By its very nature, landscaping is more or less green. Plants and lawns do provide more oxygen to the surrounding air and tend to cool the temperature due to the natural process of using water to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. This is a very simple look at it and some plants are more effective than others.
If you count the general enhancement to the environment and to the people living in it, a landscape also has a pure value in terms of quality of life. Just remember the last time you traveled through one of the downtown concrete, glass and asphalt jungles. It’s no wonder that those who work in that kind of environment can hardly wait for the next vacation.
Given that a nicely landscaped environment is a positive thing, we come to the main point. How do we achieve that with a minimal use of natural resources that cannot be replenished and how can we keep toxins out of the picture completely?
Most of the problem is tackled with the installation of a new landscape. Let’s take a look at the first aspect of this:
Watering
The whole approach is to use a minimum amount of water and still have healthy plants. The idea of collecting water and saving it in a tank to use in the landscape is still a ways off in the future, unless you have a huge budget available. The problem here is that even a five or ten thousand gallon tank, plus all the equipment to collect water into it is very expensive and when a typical irrigation system runs at the rate of perhaps 15 gallons per minute, this only gives you a little over 5 hours of watering for a five thousand gallon tank.
For a large residential property (the kind usually owned by someone who could afford the system) with only 15 sprinkler valves running 15 minutes each, this is enough water to handle the watering for one and a half days. Most of the water for storage comes from rain and during all the months that it doesn’t rain, only a small percentage of the water needed for the tank can be collected from excess water in the yard.
To give you some idea, an average swimming pool that is six feet deep would water our hypothetical property mentioned above for 7 to 10 days (maybe for a month if you water twice a week).
Using grey water from the house (wastewater from sinks and showers) to fill a tank might be possible if you can afford the special plumbing setup and some way to remove soaps, etc. that are not good for the garden.
There are currently a few areas that provide treated grey water for landscaping use, but this is a service that the utility company provides. If it comes to your area, then absolutely use it for your landscape watering.
So what does the usual homeowner do to save water in the landscape? There are some surprisingly simple ways to do this.
First, have your plant designer lean toward those type of plants that have lower water requirements. Using a variety of leaf color for beauty can be very effective and there are some flowering plants that do not need a lot of water. For this to be really effective, all of the plants in a given sprinkler zone will have to be in the low water category so you don’t have to over water the whole garden to keep the thirstier plants healthy. If you want a few beds of annual flowers that take more water, run the sprinklers to this area on the lawn zone or separate it out with its own valve. This way, you do not have to over-water your drought tolerant plants to keep the thirsty flowers alive.
A very important way to cut down on water use is to stir polymer crystals into the soil before a lawn or garden is planted. These are tiny plastic sponges that swell up about 100 times their original size when water is added. They hold this water for about a week until the roots draw it out as they need it. One lawn we installed with polymer crystals on a partially shaded side of the house didn’t need to be watered at all for 4 months out of the year because the rain water did it all. During the other times of the year, the sprinklers had to be run much less often. The water savings were enormous. These are also very helpful for plants in pots.
Faux lawns are catching on in some areas. Some of these look so real that you can’t tell they are not real even standing right next to them. The downside of this (besides being fake) is that they do not cool down the air and are actually hot to the touch in the summer. They are also a lot more expensive to install than regular lawn. It is one option though.
Proper preparation of the soil allows for deeper rooting. Deeper roots are also assisted by good fertilizing habits. Plants with deep roots can use water that is lower into the soil zone.
As much as possible, it is better to water less often and let the soil dry somewhat between waterings. This keeps fungus from developing and allows the root zone to breath. It also tends to send the water deeper into the soil and therefore drive the root zones deeper. After the plants are established, stretch out the watering times until you reach several days between each one while keeping an eye on the health of the plants (the exception to this is those very hot spells in the summer – then you can set your controller for a short watering cycle to keep things cooled down once a day and still water the longer cycles several days apart – this is particularly important for lawns).
Wherever possible, design the sprinkler system to water the shady and sunny areas separately. This might mean investing in a few more sprinkler control valves, but it makes a difference in the long run.
There is a type of irrigation control box which has a miniature weather station as well as a rain override system The cost of these has come down and they probably pay for themselves the first year if not the first few months. Remember driving past houses during a rain storm when the sprinklers were going full blast?
It is amazing how many lawns I walk across when visiting properties where I hear a squishing sound as I walk and my shoes are soaked when I get to the other side. This is the most obvious overuse of water and is more common than you might think. This is not only expensive and a waste of water, it is not good for the lawn either.
Bruce Larsen
Larsen Landscape Construction & Design, Inc.
clients@larsenlandscape.com
www.larsenlandscape.com
800.805.LAWN
