My Vendetta Against Grass and Saving Your Business Money

I wrote a longer article about the whole grass saga in the residential section, but to be clear: my vendetta is against grass, not saving your business money.

TL;dr Foreign Grass is a Giant Waste of Money

This article is mostly applicable to:

Folks that have grass to manage: property owners/managers: landlords, or municipalities managing things like parks and other public green spaces, and homeowners (even if you are in an HOA)
Folks in high desert areas like Utah, Colorado, and thereabouts
BUT: this principle can probably be applied to your region anyway, with a bit of research

Grass lawns have been around since the 1700s, but they were imported.

Grasses that grow well in Europe and other parts of the world are not necessarily going to thrive in the USA (where I live and work). Even grasses from other parts of the US don’t necessarily do well in my region in Utah. (I’m looking at you, Kentucky Bluegrass.)

The wild thing is that there have always been pleasant American native grasses and native-adjacent grasses that will thrive in Utah with minimal water, care, and maintenance–but sod is installed constantly. Why?

Installation cost.

Sourcing and planting American native and native-adjacent grasses is more expensive than planting sod (ironically). I’m going restate that again: planting sod is cheaper–not maintaining sod.

However; I’d like to use my yard and my region as an example.

I live in Utah: high desert, not much water, very hot summers, very cold winters. Not a lot of plants can survive that without fertilizer, and consistent mowing, weed-suppressors, etc.

I have an eensy-weensy, _teeny-tiny yard: c. 500 sf (46 sqaure meters).

With normal grass, it consumes about 17K gallons of water in the summer. (In a desert state with constant drought.) That’s 64k liters rounded down.

If I’d had a grass of ancient-American origin, or adjacent, it would cut my costs as below:

Water usage reduced by almost exactly 90% (once established, ofc)
Mowing cost: unlike grasses foreign to your region, many drought-tolerant lawns only need mown once a month or less, if at all due to their slower growth rate. But lets estimate high: at a 50% reduction in maintenance cost, because lets factor in annual (bi-annual is more realistic for most lawn alternatives) edging, monthly hand-weeding, and occasional mowing (monthly hand-weeding is often unnecessary after year 2-4, because the grasses can choke out any weeds)
Fertilizing cost: 75% to 100% reduction in annual cost: grasses foreign to your region require soil amendment: fertilizers, aeration, weed control, pest control, etc.

That is a total reduction of approximately 80% of total maintenance cost.

(Please keep in mind, that I’m basing this math on my own installation a native-adjacent grass developed specifically for high desert, and documenting the process in the residential portion of my website, if you’d like more information, but www.yardfarmer.co (especially the YouTube channel) is a really great resource.)

Oh but the installation Cost . . .

. . . is soooooOOoooo expensive!

The state of Utah will pay a very large portion of the cost to have folks change their yards out to more water-wise. There are big incentives in Utah to Slow the Flow, restore pollinator habitats (because you obviously want to switch out any flowers that won’t survive on less water when you switch out the lawn), and other water-wise incentives in the state. Resources to look at:

I’ve heard that those able to use these programs have reduced their installation costs by 25% to 75% —and they aren’t just residential programs.

But I Don’t Live In Utah

That’s okay!

Look for things like “my_state native plants” “my_country lawn alternatives” “my_region yard incentives” etc.

If you know any cool resources for non-Utah regions (or even Utah resources I didn’t add), comment them below, and I’ll add them here to this post.

United States:

Cool general database: https://www.dsireusa.org/
https://gardenforwildlife.com/

Here and There Consulting