Water Bill too High? Keep Good Trees and Get Rid of the Rest

 

Any plants that get bigger will shade and kill each other as they get larger. You want to reduce watering? Keep the trees that provide good and remove the rest. Dont forget this requires less water. Manage it.

Q. I have 13 each, 40 or 50-foot-tall pine trees in my yard with grass growing beneath them. The grass doesn’t look good there, but it’s how these trees get their water. I also have scattered shrubs in the yard as well. Last summer my water bill hit $400! Is there any way to convert to desert landscaping and keep the trees?

A. You want to convert to “desert landscaping” to lower your water bill? The cost of water will always increase. About 70-80% of your water bill comes from watering your landscape. The most efficient landscape uses about 10 to 15 gallons for each square foot of landscaped area. That’s what to aim for with an irrigated landscape unless you want it to look like the desert. Yours is considerably more than that.

Tough decisions must be made

Determine which plants provide the most cooling and pleasure to you and remove the others. Every plant requires water. Consider replacing plants with man-made structures that don’t need water such as gazebos and artwork. There is nothing wrong with open spaces provided they aren’t close to the house or where you sit outside.

Force Plant Roots Deep When Its Cool

The roots of pine trees are shallow and extensive in these grassy areas. Plant roots grow wherever water is available including your neighbor’s property. Look over the wall and see. When water is applied to a lawn, the roots of trees are shallow when they should be deep. Tall pine trees need roots that are 3 feet deep to resist blowing over in strong winds. Once you start removing pine trees, the “remainers” will receive more wind and have less support.

Drip tubing has drip emitters embedded into its walls. Drip emitters will come in different sizes but not the drip emitters embedded into the walls of drip tubing. They are all the same, perfect when plants need all the same amount of water.

Consider Drip Tubing

Consider drip tubing rather than drip emitters where plants greater than 3 feet tall are growing in clusters. When grass is watered with pop-up sprinklers, usually 12 to 15 minutes is all that’s needed. Not true when you convert to water applied more deeply from drip irrigation. In a conversion to drip irrigation the time increases from 12 to 15 minutes to one or two hours. To “fine tune” the time needed, use a piece of steel rebar and apply enough water to wet the soil 3 feet deep around the pine trees.

Do It in the Fall

The best time of year to do this is when weather cools off in the fall; starting around the end of September in Las Vegas. Making this conversion in the fall gives you the fall, winter and spring months to force large tree roots to grow deeper in the former grassy areas.