And League City Blog delved into the issue of our chronic lack of water supply. There, the buzz-word was again our highly-regulated practice of residential "irrigation", without reference to the potential un-regulated consumptive contribution of slab-watering. If I had extra time on my hands today, I'd sit down and calculate my relative irrigation vs. slab watering needs. Given that, in a drought, I'm willing to risk the integrity of my lawn via under-watering but I'm never willing to risk the integrity of my house foundation, my gut instinct is telling me that the two consumption numbers might be comparable, but I won't know until I can steal a bit of time to do the actual math.
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| Walk softly and cast a long shadow: You can cut your irrigation use dramatically by allowing your St. Augustine lawn to remain LONG during drought. Legendarily (although I cannot find a web reference for it), Randy Lemmon explained why: because the pores in the grass must open to allow carbon dioxide to enter. If the individual blades of grass are too short, the grass loses too much water as it is opening itself to absorb CO2. If the grass blades are instead kept longer, they have more surface area and don't have to stay open as long, and therefore they lose less water. In the process, the longer blades also shade themselves and the underlying soil, further reducing water loss. Such is the oral tradition of Lemmonheads, at least. |
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