When Grass Should Die

If you’re like me, you like to have a yard that is beautiful, thriving, and green. That takes water. As a matter of fact, one common denominator between almost all the beautiful landscapes in central Texas is a sprinkler system. That’s because those landscape owners have discovered the best way to have a beautiful landscape is to give it enough water at the right time and a sprinkler system is the easiest way to accomplish that.

But what if the satisfaction you derive from a beautiful landscape goes down the dumper when you get your water bill? I know it’s hard to say you enjoy your beautiful landscape x dollars worth, but perhaps you have come to realize you DIDN’T enjoy it $_____ worth. (Fill in the amount of your last water bill.)  If that’s the case, it’s time to take action.

Maybe it’s time to make a choice in favor of financial frugality.  The professional water guys agree.  Any time you look at the efficient methods of watering landscapes, you’ll run into a concept called “allowable stress”.

Allowable stress assumes that your landscape can be “good enough” without being “perfect.” What a concept!  So, if your beautiful landscape carries with it a water bill that has gotten out of hand, maybe it’s time to change. 

In other words, if YOU are stressed because your plants aren’t, maybe it’s time for a role reversal. Maybe it’s time for some of your grass to die––or, at least go dormant.

If that’s where you’re headed, you might want to keep in mind a couple caveats.

1. Your landscape influences your property’s worth.  Just be aware that your landscape has at least two values. 
• Replacement Cost: Will it cost a lot to replace it if everything dies?
• Aesthetic Value:  A pretty place is usually worth more than an ugly or unkept place and “ugly” and “dead” go together like salt and pepper.
2. Establish a priority.  That 100 year old oak tree is probably worthy of more trouble than that blade of grass.  Water valuable trees and shrubs at the expense of lower value plants.

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing--with one possible exception.  If you can lower your water bill but keep everything on life support, that’s good.  But Bermudagrass is an exception.  It is a very drought tolerant plant and responds to all or nothing.  It does not respond well to just keeping it alive.  If you have Bermudagrass and want to wait until this drought has ended, you’re probably better off depriving Bermudagrass completely--within reason. 

Do your own test.  Try cutting your water in half.  If you water every day, cut it to every other day.  If you water three times a week, use the Water Budget feature on your irrigation controller to drop is to 50% of your current settings.  Look at how your landscape is responding to this diet.  If all is well, you might want to cut it in half again.  When you see a degradation, stop or even bring it back up a bit.

Your grass and other plants will not do as well as they did with the full meal, but your checkbook balance will notify you of your wisdom.   A little bit of stress transfer might be just what’s needed. 

Note: A properly maintained sprinkler system can save water, too.  If Rainstat Irrigation can help, please call us at 254-829-3800.

Want Yard of the Month? Hire Rainstat!

Not really.  We had very little to do with these nice folks getting yard of the month, but it does point out that beautiful landscapes like this don't happen without water.  The right amount at the right place at the right time. 

If your sprinkler system could use some fine tuning, we'd love to help.

Call Drew at 254.829.3800 to schedule a free system check.

The Well Went Dry

I think we paid $17,000 for our 16 acres.  It had a hand-dug well that all the local old-timers said had never run dry.  We had a house moved onto the land and got to work.  That was in June.  We were working on the house (a fixer upper), building fence, planting and loving it.  Our three kids were very young, and we all pitched in with everyone doing what they could.   It was great. 

August was hot.  Dry, too.  You know how Texas’ summers can get.   Anyway, the well went dry. 

I can remember the feeling of ruin when I realized that this wasn’t going to get better.  The well was dry, dry, dry.   We had a garden and some livestock.  We needed to take baths.  We needed to cook and drink.  We could do all of that, just not at home. 

Oh, and did I mention we couldn’t afford to get a new well dug? 

We had a relative that lived about a half mile away that agreed to let us use from her well.  We hauled water in opened-topped five gallon buckets, usually on the back of a Honda, Big Red three-wheeler.

One of the things we liked about this land was a wet-weather creek that ran through it.  The previous owner had pushed a tank on the creek for watering livestock.  We actually enjoyed fording the creek in wet times and the dry-times rumble tumble experience didn’t inconvenience any of us.  Until now. 

Our one toilet was one of those pre-efficient ones. It took five gallons of water to flush one time.  To put it another way, one flush demanded a one-mile round trip on a three-wheeler with a sloshing, overflowing, getting-you-wet, going-bouncy-through-the- creek bucket of water that sometimes didn’t have enough to do the deed by the time you got there.  Somehow the dictionary’s “a strong, unpleasant smell” doesn’t quite convey what is in my head when I say that often our house stunk. 

I may forget it someday, that Saturday morning, when Carmen, my wife’s college friend, just showed up at our house.   She and her family explained that they had lost our phone number, so they wrote us they were coming.  (We received her letter the following Monday.)  When you live on the back side of 16 acres that’s outside the city limits of a town with less than 400 souls, pop-ins are the exception to the norm.   It’s hard to remember, but I think we were about a month into the well-ran-dry period of our life.  We planned to work that day, which is to say none of us had made the effort to bathe, wash dishes or anything else requiring water.  We stunk, the house stunk and our “Oh, we’re so glad to see you” was, I’m sure, tainted by the mind-scream of  “Oh, I wish we had gotten your letter.”  We explained and they were very gracious, but that will forever be “my most uncomfortable moment.”  And water was the culprit. 

For all you “location, location, location” folks, I came up-close to the realization that land without water has a lower value than land with water.  How much less?  About 100%. 

I, again, don’t remember the details, but we gathered up enough coins to have Billy Harris come out and drill us a well.  It was a good well with cold, sweet water, and everyone lived happily ever after.   We have since sold that beautiful place and moved on.  We have city water now, and our house is clean and smells good.  We shower, brush our teeth, wash dishes, water the yard and flush the toilet without a thought.  

Could it happen again?  What’s your answer?   Could it? 

Here’s the take-home from this true story:  

--Yes, it could indeed.  Water could be unavailable–very easily.--

One way is quick.  If you lost electricity, you would be without water fast.  And there would be absolutely nothing you could do about it but say, “Go, man, go!” to the utility guys.   But, let’s say they went home because they couldn’t fix it.  The source, the generator, went down.  If you will let your mind consider your state, you will see you are in exactly the same position we were almost 30 years ago, with one huge exception.  You would have no place to haul water from.  (And, your car would have had its last tank of gasoline because there was no way to pump the fuel.)  Bottled water?  Sure, buy all you can, but watch out for that increasingly desperate mob that is trying to beat you to the punch.  Like everyone else, be sure and buy a lot because you have now discovered, how incredibly valuable water is. 

The other real possibility is one you won’t even consider and that is the loss of your water supply.  The fact is, this is where almost every US city is headed right now unless something happens.  What “something”?  Either new sources of water are going to have to be discovered or we are going to have to use less water.  Maybe a lot less water. 

That’s my call to you.  Start using less water.  Use just what you need, but no more. We have started a water catchment system at our house.  We are using “just enough water” to water our lawn.  We’ve installed a low-flow shower head, and our toilet uses a fraction of the old style.

It’s made a difference on our water bill even though we’re in the baby-steps stage.  But, if we all did what we could, when we could, the cumulative affect could be future-changing. 

You have choices now.  Please make wise ones.  

Comments?  Please let me hear. 

Business is Good––But It’s Not All Our Fault

We try to do the best we can.  But, as far as I know, no one else in the area does what we do. We don’t install sprinkler systems.  We don’t mow grass.  We don’t do landscaping.  We don’t spray weeds. 

All we do is repair and upgrade sprinkler systems.

And we think we know why that’s important. 

Installing a sprinkler system is pretty simple after you do it a couple hundred times.  Everything is under the installer’s control.  S/he plans the system, digs the trenches, connects the pipes, plumbs the heads, runs the wires and connects them to the controller mounted in the garage.  Before s/he covers everything up, the workers compare what they sees on the ground to the plan.  

Put another way, if you have workers that understand how to put all the pieces together and how to run a trencher, then the most important piece in the puzzle is the sprinkler Plan.  If the Plan is engineered correctly and the workers did what they were supposed to do, voilà!, it’s done.

––––

Please, now, consider repair.  Everything’s been running fine for years until . . .

Zone three quit working.  (If you are picturing what I have in my mind, the skill difference between someone who installs a sprinkler system and someone who repairs one, is evident and huge.)  There is nothing visual to indicate 1. that zone three has quit working or 2. that this yard even has a sprinkler system! 

Who are you going to call?  Here’s your choices: 1. The landscaper/irrigator/mower/jack-of-all-trades person who charges by the hour, or, 2. the one who does sprinkler repair only and guarantees his price and gets your okay before he ever starts the job?

If you chose the sprinkler repair specialist with the guaranteed up-front price, may I respectfully submit Rainstat Irrigation as your provider? 

Please call Drew at 254.829.3800 to schedule a free, no-obligation an up-front quote that we call a Promise.

Are We Running Out of Water?

You can hardly move around in this world without hearing about the water crisis.  "In the 20th century, we went to war over oil.  In the 21st century, we will go to war over water."  Really?  Before we go further, know that I'm biased.  I believe that governments and news media have a propensity to attempt to keep everyone scared.   It's like everyone graduated from the Chicken Little School of Outlook.  I am reading this book, Unquenchable - America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It, with my own set of filters that are ready to reject Robert Glennon's premise out of hand.

So why are we "running out" of water, and why should we care?   We have exactly the same amount of water today that we did at creation.  Remember Einstein's "matter is neither created nor destroyed"?  What then, is the problem?

First, we have more people.  

Second, we are fouling our own nests by our cavalier handling of fresh water.   Most of our water is saline and, therefore, undrinkable.  A look at our surface fresh water is telling.  The Great Lakes own 95% of fresh water in the US.  It would be an understatement to say these lakes are big.  But, if you want to see what can happen when you mix big bodies of water with bad decisions, all you have to do is look at the former USSR and the Aral Sea.  This was the world's fourth-largest inland body of water.  Today, it has lost 90% of it's water.  It all started by diverting fresh water that flowed into it for "good" but short-sighted purposes.  

If we continue to write checks without deposits to at least equal the withdrawals, we end up with no money.   All of life needs water to continue living.  We will run out, however, if we use too much.  We can't supply more water, so the role of the steward is becoming more important.  

We see a small role here.  

We believe we can help ensure that the the water you use is not wasted. 

Thanks for your interest.  More and more, I believe this is going to be of interest to us all.

Doug Saylor

P.S. I've changed my title here to CWS, Chief Water Steward.  I'm taking this seriously.