Landscaping - Garden Saving Tips
Limit the cost of your landscaping
Running out of time and patience for watering and mowing. Below are a few ways to can maximize the look of your yard and lower its impact.
Landscaping
Landscaping is a natural and beautiful way to keep your home cool in summer and reduce your energy bills. A well-placed tree, shrub, or vine can deliver effective shade, act as a windbreak, and reduce your energy bills. Carefully positioned trees can save up to 25% of the energy a typical household uses. Research shows that summer day-time air temperatures can be 3°–6° cooler in tree-shaded neighborhoods than in treeless areas. Designing the proper way to landscape can be beautiful and efficient addition to your home.
A lattice or trellis with climbing vines or a planter box with trailing vines shades the home while admitting cooling breezes to the shaded area.
Lawn Watering
First of all, you should forget daily watering for a couple of reasons. It simply isn't necessary, and with many restrictions in place lately regarding "odd and even day" watering, it's not allowed. Besides, that method isn't exactly fair, since those with odd-numbered addresses get two straight days of watering when a month contains 31 days. But there's no need to be concerned. Your lawn doesn't need that much water anyway.
Most experts agree that your lawn needs about an inch of water a week, be it from rain or your sprinkler. That can be accomplished with one good, thorough soaking instead of daily watering for a few minutes at a time. It's fairly easy to determine how long your sprinkler needs to run to provide an inch. Next time you water, place a couple of coffee cans or other containers in the path of the sprinkler. Note how long it takes to get one inch of water in the containers.
The best time of day to water is during the early morning hours - around 3:00 - when the water pressure is highest. In addition, water will have a chance to soak down into the ground before evaporating, thus providing the most benefit for the lawn. And any water left on the lawn will be evaporated away in a timely manner when daylight arrives.
Mid-afternoon watering is probably the worst time to water, as far as efficient water use is concerned. Too much will evaporate away before it has a chance to soak down. You'll be using a lot of water, but won't be doing your lawn all that much good. Even though it may be very tempting to turn on the sprinkler during one of those scorching days, hold off on it.
Evening watering will permit the water to soak down just fine, but water will remain on the lawn way too long, which can invite fungus and diseases.
With draught conditions continuing to be a problem this can become even more of an issue. We can have a beautiful lawn and save on water at the same time just by watering the right amount at the right time.
XERISCAPING
Xeriscaping is a systematic method of promoting water conservation in landscaped areas. Although xeriscaping is mostly used in arid regions, its principles can be used in any region to help conserve water.
