Know what bugs me? Businesses who hose down the sidewalk in front of their shops! Even w/out a drought I think this is wasteful. Ever hear of a push broom, businesses? I see this just about every morning as I walk to work from the subway station.

watering sidewalks makes me NUTS. i yelled out our concierge about this just the other day; he pointed out (rightly) that the area around this building is basically an open air toilet for the homeless folks, so they kind of have to hose down the sidewalks....

Companies that use hundred of thousands of gallons a week to clean their equipment, and won't recylce. Car washes that don't recylce -- People who have their houses power washed. Houses with four and five bathrooms - a shower cabana by the pool - the pool -- the hot tub --- the water exercise tub --- the bluegrass lawn that has to be watered three times aweek no matter what.

another thing why don't these big companies get harsh fines when there is a water shortage,maybe they would concerve more than waste.

You can't wash sidewalks here. Can't fill a new pool or water garden (only add water to account for evaporation), fountains must be drained, cars can only be washed at public washes and their prices all went up so nobody bothers, most people also gave up on the lawns and are just trying to save gardens and agriculuture and pasture if possible. I haven't seen too much waste since the mandatory restrictions. The waiters here are not even allowed to ask if you want water served- you have to just ask. I think liquor sales are way up. The things I forgive are watering new trees, pretty but water-conservative gardens (I'm a sucker for beauty), and washing dogs. I've always hated golf courses; now is no different.

The local Walmart here needs to quit watering the parking lot when they water their plants. I never seen such a terrible amount of wasted water. GRRRR. And there are still people water their lawns and the golf course people were complaining about their greens drying up and wanted to buy more water from town,(that doesn't have any to spare). THink the gold course ended up getting a water tank and pumping from their pond, but darned if I can see whinning about a $25,000 green, when compared to and entire town running out of water. You can replace the green not the town What is with these people.?
Nancy/VA

Many years ago, I was watching a golf game w/ my dad. The "green" was actually natural desert land complete with cacti. Obviously it was someplace in the Southwest. IMO, that course would be quite a challenge to even Tiger Woods, and what a good idea to have a "natural" course.

If I may, I'll just stick up for golfers everywhere...

Most golf courses water both fairways and greens with water from their own lakes. This is both fair to the public and ecologically friendly. Of course, there are a few courses using public water, and that is a different story.

The worst around here was a brand new mall (1.5 million sq ft) that just opened. They had the head landscape guy on the news complaining about water restrictions and the impact that would have on their newly planted trees, shrubs, etc. He said that they would compensate for only being able to water three days per week by watering all day on those three days. How sad.

i was watcing a golf thing on tv (not deliberately, it must have been on at the gym or something) and the golf course was *yellow*. bright yellow. it was in japan i think; the only things that were green were the tees and the holes. presumably the native grass around there is yellow (or they were having a drought) and they just let it go. (it was mown, just not watered.)

it actually looked kind of neat...

Some farmers in our area actually irrigate in the middle of the day. I've gone out at lunch and seen massive sprinkler systems shooting water a hundred feet or more wondering if the water ever makes it to the ground. What a shame.

That's a good point janet, many golf courses in the deep south (and SoCal) use bermuda, what the owners of these courses are either unaware of or (more likely) they're more interested in the appearance of the grass than it's health, is that bermuda cannot be killed by drought. There was a story a while back (which I have confirmed true) that bermuda growing on the edge of the salton sea (southern california desert) was submerged for two years and resumed growth when the water receded. What is a few weeks or a couple of months going to do to it?

People who have sprinklers going during the day to maintain the golf green look to their lawn. Clueless!!!!

Actually, it's not clueless. There is a technique which I believe is called "shocking" the grass in the middle of the day. It involves turning the sprinklers on for about ten minutes or so to cool the grass off. There is the evaporation element. There is the wind. There is the "it'll burn the leaves" element. But it's been tested. And it works. Better to blow ten minutes and "freshen" it up a few times a day, than to have it burn from 10-8 straight. Then when it gets its night watering, the grass recovers.
Read it in a turf management article.

If there are restrictions in your state or county, there is always the option of reporting these people. There are fines given. Here in Maryland we call the local police on their general business line and they take care of it. I did just that after notifying a business owner that their sprinklers were going at night - WHILE IT WAS RAINING!! After two days he had still done nothing to turn them off.

Newt

they are encouraging people here to turn in water wasters. Each fine is larger and after three fines the water department can restrict the flow of water to the individual house.
As for farmers, here (in the arid west) it's pretty hard when you are on ditch water to reguate the watering time. If "your" shares of water come on Tuesday and Friday at noon, you water or that's all you get.

What bothers me is when the neighbour who never ,never, ever waters his or her lawn......Has now decided that now the grass is burn't, yellow, and crispy.Is going to put the sprinkler on for three days in the hundred degree weather.

My neighbors (on both sides) just power washed their decks and fences last week-total water hogs.

Then there are millions and millions and millions of green grassy lawns, a true American cultural oddity, and a true water (energy, fertilizer, time) waster.

EuphorbPhreak, not necessarily, here on the west coast with no water all summer long that is true, but back east they actually see rain in july (I have never seen rain in July here!). If appropriate species are used, grass may be an effective ground cover (bermudagrass is appropriate here if you are willing to let it go dormant for two months).

Of the many "crimes" that my neighbor can be commiting, I think wasting water is one of the less severe. Let's try to keep this in perspective folks!

Where I grew up in Kalgoorlie/Boulder Western Australia. They had a golf course that was red dirt no grass at all. And i do belive that wasting water is terrible. We rely on a water pipeline from perth to kalgoorlie, the more water is wasted in perth the harder the towns along the pipeline are hit. Growing up in semi desert i belive has helped me realise just how precious water is.

You know I have to agree that watering your lawn is not a crime, but it is a shame that so much importance is being put on how their grass looks. I live in a newer subdivision about 4 years old. I have a neighbour that gets up at 2:00am in the morning so he can, you guessed it, water his LAWN. We have been on a watering ban since the spring. I just find this sinful that he doesn't have anything better to do with his time. Oh yea and if he isn't watering his grass he is watering the driveway. You know too much dust on it. It just drives me to no end. In fact I just ripped up my grass and put in three big gardens out front. So I don't have to water my grass at all. If I am going to water it will be for my plants and only when absolutely necessary. Thanks for letting me rant and rave I feel much better.

Hello Dirtbug,

Your message reminded me of a trip to South Australia. In a small town somewhere between Broken Hill and the SA border, their golf greens were called Blacks. These functioned as greens, but was an area covered with fairly fine crushed coal, with a hole in the middle, and in each hole, bearing the flag, was an inverted rake.

Now how's that for water conservation? . . . Granny

mistybear11,
Your neighbor sounds like he has the "keeping up with the Joneses" mentality permanently ingrained in his head! I've learned that my grass is pretty darn resilient. As long as I don't care how brown it gets, it will green back up after a nice rain.
Joel

re: perspective

below was an interesting interview.

Here is a link that might be useful: article

Janet, I am glad to see some sense on the issue. Watering lawns should be the least of our worries! If it rains, the grass stays green, if not then it can go brown. What use is a lawn if there is not water to drink and grow your vegetables with?

Fireraven9
The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town. - Emily Dickinson

Thinking that people obsessively watering lawns should be the least of our worries shows a complete lack of perspective.(to paraphrase the above post and turn it around to the opposite position:) ) As a country we have grown fat and complacent, enjoying how little we know about how the things we use get to us. Anyone who knows even the basics of how water gets to your faucet, and what happens to it after it goes down your drain knows full well that the wasting of water is indeed a serious issue. One can not have perspective from a position of ignorance, but that seems to be the state most poeple enjoy being in. Water, electricity, and natural gas do not "magically" appear out of their recepticles. They are transported, often at great expense to the environment and other people farther downstream, to your house. If people in general had the capacity for long term planning, the capitalist principals of supply and demand would allow for proper pricing of water that would make wasteful practices like watering lawns day in and day out prohibitively expensive. Unfortunately we are a short-sighted breed, and we price things based on outlooks only into the very near future. We thus pass these problems on to future generations, generations that will be fighting actual wars over the H2O. The fact that Montana filed a law suit against North Dakota for stealing their clouds is telling.
Wasting water is actually a very serious issue, and not just a pet peeve.

To quote a rock song, "We've gotta start respecting this world, or it's gonna turn around and bite off our face!"

As a ploy to lure more tourists to our area, promotional brochures tout the many golf courses here. Yes, this is a desert. Yes, you need to add thousands (probably millions) of gallons of water to keep it all green. But there is a constant parade of tanker trucks delivering their gray/not potable water to sell for use on the fairways.

It does not take much to turn gray wafer into potable water and watering a golf course (in desert or elsewhere) with such a valuable material is still wasteful. Golf came from Scotland and they have little need of watering the greens there.

Fireraven9
The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town. - Emily Dickinson

Or mowing for that matter, that's what sheep are for (I don't have sheep and we wouldn't be worried about future water shortages if there weren't any lawns around here so I refuse to have one).

Where I live we have Blower Vacs that are for outdoor use. The name says it all. You can have it on Blow and it will blow air out to remove leaves etc from paved surfaces or if you don't want the leaves left anywhere you use it on Vac and it sucks up the leaves and you can empty them into the trash or wherever. I only have shrubs and hardy green stuff ( agapanthus, clivias, philos, etc ) and paths through the yard. I blow the leaves of the paths and leave for mulch. I have a lot of leaves from the gum trees that were here before we built. Cheryl

Can someone please explain to me where the water is going? I thought earth was a closed system. Water is evaporated, it condenses in the air, it comes back down as rain and starts the cycle over again. Where is it being lost? IÂm just a little confused.

It's not being lost, whenever there is a drought one place, someone else is getting more than they need. There's actually a couple of factors at work, this drought wouldn't be such a big deal in many areas if we hadn't replaced so much forest and grassland with concrete. Now the water can't soak into the soil in many areas, to prevent flooding storm drains are built to channel the excess water to the ocean instead of letting it percolate through the soil to replenish aquifers. As far as general drought, if you want to understand what causes rain to fall in one area and not another, you should check out the following site:

Here is a link that might be useful: Weather basics

They built a new Walgreens here and they have the sprinklers out watering the cars and the parking lot. So stupid!!

My neighbor waters his lawn all the time, he is obsessed. I really don't think he has a life, how can he when watering takes up so much time!!

Yes, watering the sidewalk bugs me. Bugs me too when I see people washing down their driveways. Get some exercise buddy and push the broom. Plus, how dirty can it get!!

I think powerwashing a fence is really stupid and wasteful, get a life!! A deck I can see more. I don;t care if my fences are dirty or not. Stain them and they won't get so dirty and faded looking.

Kentucky bluegrass in the desert is definitely un-natural!

You know, grass really is extremely resilient. Here in VA I've been in an "exceptional drought" all summer, which is the worst classification, according to the Drought Monitor. The grass wasn't even crunchy anymore, it just felt limp when you walked on it. We had about 5 inches of rain over a weeks' time, and now it's as beautiful as it's ever been. It looks just like springtime! Everytime I look out the window, I just shake my head at what an amazing comeback it's made. You'll never catch me watering my lawn! ;-)

Shakerbaker, look a little further afield than the mid-atlantic and you'll see where the water is going. China, southern Russia, central Europe, southern France, to name just a few, have been having serious floods, as in hundreds killed. In very simplistic terms, they have your water!

More realistically, much of the USA uses (or directs to the sea) more water then actually falls out of the sky, even in a good year. Climate change and over-use of water mean you will have to get used to more severe and more frequent droughts. Or, just maybe, change water usage ... nah ... not gonna happen :)

--ian

WASTING WATER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES IS SINFUL AND IMMORAL.

shakerbaker, you're right - the earth is a closed system and when you look at the earth as a whole, we aren't losing water. The water scarcity issue isn't just an issue of drought or flooding -- or losing water. CLEAN water is a huge issue in every part of the world, especially thrid world countries where they don't have the water treatment facilities developed nations do. If we are using treated water in cities and suburban areas, for lawns, golf courses, washing sidewalks, fences or whatever, then we are using some of the limited clean water wastefully. Can you imagine someone in a drought-stricken third world country washing sidewalks with their scarce, precious (possibly unavailble) clean water?

We haven't washed our car in months, not fully anyway, a little here and there to get bird poop off. What little grass we have is brown and brittle, who cares about grass? We can't eat it. I have a front loader washing machine, takes less water. I hate the fact that our hot water takes ages to come through from the water heater and put a bucket under the tap to catch that wasted water. I intend to pipe my washing water and bathwater out to my plants, not done it yet. I don't peel vegies under a running tap, I rinse off in 2 bowls of water.
As far as I know it's illegal for runoff from carwashing to go down the gutter, I'm sure there are fines (here in Aust). If you must wash your car do it on the lawn.

Article in paper today re: Klamath river discussing whether water should be diverted from irrigation to recreation. Eat or play, take your pick.

Over population is the problem, and we`re getting more populated every day, mostly from the south, and they`re not bringing any water with them. This is a world-wide problem that will be addressed some day, whether people like it or not.

I haven't quite understood the few postings mentioning Bermuda grass--for it? or agin it? I don't like lawns in the first place, but my property had areas with Bermuda grass, so I'm stuck with it--impossible to eradicate and invasive as the dickens. But it greens up at the end of May and browns out in late November. I have never in 13 years watered it, but have to keep cutting and for almost six months parts of my place do look like a golf course. This is the high desert. Who cares if it's brown in winter. That's more or less the normal year around color here anyway.