Adding Up the August Water Bill, Honestly
Do something a little uncomfortable this week: go find your water bill. Not just this month's. Go back to last August, or better, pull the last twelve months if your water district shows them online.
Most people don't. They feel the sting when the bill shows up, mutter something, pay it, and move on. I did that for years. Then one July I sat down and added mine up month by month, and it made me a little sick. That number started all of this for me, more than any pretty picture of a xeriscape yard I'd seen somewhere.
Why August specifically
In Utah County, August is the month that tells the truth. June you can fool yourself: the ground still holds spring moisture, the days aren't at their hottest yet. August is hot and dry, the air pulls moisture out of everything, and if you've got a lawn you're watering it on autopilot without thinking twice. That's the month the bill stops being background noise and becomes a number you can't ignore.
Grab your last few summers of bills. Look at the jump from, say, April to August. For most lawns around here that jump is dramatic. That's not you doing anything wrong. That's what grass costs at 4,600 feet in a place that gets maybe 15 inches of rain a year total, most of it not in summer.
The math, roughly
Rough way to think about it, no precise formula, but close enough to feel it in your gut.
A lawn in our climate wants somewhere around 1 to 1.5 inches of water a week in the hottest months. Figure your square footage of actual lawn, just the grass, not the whole yard. Multiply it out and you start to see how many gallons a week you're asking the sprinklers to move. Then check what your water district charges once you're past your base allotment, because tiered rate structures really bite in the higher tiers, and August usage is exactly what pushes people there.
This isn't to make you feel bad. It's because once I saw the number broken down like that, it stopped being abstract. Not "water costs money," everybody knows that. It's "this specific patch of grass nobody in my house has walked on since May is costing me this specific amount every single month, June through September."
What to do with this
Small task, don't panic:
- Pull your last 12 months of water bills or usage data.
- Circle the three highest months.
- Walk your yard and honestly count how many square feet of lawn actually gets used. Kids playing, dog running around, you sitting out there with a chair. Not "might use someday." Actually used.
- Compare that used square footage to your total lawn square footage.
For most people that gap is bigger than they think. That's your opportunity, the part you can convert without giving up anything you actually value.
Here's my one contrarian note, since people expect a guy teaching xeriscaping to hate all grass: I don't. Lawn is fine in the right place. If your grandkids play on it, if you sit out there in the evening, water that patch and don't feel bad. It's the four thousand square feet nobody sets foot on that I want gone. That's the part costing you money for nothing but looking like everyone else's yard.
One caution, since we're on money
Don't let sticker shock push you into ripping everything out at once and going straight to rock. I've watched people do the math, get mad at the bill, and cover the whole thing in gravel over a weekend. Wrong move, two reasons. One, gravel-everything isn't xeriscaping, it's a parking lot, it bakes in the sun and radiates heat back at your house and it looks dead because it is dead. Two, the bigger one: going too fast is how you kill plants.
My first spring I overwatered an entire flat of native seedlings, babying them like tomatoes. Watered them every single day, so attentive, and drowned every one. The hardest part of this whole thing, the actual hardest part, is learning to leave plants alone once they're established. You don't rush that over one weekend of being mad at PacifiCorp or your city water department.
Before next time
Pull those bills and do the circling and counting above. Bring your "used vs. not used" numbers to the next lesson, we'll start talking about what goes in that unused space.