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Low Water Gardens

Adventures in Landscaping

by schmidt on September 15, 2009 · 0 comments

in Water & Water Conservation

When I was remodeling my home I was confronted with something I knew very little about – landscaping.  I knew what I did not want, which is as good a place as any to start.  No grass monoculture.  I am not against lawns mind you.  There is just too much of a downside to all that green.  It takes a bit more than a half gallon of water to cover each square foot with an inch of water; and an inch of water per week is the generally accepted standard for lawn irrigation.  Not to bad – til you do the math.  I had a tiny postage stamp in front of my old house, two 6 X 12 foot sections of grass – and they needed more than 70 gallons a week to stay green, more than 3,600 gallons a year.  I switched to ornamental grass and Mexican beach stones in my new home, and I haven’t watered them for 3 months.  Even a modest sized lawn of your typical suburban home can hit over 1,000 square feet, and that adds up to 500+ gallons a week.

The backyard was a more complicated challenge.  I went so far as to call a few landscape “Architects” to come and give a bid.  I thought they were like regular contractors, they would look at the project, let me know what they could do and tell me how much.  Silly me.  First think I learned about landscape “Architects” was that they charge $100.00 bucks just to show up.  Now I am not a complete moron, I did chuckle at the first guy who told me that.  But after calling 4 or 5 more, I realized they all wanted 100 bucks to show up.  I figured the joke must be on me, so I got the checkbook out and made 2 appointments with 2 landscape “Architects”.  After shelling out $200.00 and getting price quoted twice  I realized I was right, the joke was on me.  The landscape “Architects” both agreed that $75,000 or so would be needed to change this:

9-8-09 Landscpae Blog Post 1

into something more interesting.  Unless they planned on making it into a pot plantation, 75k was just not going to happen.

Ever.

So what to do.

It’s not that I am lazy, I am just, well, lazy.  And I do not know much about landscaping – I may have said that somewhere.  So clearly I need help, professional help.  At least that’s what my wife says.  So I think, on her recommendation, I am going to start taking 500 milligrams of Welbutrin twice daily.  And use MyFarm to make something useful as well as practical.

MyFarm are basically folks who set up gardens in your backyard.  I have always wanted to garden, and the idea of calling it an Urban Farm sounds far to chic and forward thinking to pass up.  I hope to make this an ongoing feature on the blog here, document the weed pulling, dirt sifting, and bug shooing that I figure is involved in making some food out back.  Another thing to figure out will be how much of a carbon offset this whole thing will be – carbon reduction is well and good, but increasing carbon absorption and O2 output with a more robust backyard has got to count for something.

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The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) should get props for constantly pushing conservation and eco friendly approaches to water use.  Building on that history is their new Our Water Our World (OWOW) program that has much practical informaiton to help you build safer, water conscious front & back-scapes.  Another handy dandy link for you Californians is this Nifty 50 PDF that has 50 great, native choices to consider when building real local looking gardens.

All water eventually leads to the ocean, and every bit of whatever that is so casually flushed away does not simply disappear.  Your choices echo on and on, sometimes in really disturbing ways.  Here is one of the latest updates on Oceanic Dead Zones – something most of us hear about from time to time, perhaps in a 30 second spot on the news or a small blurb box in the local market rag.  Sure, maybe large scale industrial & agricultural pollution IS the main culprit here, but you look at the 20 LB bag of nitrogen fertilizer in your garage for your lawn, hell look at your damn lawn, and you think about all the water, fertilizer and pesticides you dump there, that I have dumped there, and you ask yourself is it worth it?

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