It’s hard to be green, but it’s harder being a brown lawn in a sea of golf green grass in your neighbourhood. It’s tempting to just turn on the sprinklers, and get our lawn to look as green as every one else’s lawn. Who really wants to be known as “those people who don’t/won’t water their lawn?” Wouldn’t it be easier to just turn the water on? Would it?
Part of me wants to conform to the standard, we grew up with green lawns, and they are beautiful. The other part of me, the stubborn, “I won’t back down, this is something I believe in” part of me won’t do it. But I will be honest, it’s hard to look out at the front yard and see brown singed grass. I don’t think turning it into a garden,or groundcover is the solution, even using water thrifty natives, we will still need to water, it’s that hot up here, for that long. The soil needs amending, and aerating, that’s not going to happen overnight. With our water restrictions I am already time sapped to get the gardens watered ever second day, I certainly don’t need another garden to look after.
I know that we live in a water tight world, and the last thing anyone needs to do up here is water their lawns. But everyone does, the lawns are greener up here, than down on the coast where we used to live.
I’ve told the neighbours that we wouldn’t water our lawn, and we won’t. Hardly trailblazing stuff, isn’t it? But we are among a small handful of neighbours that have let our lawns go brown for the summer.
It might not green up until next spring when we get some rain again. On the coast you can leave the grass to go dormant over the summer it will green up almost overnight when the Autumn rains came, there are no Autumn rains here.
But if all the snow predicted for October comes true like your comments indicate we have only a few weeks of brown, before it’s all white for months. Don’t forget to join in Snow Daze, you still have a few days to leave a comment on both Far Side of Fifty’s blog, and here at Muddy Boot Dreams in order to win a really nice gift pack of greeting cards. Crunchy…