Larry Rupp has worked for 30 years as a landscape horticulture specialist at Utah State University. He said water conservation doesn’t mean you have to drastically change the way you care for your landscape. You can save water and money on your water bill by simply being aware of the water you are currently using to keep your lawn green.
“We know that people with automatic irrigation tend to water more than people with manual systems, because they can just set it and forget it,” Rupp said. “That leads to problems like this spring for instance, in Cache Valley I saw automatic sprinklers popping up through snow and watering the landscape and that’s not necessary. If there’s snow you don’t need to water. But if they’re manually controlling it, obviously nobody is going to go out and say ‘Oh, it’s Thursday, I need to water,’ it doesn’t matter if there’s six inches of snow on the lawn.”
Rupp also said that although he understands how people want to get the most out of their lawns and plants, he said there are many benefits to watering less that will allow homeowners to keep grass, if you don’t want to replace it with rocks or artificial turf.
“When you think about it, if you fertilize and water your lawn so that it grows at its maximum rate, one of the benefits from that is that you get to mow your lawn more often,” Rupp said. “I don’t know about you, but for me that’s not exactly my goal. So in a landscape we can keep the plants healthy, and looking good using less water and not worrying about trying to get them to grow at the optimum rate, the way we would if we were say a fruit grower or an alfalfa grower.”
For those who are unsure if they can keep a guilt-free lawn, Rupp and other water specialists from the university are making house calls to assess lawn and water use in urban and rural areas of Utah as part of a water check program.
“Basically they’ll send somebody out to your home and they measure how much water your sprinkler system applies, how uniform it is, and then they help the homeowner come up with a sort of a management plan,” Rupp said. “So that kind of helps people know whether they’re overwatering.”