Landscapes can come in all shapes, sizes, and colors to fit your style. Some prefer a wide open meadow style, while others prefer a view reminiscent of the desert in which we live. And still others prefer to have a yard full of grass. They offer opinions that it is low maintenance, they do not have to worry about picking up leaves in the fall, or that they like to hear the sound of the sprinklers. While lawns do have a practical use in some yards, if the only time you walk on it is to mow it, you do not need it.
Nevada is a very dry state with limited amounts of water, yet lawns dominate most front yards. For an experiment in water usage, I have compared two yards. Each yard measures 12 feet by 24 feet. Yard A is Kentucky Bluegrass irrigated by Rain Bird pop-up sprinklers with a high efficiency. Yard B is 32, five gallon shrubs irrigated by Rain Bird drip-irrigation. I chose 32 shrubs because most shrubs will grow to about three feet wide. Each shrub will cover nine square feet, and nine times 32 is 288 square feet, the same as the lawn. For the sake of argument, I have made each yard irrigate for 8 months of the year and the irrigation timer is never adjusted on either yard.
The Bluegrass yard is irrigated for 52 minutes per week to achieve 1.5” of water. After 32 weeks of irrigation, the lawn has used 8,640 gallons of water.
The yard with the 32 shrubs is irrigated every fourth day and the valve runs for one hour each time. After 32 weeks of irrigation, the 32 shrubs used 4,300 gallons of water. The yard with the 32 shrubs used less than half as much as the yard with the lawn.
According to city-data.com there are approximately 20,000 houses in Carson City. If half of these homes removed 288 square feet of lawn, we would save over 43 million gallons of water every year. Please email me, if you would like to see the math.
In order for a lawn to remain healthy it needs to be watered regularly, mowed often (when I had a lawn, I needed to mow it every other day because it grew so fast) and fertilized. If these needs are not met, the lawn will be more prone to disease, insects and have brown spots. Most all yards without lawn can be maintained by pruning and fertilizing only four times per year.
Engines like those found on lawn mowers and string trimmers contribute about 5% of the nations’ total pollution. The healthier a lawn is, the more mowing it will need (remember my lawn from earlier?). This means that the healthier a lawn is the more effort we have to expend and more pollution we have to expel. The yard with the 32 shrubs can probably get away with being pruned by hand about once a year if it was designed and pruned properly.
Now you know how easy, affordable, and environmentally friendly a landscape without lawn can be. I recommend renting that sod cutter today or calling us to help!
