Dial it Down

Are you one of possibly 1.8 million Southern Californians considering redoing your yard with low-water landscaping?  If so, do your homework!  Begin with this much-cited article on pitfalls to avoid.  

No gravel or cactus in this low-water native garden!

And then take your time.  A quality low water garden is an undertaking to install, and usually takes some real attention the first year or two while it's getting established.  Better to study up and wait till next year than to do it badly this year.  So will it be another year of watering the lawn three times a week (or more) in SoCal?  Or you could do (and invite your friends and neighbors to do) something real simple, today, to reduce water use?

This cheery evergreen ground cover used to be lawn.  Dwarf Coyote Bush (Baccharis pilularis 'Pigeon Point.' )  My association planted the same plant.  Then killed it (apparently by overwatering.)

Watering three times a week.  (Except our association lawn, which is watered six times a week.)  This is so weird to me.  I have lived in Minnesota and in Connecticut.  It did not rain three times a week in those places.  Often once a week, sometimes not.  Nobody watered their lawn.  It got a bit brown in the middle of the summer.  No big deal.  Minnesota's summer climate is not so different from coastal California-- a bit more humid, not much, warmer at night, no dew (which does hydrate plants.)

This section of the garden is basically never watered.

So here's an idea.  Dial it down.  Wean your lawn down to being watered twice a week, or even every four or five days, and see how it goes.  If it gets a few brown spots, who has a right to complain?  To help the lawn cope with less water, dial down the fertilizer.  Then you get to dial down the mowing too! The technical aspects of how long to run each zone depend on your setup– but in general reduce number of watering days before reducing time of watering, unless you're obviously getting runoff.  And while night watering conserves water, it seems wise to water at a time you will notice if you are getting excess runoff or a sprinkler has broken! (Note for those who engage paid gardeners: expect your gardener will reset the sprinklers back to their previous settings. Repeatedly.)

Most native wildflowers want to be summer dormant.  They can sometimes be coaxed to bloom longer with copious water, only to drop dead before the next year.  Even this relatively late-blooming Monardella antonina (photographed at the end of June) is now dormant.

Are you watering your shrubs and roses as frequently as your lawn? Most established foundation plants can get by with (and many prefer) less frequent water than lawns.  I dialed down my non-native garden section to once every four days through these hot summers.  The Pomegranate loved less water; the Gardenias were a little out of sorts.  The Roses have less disease.  And I see far fewer snails!

Variegated Mockorange, Pittosporum tobira, back left, comes in dwarf and tall sizes, and takes pruning very well.  Also takes full sun, deep shade, swamps, little water... pretty much impossible to kill.  Just prune this non-native staple nicely please.

Austin Brown, of Coastkeeper Garden, notes that one of my favorite foundation non-natives, variegated Mockorange (Pittosporum tobira) does just fine with once-a-week watering and no fertilizer.  In conditions of low water and basically no fertilizer it seldom needs trimming.  It could be a staple in a once-a-week watered garden complete with Australian and Mediterranean reliables, and native beauties like Coffeeberry, Howard McMinn Manzanita, and Catalina Perfume.  Did you know established Bird of Paradise requires almost no summer water?  (Apparently the distinguished gardeners who compiled WUCOLS didn't.)

This two-year-old Catalina Perfume (Ribes vibernifolium) from the San Diego CNPS Garden Tour needs a haircut but fills a shady spot with enthusiasm.

The typical gardening approach in coastal Southern California has been: when in doubt, overwater.  This has the advantage of convenience, but is so, so wasteful.  Uneven sprinklers are set to run profusely to cover dry spots, the excess running into streets or drains.  They are seldom adjusted for even coverage, or, God forbid, allowed a dry spot or two.  Plants that die of overwater die quickly and are replaced with swamp-tolerant varieties.  This approach has been preferred to allowing a little natural summer browning, or replacing a few droopy water hogs with lower-water plants.  Further, overfertilizing will kill plants unless you flush most of the fertilizer away.  This is how Newport Beach, with its modest-size yards, uses water at the profligate rate of distant inland town with multi-acre properties, and creates polluting runoff to boot.

Happy Pomegranate:  In 15 years we never got more than a handful of pithy fruits from this little tree.  After I dialed my sprinklers down, it went nuts! 

Dialing it down is part of a landscaping approach and aesthetic that is humane, ecological, and ethical.  Southern California has been known for a surface "perfection" in its landscaping, that ignores hidden ugliness (fast plant growth, brilliant greens, no tolerance of dormancy or pests or disease...at the cost of draining lakes and aquifers, creating voluminous waste, runoff of fertilizer and pesticide into watersheds, and poisoning and starvation of wildlife.)  I admit I love the look, but I can see it at Disneyland if I like.  

What is acceptable?  Take spittle bugs.  They are harmless, and they love my California Sagebrush (Artemisia californica).  Their offerings can be hosed off, but often come back the next day.  So I have learned to accept their little white decorations.  I do hope some clever bird can make dinner out of them.

Consider making your garden more real and more beautiful below the surface.  Dialing it down allows the imperfection of a brown spot and a nibbled leaf, by allowing natural seasonal dormancy, natural slow growth, natural wildlife use (i.e. eating, digging...), a root-rot-free soil agreeable to natives, and less impact on water sources and waste streams.  We can accept imperfection.  (I admit the rabbit hole by my kitchen window was hard to accept!)  We can share our discoveries: which plants languish and which prosper, and then plant more of the latter. (The rabbits are gone now– probably fed a neighborhood bobcat, and they only mowed down the 'Paprika' Yarrow.)

Native gardeners accept that little blooms in September.  So we fuss over a lone bloom.  Here is California Fuchsia (Epilobium canum), which is just flowering in my yard. 

I finish with this reflection from a commercial organic fruit grower who has dialed it down.

So, what's the natural use of water?  If these peaches are naturally small, I don't need to water them as much. Let me just grow them naturally.  I realized, I don't think these peaches want to be big.  What's the matter with that?  That's my breakthrough: Oh, my god, I may have been over-watering all these years.  Why?  Because we had access [to water].  It was cheap.  It was supposedly free.  And it's not now.  (David Matsumoto, organic fruit grower, LA Times 6/4/2015)

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