Conserve Even More Water in Lubbock This Summer By Killing Your Lawn

The City of Lubbock has released its annual guidelines for irrigating our lovely lawns and keep them looking luscious and green all through the summer. The irrigation restrictions tell citizens what days they're allowed to water their lawns based on the last digit of their house number and what specific hours of the day.

Along with time and day, the City of Lubbock urges citizens to use items that could allow for easier and better control of water systems management, like a programmable irrigation controller with a timer that can be set so irrigation can be automatically set for when it's your specific address numbers turn to water the lawn. That's a concept that's foreign to me since I've lived outside the city limits. It's also suggested to get a rain sensor that will automatically shut off your sprinkler system if enough rain has fallen to fill the small reservoir.

The City of Lubbock also suggests measuring your water output with what I'm guessing is a ruler and seeing how much water your yard accumulates within a set amount of time. That's a smart method of course, but I'm very bad at math and would probably end up with two trains meeting in Chicago going at 70 MPH.

@yardfarmer.co #stitch with @chastinjmiles YOUR LAWN IS STUPID BUT IT DOESNT HAVE TO BE!!!! #foodnotlawns #savewater #waterconservation #utahwater #savewater #highdesert #highdesertgarden ♬ In My Bed - Rotimi

My personal opinion to conserve water during these hot Texas days is to simply just kill your lawn. I can hear the resounding gasps around the South Plains as people read that, but I've been very anti-lawn since 2011 and found my people on TikTok and in El Paso, Texas.

I stayed in El Paso with my older brother in 2011 and noticed no one had a lawn, just rock gardens, cacti or succulent gardens, and fake grass which stuck out like a pinto bean in yellow rice. I'm not saying don't have any grass, but why have specific lawn that requires so much water when you can instead grow native species of grasses that are hardy to the South Plains and do well with infrequent watering. I will admit I do mow the lawn right before a thunderstorm because my dad brought me up that way, and the smell or freshly cut grass after a fresh summer rain is invigorating.

Now that I've totally convinced everyone in Lubbock to uproot their thirsty lawns, we can plan some alternatives. Vegetable beds, native flowers, even try the El Paso route and get creative with something different. It may not be the next Lubbock bush grass equivalent, but it will save on that water bill in the long run.