Two weeks ago, I went to a free class at the Natural Gardener on maintaining a lawn naturally. I was hoping to find out great information on what I thought was pretty difficult issue in central Texas. It turns out there is nothing natural about trying to maintain a lawn in Texas. Sure, you can put on the nifty organic all natural products that they were selling and what not, but the manpower and resources involved are crazy. Lawns do not want to exist in central Texas, nor should they given what a waste of resources it is. The recommendation that really caught my eye was the recommendation of watering your yard twice weekly, and watering a full inch each time! I also got the impression that if you were outside the city limits and did not have water restrictions, they would recommend a third watering.
Thinking this must be a crazy amount of water, I did some searching to see what this would calculate to if you had even a modest sized yard. For example, if you had a 1/5 acre plot, you might have 30' x 40' in each the front, back of the house, plus a little extra on the sides. This would amount to 3600 square feet that needs watering twice each week. So I found out that 624 gallons equals 1 inch of water for 1,000 square feet (a 31 x 32 plot), so your 3600 square foot lawn would need 2,246 gallons every time you water! This is an average of 20,214 gallons a month. This would be about 160,000 gallons annually!!! (accounting for ~4 months of not water for dormant grassand rainfall). I mean, what is grass good for? Not much! The average household in Austin uses 8500 gallons of water each month, although this is more during the hot months. But my guess is if everyone followed the guidelines above, the usage would be much higher.
I guess the big question is what exactly is sustainable water usage? Some people have yards, others live in apartment complexes and can't harvest rainwater etc., although there are also rivers running through Austin. My opinion is that for landscaping, sustainable usage would be what rains down. So get a good rain harvesting system. Austin gets an annual rainfall of about 33 inches, although that is hardly evenly distributed through the year. Calculating that out for 1/5 acre that could yield a potential 179,000 gallons each year, provided you were able to harvest every drop of water that fell on your land. A more reasonable estimate might be a good cistern to collect water from the roof, this might harvest for 1600 square feet, or 32,900 gallons a year. By this estimation maintaining a yard is absolutely not sustainable, since it would require 130,000 more gallons than you could provide. But maybe a small garden is possible. Or maybe native grasses like buffalo grass. Sigh. I wish native plants were cheaper. I don't understand why they had to tear them out and put grass in instead.
See also:
http://www.examiner.com/green-living-in-austin/new-report-says-current-water-usage-not-sustainable
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/2009/08/17/0817water.html
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