I’ve called this year our demolition year, and it definitely has been. We’ve ripped out enough 50 year old shrubs to make a pile big enough for someone to live in. Good thing about ripping stuff out is it is cheap, even if it is labor intensive. Landscape installation can get quite expensive fast, and we do not have an adequate budget. As a guideline, total landscape installation can cost 10-30% of the value of the house.. It’s not a crazy amount: although doing it yourself and over time will reduce the cost. Hopefully, for a fraction of the cost and a lot of labor we’ll still get some good results.

This fence line had a ton of volunteer maples, and half-dead bridal wreath spireas.

After lots of pruning: I wouldn’t mind if some of the spireas came back, but I don’t care if they don’t too.

Right now thought, the landscape is a bundle of hopeful dreams and currently a lot of projects in the making. It looks awful. I’m letting weeds grow and grass die. But I think the difference between what I’m doing and a neglected landscape is that I have a vision for mine, and I’m letting weeds grow and grass die because I’m working toward something that will be better. I understand that weeds are better than bare soil, that I don’t want to waste the valuable resource of water on a non-wanted lawn. The landscape is progressing, even if it is nowhere close to where I want it to be. And we finally got rid of all the garbage that had piling in the backyard.

In the middle of mowing the back half of our yard. Everything growing here is weeds.

All done. Notice the big pile of shrubs on the left, and the old shed that has transformed into a storage area–now with stuff we want instead of garbage. Much better than before.

In the massive weed patch that makes up our backyard, I did want to grow squash and other large plants. After I mowed, Joe tilled, we laid down a soaker hose and black plastic mulch. Today, I went to go water the squash and discovered that the hose had a hole and wouldn’t work. So I had to pull up the plastic mulch, get a new soaker hose, and then put everything back together. Hopefully the hose doesn’t break again. I do like using soaker hoses and plastic mulch on curcurbits, they do really well and there isn’t a lot of weeding.

Later update:

Turns out I haven’t even been using the soaker hoses. I found it isn’t too hard to just hand water with the water turn, and that’s how I’ve been irrigating everything. The only problem is there is only a small, less important part of my yard that is effectively irrigated by the irrigation turn, and I’m getting tire of having to water so much by hand. The worst is the lawn. I actually don’t mind watering the edibles and flowers. But I hate grass. I feel like it is a status symbol of how your landscape is doing, and mine is dry. I irrigated the park strip yesterday, for the first time this year. Even thought I don’t want grass there, I decided I better not kill it off until I’m ready to put something else out there.

Lawn only needs to be deeply irrigated once a month to not die. It needs a lot more water to stay green, but  I am not yet ready to give my nemesis that pleasure. I have decided to kill the lawn in my front yard though. No irrigation, and because it is a high traffic area, it is decomposing fast. It’ll look a lot better with whatever ends up there.

I read somewhere that Box Elder county has the highest per capita use of water in Utah. I have no idea if this accurate, nor can I quickly find the data again. Box Elder county is very agricultural, which is were a lot of our water goes. I am not living or working on a farm, so this is not about the agricultural use of water. This is about the stupid use of residential culinary and secondary water in Brigham City.

In my previous apartment and in my current home, we had a water turn. This is a very old system of taking turns using ditch water. In a residential area, I think this is becoming almost unheard of. Many cities switch over to a pressurized secondary irrigation system, which make sense. Landscapes are currently designed to work on some sort of already pressurized irrigation.

I think water turns are fine, but the design of our landscape has to follow suit. Wide expanses of lawn aren’t going to fit everywhere, because water will only flow downhill unless it is physically moved or pumped. Currently, I can see based on irrigation water where I would want my lawn, where I want more water-wise mixed beds, where I can grow veggies. I could grow everything I want using only my secondary water turn, with the right design. But not right now. In order to maintain a good state of landscape maintenance (and I’m not, most of my grass is not green), I have to use culinary water.

Here’s our current irrigation set-up while running

I think most people have just switched over to using culinary water for the majority or all of their landscape, even if they have access to an irrigation turn. There are a few innovators out there who take a more full advantage of the secondary system.  There are also a lot of people who don’t use the water at all. At both places where I have had an irrigation turn, I was supposed to have a one hour turn. The next person in line for the water will switch off my water to get to their property. When it’s midnight, you got out once to turn on the irrigation water, not to turn it off. I would expect someone down the line coming and getting it, but when I wake up the irrigation is still running on my property. People are clearly not taking their turn.

So right now Brigham City has a secondary irrigation system that isn’t widely used. Because it isn’t widely used a lot of water is wasted going down gutters or over-irrigating areas. Brigham City also has tons of culinary water that is getting drenched onto lawns in order to maintain a certain appearance, not for any sort of production. If there is ever a water shortage in Brigham City, it is not because there is a lack of water. It is because the water is used so poorly.

We live in place with only 18″ of rain a year, and yet we try to maintain these landscapes that would only naturally function in a much more humid environment. It’s madness. So if anyone wants to know why my grass is crunchy right now, it’s because I’m not going to just follow the stupidity out there of wasting water just to maintain a green, never-used lawn. I know I live in a dry environment, and I’m going to act like it, even if no-one else does.

My thoughts now are how do I design my landscape? I can see a huge benefit of Brigham City switching to a pressurized secondary irrigation system. It would help both culinary and secondary water be used much more efficiently. It might happen someday, although I doubt there are immediate plans or funding.

But I would be fine with a water turn. I’m not stuck in wanting wide swaths of green lawn. I can design my landscape to use only secondary water as irrigation, with the present system. But should I pursue that route, or rather look forward and push for a day with pressurized secondary irrigation? I probably will design my landscape around my irrigation turn, if only to show people how to take advantage of that resource. If we did take advantage of the current system, it would be more effective and efficient that switching to a different system.

What I do hope for, if nothing else, is that people start at least wanting to take responsibility for our water use. It is an awesome, valuable resources, and if we waste it, it won’t always be there.

This year was a haphazard garden. I ordered a few seed packets, but mainly just used seeds I already had. I started a couple of flats of transplants, and that’s all I planted–total plant cost was about $10 for new seeds and soils. There wasn’t any real planning on how much or even what I wanted, I just went with what I already had or felt like. We planted most everything in the beds where we ripped out the old shrubs, simply because it was easy. (They also met the requirements of getting enough sun, had decent soil, and were close to the house for easy care.)

In our garden we have

• broccoli raab
• radishes
• 8 lettuce
• 1 cabbage
• 15 tomatoes
• 8 peppers
• 2 eggplant
• 3 tomatillos
• 1 melon
• 1 cucumber
• 4 zucchini
• 2 winter squash
• and a bunch of seeded herbs and some flowers

Provided everything grows and does well, it should be a productive year, even with very little thought put into it. I wouldn’t have necessarily planned it this way–I would have loved more melons and some spinach and onions at least. Four zucchini plants does seem like a lot, but the last two years I’ve grown them I haven’t actually ended up with zucchini. I wouldn’t mind a lot this year.

My four-year old has really enjoyed helping plant everything. I’m a little picky when it come to gardening, so working with him is a good reminder to be more patient and not care so much about everything being just right. He and the toddler were overjoyed to discover that there were radishes underneath all those leaves, and kept picking them and bringing them inside, often before they were fully grown. Hopefully all the excitement about gardens also turns into a desire to actually eat some vegetables, but I’m not holding my breath.