A couple of years ago I switched over to a water-wise, native buffalo grass/blue grama (BG/BG) mix, and the whole endeavor was, quite frankly, a real chore. First, there was the issue of the grass that was already there, which was Bermuda. Now anyone familiar with Bermuda grass knows that removing it from your lawn is not as simple as digging it up. Leave even the tiniest scrap of a root behind and it will bounce back like a rubber ball. It took me months to get rid of it (which I had to do because it out-competes buffalo grass), and I had to compromise my “organic” principles to do it. Even so, sprigs still pop up here and there from time to time.

And getting the BG/BG seeded wasn’t much of a picnic, either. Shortly after I seeded it I had to leave for a ten-day canoe trip down the Upper Missouri, leaving the fragile sprouts in my husband’s non-gardening hands. A couple of days after I left town, I made my customary last phone call before getting on the river (okay, I was checking up on the new lawn) only to have him report that the city had issued a city-wide ban on lawn-watering because of drought.

Now there’s irony for you. I’d switched to the BG/BG because it was water-wise, but to get it started, it really needed to be kept watered every day for a couple of weeks. Drought was threatening the establishment of my drought-tolerant lawn. If I’d only left well-enough alone, the Bermuda might have gone dormant, but it wouldn’t have died. There was a strong possibility that I was going to be stuck with a dirt patch indefinitely.

I was saved by my husband’s patience, though, because the city hadn’t banned hand-watering. So every morning and night, he stood out there patiently spraying it with a hose. The BG/BG took hold and all was well…except for a few stubborn patches where, try as I might, I couldn’t get it to grow. I don’t know if it is something alleopathic from the live oaks in the yard, or squirrels digging for moisture, or that flock of chipping sparrows that came through one day during spring migration and ate every speck of grass seed they could find—whatever the cause, there were bare spots. So I re-seeded and re-watered, and a few of the patches began to fill in.

But there was one spot that was impossibly stubborn. Did I cover the seed with too much soil when I seeded it? Was the live oak nearby alleopathic? Did it get less water than the rest of the seed when it was germinating? Who knows? All I knew for sure is that the rest of the lawn was growing a thick head of luscious grass, while this spot was just plain bald. Finally, late last summer I managed to get some promising grassy peach fuzz to grow…only to have someone drive a truck over it in the middle of the night and churn it all to dust (no, I’m not making that up; the cop I called couldn’t understand why I was so upset about a lawn). So here it is a two years after trying to make the switch to a native-grass, water-wise lawn and I am still struggling to get it to work.

So you know what? I’m giving up on it. I was talking to a friend who happens to be a landscape architect, bemoaning the failure of my efforts, when he said, “Why don’t you just grow something else there?”

It took me all of half a minute to see the wisdom in that question. So that’s what I’m going to do. Don’t know what I’m going to put there yet, but it ain’t gonna be lawn.

All of this leads to a confession of sorts. We enviros sometimes act as if being green is the easiest thing in the world, when the truth is that it’s just like everything else. Sometimes stuff works and sometimes it doesn’t. We say, for example, “Oh, composting is easy!” and it is…sort of. It’s plenty easy after you’ve got a place picked out for it in the yard, and you’ve figured out how you’re going to collect the kitchen scraps, and you’ve learned about layering nitrogen and carbon-rich materials, and…Once you finally get going, composting is a walk in the park. Making the transition from throwing your scraps in the garbage to throwing it on the compost heap is the hard part.

And that’s probably the hardest part of anything we do for the environment—the transition from one way of doing things to another. Part of my lawn did finally get established, it’s true. It was hard to get it there, but now that it’s there I seldom water or mow it, and it is easier to maintain (and looks as good to my eyes) as a “regular” lawn. There just that one little patch that didn’t want to make the transition with me. But that’s okay, because as hard as it might be to get something to finally grow there, it will still be no more inconvenient or difficult than watering and mowing the original Bermuda. It may be true that it isn’t easy being green, but certainly in this case, it isn’t really any harder.

 Photo credit: author's private collection