Lawn Rebates Still Available

We’re getting to the really hot part of the year, and lawns everywhere are getting that golden glow. Don’t panic! Fescue grass has a strategy to survive a hot dry summer – it goes dormant. Gold is good, it means the grass has hunkered down and is keeping just a core part of itself alive until the weather cools and the rains come again.

We live in a Mediterranean climate, which is characterized by moderate wet winters and hot dry summers (well, moderate compared to Minnesota). Fescue grass is native to the Mediterranean part of Europe, which also has a Mediterranean climate and hot dry summers. Ok, I know how to spell Mediterranean now. For fescue grass, hot dry summers and midsummer dormancy are a normal part of life. What’s not normal is summer irrigation. Fescue grass has survived as a species for thousands or millions of years, and home landscape irrigation has only been around for sixty or so years.

You can let your lawn go dormant. Water it once every other week, but when you water, give it a good deep soak. Gold means still alive. Dead grass is gray. We can take advantage of fescue’s ability to go dormant and save water. In this fourth year of drought, it boggles my mind that some people still have an emerald green lawn.

We’ve all made mistakes. Asbestos was a mistake. It was the miracle building material for a while, until we figured out that breathing the fibers could kill a person. So asbestos is getting removed from buildings by guys in hazmat suits at a large cost. Channelizing rivers for flood control was another mistake. It turns out that the natural meanders of a river and its surrounding wetlands are much better at flood control than our engineered concrete and straight lines. Now they’re tearing out the flood control channels and putting the meanders back in the river. Who would have thought that something as innocuous as a lawn would turn out to be a mistake. Wait, let me rephrase that. Too many people with too much lawn in such a dry climate is the mistake.

The “too many people” part is not easy to fix, but we can fix the “too much lawn” part. And the state Department of Water Resources will help pay for the fix through their lawn rebate program. I’m delighted at the number of Tehachapi residents that are taking advantage of this program. My job is the hand-holding part. If you’re ready to turn your boring, water sucking, biological wasteland into a flowering buffet for the three B’s (birds, bees, and butterflies), I can help. Call for a no cost landscape consultation and we’ll talk about how to go about upgrading your landscape. Perhaps you’ve already applied for the turf rebate and have gotten stuck or lost. I can help. Can’t afford the up-front costs of a landscape makeover? The HERO program can help.

We’re all in this together. Together we make a big difference! That’s exciting.