The Drought of Ought-Five
Northern Illinois is in the midst of a near-record drought. Lawns are brown and pitiful. Crops are endangered. Inevitably, the question of whether to water the dormant (not dead) lawn rises. Trib columnist Eric Zorn offers his insight and later reflects the following in his response to a poll about watering.
Count me as someone refusing the water my lawn. I watered once when I wanted to play with my daughter using the sprinkler. Needless to say, some neighbors with built-in misting systems have almost freakishly out-of-place, lush, green lawns. Most of us sensible folk just roll our eyes at their efforts. As Zorn says, we're truly at nature's whim. Some summers just aren't meant for green lawns.
Could it be that, in this drought, green lawns will become like deep suntans, furs and Hummer SUVs? No longer symbols of wealth and beauty, but symbols of irresponsibility, decadence and wretched excess?
Count me as someone refusing the water my lawn. I watered once when I wanted to play with my daughter using the sprinkler. Needless to say, some neighbors with built-in misting systems have almost freakishly out-of-place, lush, green lawns. Most of us sensible folk just roll our eyes at their efforts. As Zorn says, we're truly at nature's whim. Some summers just aren't meant for green lawns.
Posted by GiromiDe @ 10:43 AM
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1 Comments:
Maybe it's because I grew up in small-town Maine half a century ago, with a sparse layer of grass in the yard that barely qualified as a lawn, but I've never watered a lawn in my life. Even after 25 years in Ithaca NY, I can't recall my ex ever doing anything to the lawn besides mowing it, and very occasionally dousing the dandelions with herbicide. The way we figured it, if it was too dry for the lawn to survive, it was too dry for us to waste well water on a lawn.
[Permalink] [ popup]Now, I realize that lawns in the south are, quite literally, not the same as lawns in the north, and I'm on city water, not a well. But I'll be hanged if I'll run up my water bill to keep the grass green and growing so I'll have to go out and mow it in this heat. I'm quite seriously planning to replace as much of the lawn as I can with drought-tolerant plantings and ground covers, the kind that you can't kill with a club.
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