Oasis In The Desert

Posted on June 3, 2015 Updated on June 3, 2015

Nothing like a cool breeze blowing through a green trees,casting rippling shadows across your flower bed and lawn. I don’t know about you, but I love a yard with giant trees and a green lawn. Its like comfort food for my eyes I guess. Problem is, just a lawn can use up to two inches of water each week. A good way to think about that is to imagine your yard covered in about 3 feet of water just for the summer. In today’s RumHam post I’m going to shortly go over lawns.

First I will tell you what I did for my front yard, and no it was not xeriscape (pronounced ZEER-escape). One of the things you can do to make a less thirsty lawn is to seed with desert grasses. Just the type of grasses alone is a whole other post. What I did is I went to the garden center, and bought “dry pasture mix.” This is the seed that ranchers spread in the fall so that a pasture will form next spring for cows. It’s a combination of all kinds of grasses, from wheat, to blue grama, designed to be used where only natural rainfall will be available.

Water consumption for this grass is in the order of eight inches of precipitation to grow. It is meant to die off in the summer, so eight inches is to get to maturity. You can continue to water the grass,and it will stay green while at the same time use far less water then Kentucky blue grass. What you do next is let it grow nice and tall, some of the grass has pretty purple grains, some with really dark blue-green grass blades, just a wide verity of shade, and texture. If the wild look isnt for you every month I mow it down. I like to keep the grass a little longer so as to retain soil dampness.

So that’s today’s RumhHam Weekly post for those that don’t want to xeriscape, but want to make a less thirsty green yard.