- Author: Alex Russell
It's one thing to want a water-wise lawn and another thing entirely to commit to one.
Most of my backyard has been under woodchips for two years now and I have become restless for grass. The space is set aside. The question is what kind of grass to put there.
I don't want a sod lawn. Even with tall fescue, which is much hardier and drought-tolerant than Kentucky bluegrass and others, this is Vacaville. Any sod lawn needs water every day to look its best. In the hottest months, it needs daily water to survive.
Fortunately, there are alternatives that reduce watering from daily down to weekly, sometimes less. This sounds nuts, I know. And I'm not talking about bermudagrass or anything you'll never be rid of if you change your mind.
A Warm Season Grass to Water Weekly
Two years ago, I planted plugs of UC Verde Buffalograss in a small space between garden boxes and hoped for the best. UC Verde is a warm-season grass developed from native buffalo grasses but with some special characteristics that make the plant a hardy alternative to sod.
First of all, it only needs water weekly. I'm not talking about only in the rainy season, either. I'm talking about the 100-degree Central Valley summer when you go outside around noon and the sun punches you in the forehead. In that kind of heat, my UC Verde lawn is green and lush with deep weekly water.
Part of the reason is the deep root system. The deep roots are why you have to buy UC Verde in a flat of plugs instead of as sod. The roots grow deep enough that cutting underneath the soil to make a roll of sod would kill it all. The plant produces no viable seed and spreads only by above-ground stolon—not rhizome.
Two years ago in October, I planted plugs of UC Verde about nine inches apart and then waited. What I didn't quite understand was that this is warm-season grass. When the temperature dropped, the blades turned yellow and the plant went into total dormancy until spring. I spread annual ryegrass to keep the filaree down until spring when the UC Verde greened up and started filling through the dying annual rye.
Eventually, I hope my UC Verde lawn will look as good as the one on the UC Davis campus right beside Hyatt Place. It's one of a few places you can see a UC Verde lawn for yourself. That lawn, the professional version of what I have attempted, is vivid green and soft to the touch. When it's kept cut it looks like any other water-hogging lawn.
A Hardy Cool-Season Grass
In reality, I don't like having to overseed with ryegrass every year. I want a lawn that's tough like UC Verde but that won't go dormant in winter. Right now, I'm considering a different plant entirely, something almost completely wild.
The California native Clustered field sedge (Carex praegracilis) is not technically a grass. Grasses have narrow leaves arranged in sets of two with stems that are rounded or flattened. Sedges also have narrow leaves but arranged in sets of three with triangular stems. Like UC Verde, you plant Clustered field sedge from plugs and then wait for the rhizome (yes, a rhizome) to fill in the empty space.
Clustered field sedge looked to me like a great alternative lawn because of photos I'd found showing a lovely tall grass falling over itself beside what appears to be a normal manicured lawn. In the photos, this native sedge appeared to do both those looks with bells on.
It turns out Vacaville has a demonstration meadow right in town behind the Three Oaks Community Center. The Three Oaks Demonstration Meadow is accessible from a bike path down Marshall Road, which intersects with Alamo Drive a few blocks from I-80. The meadow is a corner plot of land behind the fence for tennis courts and in plain view of the water park with the gnarliest water slide tube in the city.
The site was installed in 2016, four years ago, and let's just say it's probably seen better times. The species of grasses and sedges are all still there and even in our hot summers, they are still thriving. But so are the weeds, lots of them.
I found the patch of Clustered field sedge and it didn't look at all like the photos I've seen of a lush meadow or a clean, trimmed lawn. The leaves are thick and hard, not exactly barefoot-friendly like the UC Verde. In four years, the rhizomes hadn't filled in like I might have thought, but this probably has to do with receiving no water besides what falls down from the sky.
Deciding, or Not
As a meadow, with no plans to mow and maybe even a few native bulbs and lupins thrown into the deal, Clustered field sedge still might work. Earlier this year I sheet mulched my front lawn and planted half with California native shrubs that require no summer water and the other half with fruit trees on drip irrigation. I did plan to plant some kind of lawn alternative eventually, and a meadow surrounded by fruit trees sounds pretty romantic—and nothing I'd ever have to mow.
I still have some thinking to do. There are far more lawn alternatives out there, too. The Sonoma Master Gardener blog has a whole list of lawn alternatives with details on how they grow.
The issue now is time. If ever in Vacaville there is a good season to plant a lawn of cool-season grasses, it's fall. I'm already behind, having missed a lot of days from the bad air quality, though I am lucky compared to nearby neighbors who lost businesses and homes and in particular to those who live in areas still burning. If I don't get the lawn this year, I can wait.
