Green Lawncare in Texas

Now that it's not such a depressing sight, I can report on the state of my lawn.

We bought a house in June. We live in Texas. You probably heard about the drought. It made the national news. We were gone for most of July. So, here's the situation:

June 1 -- beautiful lush green grass; we move in. We ignore the grass as we paint the house & move.
July -- we're gone. Continue ignoring grass. Call my brother mid-July after hearing from people all over the northeast about the drought. He waters the lawn. Once.
August 1 -- we come back to Texas. The grass is brown. And crunchy. When I tried to hand-water some of the grass in the back yard, it washed away. :/

Austin has water restrictions right now. We can only water lawns on Sundays before 10 am or after 7 pm. It has started raining again, which is sort of hard to believe after so little rain all summer long.

So what does the lawn look like now?

Well. It looks different. But not so bad. When we came back, I decided that we would just try to "save" a patch of grass in front of the house. There was also some grass under a big oak tree that had not done so bad, so I gave it a little hand-watering love (permitted under watering restrictions). I pretty much let the rest of the (huge) lawn go.

The grass is mostly St. Augustine, which is not the preferred grass for our area. A better choice would be bermuda or buffalo grass, which does not need as much water. So, a lot of it died. But some of it is coming back with the rain that we are having now, and starting to cover some of the bare patches. And then a large portion of the side yard is covered in a fluffy clovery substance. Not sure what it is.

We've planted a couple of native trees and are planning on planting some more. We are hoping that some more trees on the lot will help with erosion control (very important since our house backs up to a steep drop-off with a sometimes creek) and in the prevention of desertification. The grass underneath the tree was just so much happier than the grass in the burning sun.

When we get more organized, we will be replacing some of the grass with native plants and mulch or gravel. I'm still not totally sure what the best method is, so I will be doing some more research.

Mowing
I think that what helped the lawn look slightly better than surrounding lawns is that we weren't here to mow it. I've noticed that a couple of the neighbors have lawn services that cut the grass regardless of what's going on. I have seen one service cut the grass in the rain -- twice! Many people cut the grass very short and it really suffers in the sun when it is that short.

All About Lawns recommends the following care for a lawn during a drought:
1. let your lawn grow higher than usual
2. mulch the clippings
3. water in the morning
4. plant drought-tolerant grass
5. fertilize less
6. or let your lawn go dormant

It's funny that I did #1, 5 and 6 by default just by not being here :)

When we got back, we had the chance to try suggestion #2 -- mulch the clippings. Again, this is because of laziness and frugality, not because we read the suggestions at the time.

Our Lawn Mower
We bought a push reel mower -- the kind that uses no gas or electricity. It was under 100 dollars at Lowe's. I thought it was pretty cool that it came in a small box that I could easily pop in the back seat of my car. I wasn't expecting that in a lawn mower. I had the choice of paying 20 or 30 extra dollars for a bag, but I decided not to.

It's easy to push. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. My 8 year old son can push it with no problem. I mowed the lawn the other day in platform shoes and a dress. (Maybe not totally wise, but I was in a hurry). The only annoying thing is that EVERY STICK IN THE WHOLE YARD will get stuck in the blades and you have to stop and very carefully pull it out. I have to stop every couple of minutes, but other than that, the mowing thing is a breeze. This is also the reason that, although my son CAN mow the lawn, I don't think he's quite old enough to do it. I have no problem having him push the mower, but I'm afraid he might miscalculate the stick removal and take off a finger.

If the grass gets really tall or there are crazy weeds, the mower doesn't do the greatest job. Weeds really need to be weed-whacked or they just stay there, waving around in the middle of the lawn.

Mulching the cuttings
Again, this happened because of laziness and frugality. I could buy the bag or rake the cuttings. Didn't want to do either. I just left the grass fall. When it finally started raining, I noticed there were a couple of areas where the grass didn't seem to be growing back because it was all clumped with grass (this is called "thatch" in the lawn-care world), so I raked those areas. The rest of the lawn seemed to do just fine.

Mulching the cuttings is beneficial to the lawn if you don't let the lawn get too long. You should only be cutting about 1/3 of the blade of grass at a time. Ideally, the cuttings will fall INTO the lawn, helping the soil hold in moisture and providing some fertilizer. If the grass is so long that it covers the lawn, it just builds up thatch and makes it hard for the grass to grow.

Ahhh... the joys of home-ownership. Just a few months ago I was totally innocent of anything lawn-care related.