Musings: Perfect lawns drink what people should sip
Overwatered lawns provide an ideal environment for mosquitoes to breed. Credit: Newsday/Steve Pfost
Maybe someone should invent a perfect lawn-green organic paint that the hundreds of Lawn Island landscapers in their road-blocking trucks and trailers can spray on the lawns they maintain weekly. It would be cheaper than dousing drinking water on the lawns every morning between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m.
On a recent August morning, a few days after we received a robocall from the Suffolk County Water Authority asking county residents to stop watering their lawns, I counted about one-third of the houses near me either in the act of watering or with noticeable puddles in front of their houses, and no, it did not rain the night before.
It is difficult to think of a more wasteful habit than pouring water that has been pumped, filtered, purified and distributed on the ground. Yet it is an accepted practice, and in some neighborhoods, if your lawn is not that perfect green, your neighbors will talk about you, or report you to some homeowners organization. Maybe we should require that people who have irrigation systems pour fresh milk from the supermarket down the sewers as well.
Worse, watering lawns daily (usually in the predawn hours) provides a perfect environment for mosquitoes to breed. The solution for that, of course, is to spray poisons on your lawn.
We don’t water our lawn. Any outdoor use of water for us is for a small vegetable garden a couple of times a week. I look forward to late July and August when our lawn becomes brown and dormant and does not need to be cut until September.
I don’t know how much Lawn Islanders spend to maintain their lawns, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s thousands of dollars a year to have someone maintain their irrigation systems, rake, spray and mow their lawns weekly, and then rake them again in the fall. And yet, people complain about the high cost of living on Lawn Island. Want to save a couple thousand bucks a year? Get a robotic lawn mower and stop dumping drinking water on your lawn.
Meanwhile, there is a way to stop the irrigation silliness: Charge irrigating homeowners an annual fee for sprinkling. Boy, that would drive some people nuts.
— Bill Olson, Westhampton
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