It’s going to be a summer of brown grass and hard choices for Southern California lawn owners facing the Metropolitan Water District’s one-day-a-week watering restrictions starting June 1.
With just eight minutes of water once a week, the recommended amount people should use with traditional sprinklers, you can’t keep a lawn green. Period.
“Most lawns are going to go dormant, and depending on the grass, some will be a total loss,” said Jim Baird, a turf grass specialist at UC Riverside’s Turfgrass Research Facility.
The preferred variety in Southern California, fescue lawns, are used to getting water multiple times a week. The water-thirsty fescue will be hard-pressed to stay alive in communities facing water restrictions, which include about 6 million people in Los Angeles, Ventura and San Bernardino counties. And that’s just fine with people who believe ornamental or “nonfunctional” lawns are a colossal waste of precious resources in Southern California.
“If you’re playing soccer on it or using it for picnics with the family, fine,” said Evan Meyer, director of the Theodore Payne Foundation, which grows, sells and preserves California native plants. “But if your lawn is just ornamental, it’s indefensible given the reality of our water situation here.”
Rebecca Kimitch, a Metropolitan Water District spokesperson, put it more bluntly: “‘As we always say, ‘If you’re only on your grass to mow it, then get rid of it.’”
But turf advocates like Baird see the demise of Southern California lawns as short-sighted. Lawns provide a valuable service here because they reduce dust, sequester carbon and keep communities significantly cooler while making neighborhoods more desirable, he said.
For the last decade Baird has been trying to educate government officials and lawn owners about the most water-efficient ways to grow traditional lawns in this region. He suggests:
- Planting warm-season grasses such as Bermuda, Kikuyu and buffalo grass, which use at least 20% to 50% less water than the tall fescue varieties that make up the majority of SoCal lawns. (The downside: Warm-season grasses go brown and dormant in the cold winter months, especially in inland areas.)
- Not irrigating during the cooler winter months.
- Watering at night or early morning up to three times a week during the hottest months for two minutes at a time over several hours, so the water has a chance to soak in and not run off into the street. For example, a 14-minute watering session would be stretched out over seven hours from, say, midnight to 7 a.m. with the sprinklers staying on just two minutes at a time for each hour.
To his frustration, however, that’s not what people do. “Most people don’t even know how their automatic sprinkler systems work,” Baird said. “They just ask their gardeners … to set the [sprinkler] clocks so the grass stays green, and the gardeners set the clocks to overwater so they don’t lose their jobs. I see people’s irrigation running every night and it’s so sad, because now the lawns will suffer because people waste water and faulty irrigation systems waste water. It’s not the grass wasting water.”
The stringent watering rules apply only to the MWD’s customers who rely on water from the severely depleted State Water Project, which historically collects about 3 million acre-feet of water over a three-year period, on average, but has collected only 600,000 acre-feet of water over the last three years, Kimitch said.
MWD also collects water from the Colorado River Aqueduct, as well as local sources such as groundwater supplies and recycled water, but customers in the crisis zone can’t get that water because their pipes are connected only to State Water Project supplies. It’s basically a distribution issue that affects about a third of MWD’s Southern California customers, Kimitch said. Meanwhile, other communities have more water available — at least for now — so you may…
Read More: How to get rebates for removing turf in Los Angeles