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Water Conservation Tips for the Home Landscape

Know Your Lawn

Most lawns are either bluegrass or tall fescue. Bluegrass will require more water to keep looking green than tall fescue. New lawns will require more water than established lawns.

Know Your Irrigation System

Locate the time clock and learn how to set it. Know where the shut-off valve is in case of an emergency.

Know Your Soil Type

Sandy soils do not hold water as long as clay soils and may require more water to keep lawns looking nice. On the other hand, with proper watering, you can promote deep-root growth in sandy soils that go longer without water than you think.

Understand How Weather Affects Your Lawn

High temperatures and low humidity will cause your lawn to use more water (evapotranspiration.) Wind will also increase water loss. You can find the evapotranspration rate and turf watering requirements on the weather page's "Past Seven Days" table for your area.

New Lawns (Planted within the last two months)

Irrigate twice a day for the first week, once a day for the next two weeks, then every other day for the next two weeks. Five to six weeks after planting, irrigate once every three days.

Established Lawns (At Least Three Months Old)

Irrigate once every three days. Set sprinkler run time for 30-45 minutes. Apply a .7-1 inch of water each irrigation. If lawn appears dry and stressed, water every two days applying .5 - .7 each time (about 20-30 minutes.) Once the lawn recovers, move back to every three days and increase the run time.

Hard to Manage Areas

Do you notice excessive run off when you water? Is the area sloped or do the soils contain heavy clay? These areas will need special care. Consider cycling or interval watering: apply water for ten minutes, wait one hour, then apply for the remaining time.

How to Maintain a Healthy Lawn

Mow at 2½ - 3½ inches.
Water deep but infrequently. If the lawn is high, do not remove more than inch in one mowing. Keep mower blades sharp. Mulching blades work well as long as you do not let grass get too high. Aerate once a year–twice if you have heavy soil. Irrigate in the early morning hours before sunrise (2-5 am is suggested.) Fertilize twice a year, once in the spring and again in the fall.

Evaluating Your Sprinkler System

In order to determine how much water to apply to your lawn, you must first know the delivery rate and the efficiency of your system. A simple evaluation can be done with a "Sprinkler Performance Kit" that can be obtained from the Washington County Water Conservation District. Contact Julie Breckenridge (Title), 673-3617, at the District Office, 136 North 100 East, St. George, Utah.

The kit consists of 10 collection cups, a soil probe, and some colored flags. First, locate the sprinkler heads in the zone to be evaluated and mark each head with a flag. Place collection cups in a grid pattern as shown in the diagram. Containers should be placed at the midpoint between sprinkler heads. Determine which zone you are checking on your time clock and let it run for a specified time. For example, if you normally run your sprinkler for 15 minutes, turn it on and let it run 15 minutes. While your sprinklers are running, draw a simple sketch of your yard. Note where each sprinkler head is located as well as the collection cups.

While you are making the sketch, note any sprinkler heads that are not functioning properly. Identify any that may be broken or misaligned. When the system turns off, read the water level in each cup and record the amount of water on your drawing by the cup it correlates to. The cups are designed to be quite accurate and are read in one-hundredths of an inch. Be sure to read the "depth in inches" scale and not the one in centimeters. After you have read and recorded all the collection cup readings, obtain a clean sheet of notebook paper. On this sheet, list all of the readings from highest to lowest in descending order. Ideally, the amounts should be close to each other. Cups that only measured a trace of water are an indication of poor coverage in that particular area. Add all of the amounts together and divide the total by the number of samples to get an average. This average is the amount of water (inches) that you are applying each time you irrigate. The following chart gives you an idea of how much water you should be putting on in a week.

Soils

The soil probe provided in your kit is useful for two things: 1) determining root depth; and 2) understanding how deeply you are watering. An hour or so after watering, push the probe into the soil as far as you can and extract a plug of soil. Ideally, you should see grass roots down 5-6" below the surface. Your watering cycle should also thoroughly wet this same area (rooting depth.) Here is where soil texture can make a difference. It will generally take less water to fill the root depth in a sandy soil than a clay soil. Realize that sandy soil does not hold water as long and may need to be watered more often.

Run-Off

We define "run-off" as the point at which water is not going into the ground as fast as it is being applied. This, of course, is wasted water as it ends up in the street, sidewalk, or going down the gutter.

Run-off may be caused by these reasons:

Water application rate is too fast.
Soil type is heavy.
Top of soil may be crusted over.
Lawn may have a heavy layer of thatch.
Area may be on a slope.

Run-off may be corrected with the following suggestions:

Pre-wet your lawn with a short cycle of 5-10 minutes and come back one hour later and run sprinklers again for an additional 30-40 minutes or so.
Heavy soil will benefit from the addition of organic matter. A light application of organic fertilizer should be applied after aeration.
Aerate soil twice a year.
De-thatching or aeration will remove thatch build-up, but you need to learn why thatch is building up. The most common causes are over-fertilization and mowing too short.
Aeration may help, but you may also look at changing the area to something else that can be drip-irrigated (i.e., shrubs or trees.)