicates that there are already both short and long term effects in most of the areas affected most severely by the current drought.

My parents both grew up in Kansas during the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression, an experience nobody wants to repeat.

Signs of Drought In The Midwest

Dad's Lawn

We recently returned from a trip to visit Cindy's dad in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Weather records have now confirmed that this past July was the hottest ever recorded, hotter even than July of the Dust Bowl year of 1936 according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

We knew before we got there that it was hot in Indiana, but we were stunned by how brown and dried up everything was.  Flying into Indianapolis looked like we were flying into a California city because it was so brown.

They had had no rain for weeks.  We had never seen Dad's lawn so brown in the summer, it looked like it does in winter when they've had no snow.

There were still trees down from the huge wind storm several weeks before, and the surviving trees looked stressed and some appeared to be dying.

Later, Signs of Green

The day we arrived they had a small amount of rain and got a little more a few days later.  By the time we left, the grass was showing signs of green, but it was still a long way from the normal lushness that used to require mowing twice a week.

That was the lawn; the corn was another story.

Coming Back a Little