Practical information for consumers on going green.
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Saturday, March 15, 2003
Grass, Man
It's warm outside, very warm. All this summery weather makes me think of grass.
Now, don't sick John Ashcroft on me quite yet. I'm talking about lawn grass. In the fourth summer of drought here in Colorado, grass is on everyone's minds. Typically, a household expends 50 percent of its water on landscaping (toilets, the next largest category, account for 13 percent of household water use). Governments along the Front Range are eyeing their half-empty reservoirs and encouraging homeowners to reduce the amount of water they sprinkle on their lawns.
My favorite way to reduce water use is to replace regular turf with buffalograss. It's a tough, low-growing grass (about 8 inches tall) that makes a fine lawn and has the advantages of needing little mowing (if you don't mind longer grass) and little water (as little as an inch every two weeks in the hottest parts of the summer). It needs at least 6 hours a day of sun.
There are two ways to get a buffalograss lawn: sod or seed (after you've removed the old lawn, of course). Sod is more expensive but produces instant gratification; seed is much cheaper and easier but requires extended weeding. The difference between buffalograss seed and sod is this: the seed will produce both female plants (which spread by runners) and male plants (which produce 6-inch-high seed heads); the sod contains only female plants. I prefer the look of the male plants, but the female ones help to produce a thick sod.
Along the Front Range, sod can be obtained from Graff's Turf Farm in Fort Morgan (970-867-TURF). They charge about 50 cents per square foot of sod and $75 to deliver small quantities (under 500 square feet, if I remember correctly). If you don't want to pay the delivery fee, you must drive to Fort Morgan and have the sod loaded into your truck, then drive home and unload it yourself. Buffalograss sod comes in rectangles, not in rolls, so it's a little more difficult to install, but you can carry several rectangles at once. The sod will need to be watered every day for at least two weeks and then two or three times a week for the rest of the season. You will not realize water savings on buffalograss until the summer after you install it.
Buffalograss seed is available at a number of places: Garden Country in Westminster sells it for $12 a pound, the cheapest price I've seen anywhere. It is a strange green color, I believe because of a treatment that makes it sprout more readily. But be warned: not all of it will sprout the first year. Buffalograss seeds can lie dormant for several years.
Buy 2 to 3 pounds of seed for every 1,000 square feet. You can buy extra to try to achieve a thicker turf the first year, but it really takes two years to fill in. Score the ground, distribute the seed, and cover it with a thin layer of compost. Then water it every day for three weeks. It takes a long time to sprout and will look thin the first year, but the second year, the areas that were planted the year before will be much more robust.
Buffalograss is green from May through September. The rest of the year, it is a light beige color that is much more attractive than the dull brown of dormant bluegrass lawns. If you're unsure, try buffalograss in a dry, very sunny spot in your yard and see how you like the results!
posted by Beth at 6:45 PM
bapartin@yahoo.com
Sunday, March 09, 2003
Wow, it's been a while. More than a month, in fact, but I finally got my ass in gear and decided to blog again. As you might expect, I now have a backlog of subjects.
Recently my husband Todd Bradley (you can check out his site at www.toddbradley.com) and I had LASIK. Now we are faced with the problem of disposing of our old eyeglasses.
As you may know, some optical companies do take old eyeglasses, measure the prescription on them, and then match them with people in other countries have a similar prescription. The prescription will not be exact in most cases, of course, but at least some people who can't afford to buy eyeglasses will attain better eyesight. I took most of our old eyeglasses to Lenscrafters at the Flatiron Crossing Mall in Broomfield, Colorado. They had a special box built into their wall into which I put our seven pairs of old glasses, and the woman behind the desk said their next stop for delivery of eyeglasses would be Mexico. They didn't want the cases, however, so I'm still debating what to do with them. I saved a few for sunglasses, and I'll probably take the rest to the Salvation Army.
There is another option that I know of for disposing of eyeglasses: you can donate them to a local Lion's Club. My father, Bill Partin, who lives and practices law in Kansas City, has been a member of the local Lion's Club for years. He said their club works mainly with Central and South American countries and mentioned a sister club in Guatemala.
So here's yet another aspect of recycling. It's not just dumping things in a dirty old bin full of broken glasses and blowing paper. It's actually a way of directly improving the lives of the poor.
posted by Beth at 10:12 AM
bapartin@yahoo.com
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