The Grass Is Not Always Greener on the Other Side

Or how you can have a lawn that is environmentally more green

If you really must have a lawn (really, really must have it!) then please read on and learn about how you can be more environmentally responsible ... by watering less.

Here is my personal recipe on how to train the lawn to expect less water and become more drought-tolerant. I just shared it with some colleagues and wanted to make it more widely available:

1. Assume you water with a sprinkler system every day for ten minutes. The roots are all on the surface – there is no reason to grow down, since this is not where the water is.
2. Change the watering to every other day and water for 20 minutes (use two start times if you experience runoff) – so in essence the grass still gets the same amount of water, but now the roots need to grow deeper to get it. Do this for four weeks.
3. After four weeks start to cut back the watering by 4 minutes to 16 min every other day.
4. After six weeks cut back by 4 minutes to 12 min every other day. This puts us to the beginning of October and the roots are now certainly deeper down in the soil than ever.
5. After 8 weeks change the watering to 2 times a week, e.g. Monday and Friday: Water for 18 minutes 2 times a week – which is close to the amount of water it got with 12 minutes every other day.
6. Since by now it is middle of October, you can start decreasing this as you usually would at the end of year.

Once you start up watering in spring, only provide water on two weekdays and start off with a low number of minutes. Increase the watering as needed when it gets warmer. The strongest growth months are June and July – so I expect you could set the timer to two times 20 – 25 minutes as the max. watering time in these two months (make sure you have enough start times to avoid runoff). Taper off the watering for the season starting in August.

A very nice side effect of this treatment is the fact that the lawn gets more resistant to any invasion from other plants - the stronger roots provide a better base for a stronger growing grass that can outgrow the competition.