Tag: Colorado Water Conservation Board

Now That Spring Is Here, Homeowners Turn Their Attention to Lawn Care and Landscaping

Last week’s column devoted just one paragraph to landscape improvements that might add value to your home. This week I’ll address the topic at greater length and with less of a focus on improving the resale value of your home.

Rita and I sold our Golden home last year and moved to Avenida Lakewood (now called Solana Lakewood, under new owners), but I retain several ideas and opinions to share about the topic of landscaping and lawn care.

For lawn care, I hired a company to mow my lawn, but prior to that I purchased a corded electric lawn mower. Lowe’s and Ace Hardware have the franchise for EGO battery electric lawn mowers, which I have heard from others are the best. EGO makes many battery-powered yard tools, all of which use the same interchangeable battery. They have edgers, string trimmers, chainsaws, riding and push mowers, snowblowers, leaf blowers, you-name-it. Check out all the EGO products at www.EGOPowerPlus.com. 

Consider for a moment how much quieter your neighborhood would be in the spring, summer and fall if everyone used electric yard tools! Also, it’s well documented that small gas engines are major contributors to air pollution and climate change. According to the EPA, small  gas-powered equipment such as lawn mowers and leaf blowers emit 242 million tons of pollutants annually — as much as cars and homes.

As water bills increase, homeowners are wondering whether perhaps they should replace their Kentucky bluegrass lawns with something that requires less watering. I replaced my lawn with a slower growing sod, but it still required a lot of water. In retrospect I think buffalo grass would have been a better choice. Check with your water utility. The Colorado Water Conservation Board is providing funds to replace lawns, with rebates up to $1/sq.ft. Visit www.EngageCWCB.org.

(Wouldn’t it be smart of CDOT to install buffalo grass on all highway medians and shoulders?)

Xeriscaping is a good solution too, but I can’t imagine dog owners and parents of young children wanting to eliminate grassy backyards for their pets and children.

Hardscaping is another matter. This refers to installing patios, retaining walls and walking paths, as well as occasional boulders. An “outdoor kitchen” is a great enhancement which you’ll enjoy yourself and will ultimately help sell your home. For this you might want to hire a landscaping company. I can recommend one or two if you call me, but I suggest you use Google first and interview multiple companies. Although we considered it, we never hired a landscaping company, so any recommendations I make would not be based on personal experience.

My house, like many Golden homes, was encircled by juniper bushes, but those are a fire hazard and should be nowhere near your home in case of an approaching wildfire. I noticed recently that the new owner of my Golden home had pulled out all the junipers, and she told me that it was for that reason.

Trees are great, but you need to be mindful about which species you plant and where. On the south side of your house, you want to plant deciduous trees, which will shade your home in the summer but allow the sun into your home during the winter. Limit evergreens to the north side of your house, and choose trees that won’t shade your south-facing roof as they mature if you have or plan to install solar panels.

Please share your own landscaping ideas with me, and maybe I’ll feature them in a future column. Thanks, and happy spring!

Conserving Water Is Likely to Become More Important in Coming Years

My understanding as a layman is that al-though one of the impacts of warmer oceans due to climate change is increased precipitation over land, it won’t be as predictable and consistent, so we need to include water conservation in any discussion of sustainability. Or think of it as water management, since we’ll need to be concerned about flooding just as much as about prolonged droughts.

At the local level, we need to be smart about conserving water. It’s a practice we need to implement in times of abundance, because we can’t be sure when the pendulum will swing the other way and we’ll endure periods of water shortage.

For homeowners, the biggest consumption of water is typically the irrigation of our lawns and landscaping. Even though Rita and I replaced our Kentucky Bluegrass lawn with Bella Bluegrass, which requires less mowing and watering, we still need to use our sprinklers, although not as much. We would have done better to install buffalo grass, which is not as verdant, but requires zero irrigation and mowing.  (I can provide the address of a home I know in Golden that installed buffalo grass a couple decades ago.)

There are sprinkler systems which adjust the amount of watering that is done based on rainfall and ground moisture, but I haven’t investigated those devices, since I usually am home and adjust our watering according to the weather. For example, this spring I didn’t turn on our sprinkler system until June 1st because of our unusually wet May.

There are other residential strategies for saving water. I have learned to take showers in which I only run the water to get wet and to rinse off, without running the water while washing.

We also installed 1.2-gallon-per-flush toilets, which perform as well as the 1.6-gpf models.  We have a sensor faucet on our kitchen sink which operates like those sensors you’re probably used to seeing in public restrooms. The faucet (by Moen) also allows us to turn the water on and off manually when needed.

We also installed a recirculation line on our water heater, which saves a lot of water by producing hot water more quickly in the kitchen and bathrooms. Think of all the water you run waiting for it to get hot. Not only are you wasting that water, but you paid to heat that water, only to have it cool off sitting in the pipes between your water heater and your sink. You’ll also save energy (i.e., money) by installing such a recirc line. Ask your plumber for an estimate.

High efficiency washing machines are efficient in their use of water, not just energy. Front loaders use less water than the older top loaders, but the new top-loading high efficiency machines, such as our LG unit (the kind with a glass top and no agitator), automatically sense how much water is needed and do an amazing job. We’re glad our front-loading high efficiency washing machine died and had to be replaced!

At the governmental level, I’m surprised that CDOT and other jurisdictions don’t install buffalo grass in the medians and on the shoulders of our highways. Doing so would not only conserve water but save a lot of money on mowing, which can also endanger workers on high-speed highways.

Recently I saw a report on the blue jean industry, which uses an immense amount of water not just to grow the cotton (1,800 gallons per pair of jeans) but even more water to dye them blue!

I expect to learn even more about water conservation and management at this Thursday’s (tonight’s) session on this topic at Golden Real Estate’s office., 17695 S. Golden Road, Golden.  It starts at 5 p.m. and is scheduled to last only 1 hour.  We still have seats available. Email me (see below) or just show up.  The presenter is Ben Wade from the Colorado Water Conservation Board.

If you can’t attend this Thursday’s session, a video of it will be archived by Saturday at www.SustainabilitySeries.info, where you can already find archived videos of the previous five sessions on other sustainability topics.

Please consider coming if you, too, have water conservation or management ideas to share, such as I have done in this column. I’m certainly looking forward to learning things I don’t already know.