Today is My Water Day

June 14, 2011 - Stage 2 Drought Rules

Today is Thursday, my watering day as designated by SAWS and the last digit of my address. Under Stage 2 drought rules, I can water once a week on my day from 3-8 am (yea right!) and 8-10 pm.

Keeping a lawn looking good under these restrictions without the aid of sprinkler system is difficult, but not for me. In fact, our turf looks better than ever. That's because what you see in the picture is the only grass we have. It's such a small area that I barely have to move the sprinkler to water it.


We used to have a tiny bit more grass than we do now, but this spring, we leveled No Man's Land with mulch, lowering the total sodded area to about 15 percent of the landscape.

My favorite girl playing on a bed of blended grass

We keep the lawnette because of this girl: Bailey. She has just enough grass for play, poop and pee. We scoop the poop every few days, and it's no big deal. The urine was a problem because Baily always picks the same spot for her morning relief (a few steps off the patio, in full West sun).

The St. Augustine was getting burned, and I wasn't sure how to address the dead spots. (Should I teach her to pee on the decayed granite? - it crossed my mind). As luck would have it, Bermuda from a neighbor's yard sneaked in and solved the dilemma. The Bermuda tolerates the urine better than the St. Augustine, and more importantly, it regrows quickly after an insult. I used to prefer a mono-species turf, but now I've embraced the blended look.

With the new mulch and the Bermuda patch, I'm proud to say the grass looks the best it ever has – drought be damned.

June 18, 2011 -Water hose obstacle course. (The hose bib is on the left side of the driveway.)

Please don't misunderstand. The drought is wreaking havoc, even in my yard.

With reasonable rainfall, I rarely have to water the plants in the other parts of the yard. But in the face of our exceptional drought, I have to drag the hose around to each plant and offer an occasional drink. I hate doing this. I prefer to leave the hose running low and slow, which makes moving it from plant to plant take f-o-r-e-v-e-r. On top of that, our front yard hose bib is in the worst location so I have to drag the hose three quarters of the way around our property, snagging it on plants and hardscape while I navigate the slopey sections in the dark.

No need for a pity party though. If this is an exceptional drought and my yard looks like this with only a slight inconvenience, image how fabulous it will be when we get back to our usual weather. I am looking forward to it.

Shades of Green

This post is devoted to three plants with outstanding foliage.


I love the fine stems and bright color of this salt marsh bulrush. Each reed tip has a tiny brown cap (sorry no pictures of this). The plant's other name is fiber optic grass. I grow it in a pot in my fountain.


I'd grow cabbage just for its form and blue-green leaves, but I like to eat it too. If you were a girl in the 80s or had a young daughter then, you can probably imagine a Cabbage Patch Kid folded up in the roset of leaves.


Fig ivy grows in the pattern of a spilled liquid with the leaves on each vine looking like the steps of a splay-footed dancer. The leaves have small reverse wrinkles (closer look) that remind me of  paper that has been crinkled then flattened.