Where Have all the Barbaloots Gone?

"Can't we have the puppy pee on this lawn?" my little son inquired during our morning walk past the neighbor's house. "Look how green it is. Don't they know we're in a drought?"

Indeed, the neighbors lawn fills me with an unreasonable rage. In March of this year the governor of California announced that the state was in one of the worst droughts in history, only to see Californians save a whopping almost no water. After only a 3.6% water conservation for the month of April the government was forced to make water restrictions of 25% per household mandatory, which in our neighborhood also means mandatory restrictions on your outdoor watering to twice weekly or less.

Yet, my lovely neighbor's lawn, filled with the highest quality, fine-bladed, lush and soft Kentucky bluegrass is uniformly the color of water in a deep, still forest pond; the green of a ripe cucumber, watermelon green, the color of life and growth. The grass is so soft and so fine, with nary a tan or yellowed blade amid its luscious carpet, it forces you to imagine squinching your bare toes in it, or laying in it blowing dandelion wishes (if weeds were allowed, which they are not), or braiding daisy chains (if landscaping flowers were allowed to be picked, which they are not). Dr. Seuss must have had grass like this when he wrote of his famous truffula trees, "the touch of their tufts is much softer than silk."

What I'm saying is this lawn did not get nor remain this green by being watered twice a week. 

My lawn, as of March, is D-E-D dead. My lawn is as dead as the girl in the zombie movie who stops to make love in the peach orchard. My lawn is as dead as any character that you name out loud as your favorite character in Game of Thrones (why, Ned Stark, why? Why did you have to be so noble?). My lawn is an alien threat who, having been warned by Doctor Who to stop whatever they are doing, does not stop whatever they are doing. My lawn is a red-shirted nameless helmsman in a Star Trek away team. Dead, is where I'm going with this. Like so dead it's a little embarrassing. My lawn is the color of a truck stop waitress's hair in Texas.

My lawn when when it was green was getting watered twice a week and still using over 2000 gallons of water a week. In exchange for about $100 a month in water resources it gave me:

• the satisfaction of driving up to my house twice a day and seeing a green lawn that matched the other green lawns in the neighborhood
• a soapy chemical runoff that watered the street in front of my house really well
• the pleasure of playing on my grass no, wait, we never played on the grass
• the smell of fresh cut grass  no, shoot, not that either since the gardener cut it
• lots of barefoot front yard barbecues no, front yard parties are not really "done" around here
• some other stuff...wait...there was something. I feel like there was something though...

Total minutes of joy for the month: 60. So, like $1.60 a minute. I mean, you could have phone sex for that much. I think you can buy a dose of heroin that will jack you up long enough to make that worth it. I'm not sure the joy of driving up to see my green lawn before I pull into the garage twice a day was really that kind of high. 

We told our neighbors we were going to let the lawn die. They all shook their heads at how brave we were. Yep, just the heroes of Mount Suburbia over here, willing to shoulder the badge of shame that comes with a dusty brown lawn. Cancer survivors have nothing on us. I am Khaleesi, Queen of the desert grass.

The only problem was that in March we also start watering the vegetable garden more aggressively, and at the same time we decided to let the lawn die, we had just put in two more raised beds in the front yard. I decided to hand water with a watering can for a week so I could keep track of how much water I used; it came out to 175 gallons a week. In exchange for less than $10 a month in water resources it gave me (well, less, actually, since I saved rainwater that particular month): bowls of blueberries

• 5 bowls of blueberries 
• 4 small heads of broccoli
• 50 snow pea pods
• 15 handfuls of strawberries
• 4 heads of spring garlic
• 3 bouquets of fresh cut roses and scented geraniums
• the strong and heady fragrance of blossoming lemon trees
• the exercise of lifting and carrying buckets of water
• a bunch of fresh air and sunlight

Total minutes of joy: 900. That's a pretty good cost per minute of joy ratio. I can handle that. And it was good joy. Fresh blueberries straight from the bushes and a bunch of vitamin D from a few extra minutes of sunlight the garden forced me to get, AND we not only met our water restrictions mandate of 25%, we exceeded it by reducing 90%? I just might be the smartest girl, in the highest heels.

"And so," said the Lorax, "please pardon my cough,
they cannot live here, so I'm sending them off.
Where will they go?
I don't hopefully know."

Most people are addressing California's water issues by digging out their lawns and replacing them with hardscaping and rock gardens; some, like my Bluegrassian neighbors, ignore water restrictions entirely in favor of flowerless manicured outdoor carpets soaked in as much as three times the chemicals per acre of commercial agriculture. Meanwhile songbirds, butterflies and honeybees are becoming fewer and further between as their search for seeds and flowering plants for food pushes them (and us, by the way) into extinction. They are the Barbaloots, the Swomee Swans, and the Humming Fish that disappeared from the Lorax's Valley.

I propose a third option. A pot of flowers. A hanging tomato plant. A bunch of potatoes sprouting in a bucket. A fruit tree. Instead of wrought iron ivy curling up your fence posts, actual bean and pea plants. Instead of grass, paths between the carrots and strawberries patches. Food, not lawns. Butterflies, not chemicals. Purpose, not picture-perfect. For the water, for the bees, for the topsoil, we just have to do better with the resources we have. And unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot...

"...unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot
Nothing is going to get better. It's not."