Last Updated on February 15, 2025 by Brian Beck
2025 is upon us and the growing season and the battle for your lawn will once again begin, but does it have to be the same war? While there will be the typical struggles with the usual things like aeration, weed control, getting the irrigation running, and laying down fertilizer, but is this system working? The biggest cost that people contend with is their water expense. For most people it seems like they are being penalized for keeping their lawn in a marginal state. For some who can keep up with this cost, it is bittersweet, for others, they have already given up and allowed to lawn to bare patches and weeds. To add insult to injury you will face other burdens as your HOA that has demands, your water authority that makes you feel like a war criminal and your neighbor, the neighborhood Karen who turned you in during Covid for playing frisbee in your front yard with your kids, is jealous just because your lawn is a little greener than others. It can get a little exhausting and stupid.
So, why the struggle? Well, the politics of water and its use is a very deep and stupid rabbit hole. In the light of solutions, everything that is brought to the table from warm season grasses like buffalo grass, to mulch, xeriscapes and rock (please don’t put in rock), are all escapes from the high cost of water and have their own problems, but what no one is talking about is what is causing the high use of water. I find this like a sea of sick people that have all of these different diseases and the establishment recommending or ordering that certain drugs be used as to cut off the head of the disease when no one is talking about what is causing the problem in the first place and avoiding the disease rather than suffering the effects of the disease (sound familiar?)
I saw a video today that walks people through on how to remove their bluegrass lawn and replace it with a buffalo grass lawn. I do not have a problem with this at all. I believe that we should maintaining green spaces to counter urban heat and encourage the water cycle (rain) and cool the air. This video proposed cutting out the lawn, bringing in soil, tilling it in and planting (from seed because all of the turf farmers have given up on growing it because it is so difficult to do so, if that is worth anything) in the hopes that all of the water problems will be suddenly destroyed in just a few months with a lawn in the background that looks like the perfect specimen of the grass type. The expense to do this on a 4000 sqft lawn would take years to re coop, with a lot of unnecessary work that just adds to the mammoth task just to save a hundred dollars on the water bill. No one mentions that Buffalo grass only grows for about 4 months out of the year and that realistically it will take two to three years to get the lawn that you just destroyed. I felt like a victim of some agenda, like someone was asking me to refinance my house all over again so they could get more interest out of me.
What is not being mentioned at all is the health of the soil and how that is causing the water usage. This is not intentionally being left out (I hope) because the ones asking you to tear down your house and rebuild it just because it needs to be painted were educated in a system that embraces a certain method of soil fertility that requires a manmade product rather than using the operating system that nature uses. I am of course making a comparison between a synthetic system and a biological one. It all began with our soil, which is high pH, low biology, low organic matter which means that the soil is hostile for growing grass and does not hold any water, allowing most of it to evaporate leaving you bear the burden of picking up the slack. This what you are not being told. The other half of what you are not being told is that there is a solution that corrects this dysfunction for less than half the cost of tearing out your lawn with ZERO (That means NONE) mechanical intervention and jumpstarting a biological program that will allow you to do several things such as increasing your soil water carrying capacity, using atmospheric nitrogen as free fertilizer and lessening the need for weed control. This translates into a lawn that uses 20-50% less water, fertilizer and herbicides that are causing all of your grief.
Starting over is not at all necessary and wasting your time and money with a brand new species of grass that is foreign to you is not required. It all begins with the soil, identifying the problems with soil testing, correcting the problems to create balance in the soil and growing a biological system that will work with your lawn rather than against it. Trust me, the problem is not with your grass, it is with the soil. Once you correct that, the system will pay for itself in a year and you will have the lawn that you should have had from the beginning that was hidden from you due to an adherence to a system that creates more problems than it solves.
