You and your true love can walk through fields of gold.
Simply don’t water your lawn.
“Golden is gorgeous,” said Clea Rome, planner with the Clallam Conservation District, during a recent water-saving workshop.
Watering lawn grass deeply once a month will let it go dormant but not dead. It will get green again with the return of wet weather, she said.
Rome’s suggestion was just one of many for people who attended the workshop. Some of them came to qualify for discounts on rain barrels the conservation district will sell next weekend.
Other topics included improving soils, choosing drought-resistant plants, using mulch, putting the right plants in the right places, replacing grass with clover, planting lawns only where you need them — and eliminating lawns entirely.
“We Americans love our lawns,” Rome said.
For that we can blame the British, she said, who enjoy year-round rain. They exported lawn landscaping to New England, from which it spread across the United States, even to parched lands like Arizona’s.
And, come this dry summer, like the North Olympic Peninsula.
Water use in Sequim
In a typical summer, the Sequim area uses up to 1.4 million gallons per day of water that will be precious as the currently meager mountain snowpack dribbles into diminishing streams.
In addition to their thirst, lawns provoke homeowners to use herbicides and pesticides.
Land in the Puget Sound region receives nearly 3 million pounds of pesticide in a usual year, Rome said. The chemicals kill pests but also harm lawns by killing beneficial insects and microbes that improve the soil.
A homeowner could replace grass with gravel. Or he or she could reduce the lawn size with patios, decks, or pathways of flagstones or bricks that let water seep through.
Homeowners also can fashion rain gardens — small depressions in the ground that trap rain. The conservation district has lists of plants that thrive in these damp hollows.
