Lawn saga

Here it is, the cool season in the desert. Well, cool-ish. Compared to the rest of the country this is spring. Great for vegetable gardening - I've got peas coming and beets, cabbage, lettuces, parsnips, even strawberries from seed coming up. But the lawn saga is what I really wanted to update.

This morning I went to a desert landscaping seminar hosted by the Water District. I had the chance to speak with someone in the landscaping department from my city and he told me there is "no alternative to the bermuda/rye grass overseed cunundrum". What I have is cool weather drought resistent fescue - not, as he pointed out, heat resistent. "It is sure to look awful in the height of summer" he said categorically. Well, true, but not that bad. As I pointed out there is no one actually on the grass in the summer and so the need for it dwindles as the heat rises. So, the fact that it looks bad becomes solely an aesthetic concern. And frankly, even the Bermuda summer grass looks bad, patchy, brown, whereas the tall fescue I have actually goes bald in spots. Not the most attractive but it was a far sight easier to reseed than having to kill off another type of grass and then coax new grass up. The hoops I went through to get the lush green water conserving grass I now have - which was basically fertilizing, manureur and some nitrogen addition, throw on some seeds and water like heck - is a lot less than what my own gardener and gardeners went through around town to 'overseed'.

By the time September and the end to the drastic heat came about I had a lot of bald spots in the lawn but I must say the middle - where we have the graded gully (for flood reasons - doesn't happen often but better safe than sorry) and the rotor sprinklers overlap was thick, lush and deep green all summer no matter what the heat. This grass loves company. There more there is the more there will be. If it starts to give in to the desert it goes rapidly until the balding meets a densly packed patch of thick blades, then it will stop.

So the idea this year is to reseed the cuss out of my lawn until I can get it as densly packed as the soil will stand... and then when summer comes, hang on.