The grass is greener on this side
Last year I was trying to make my lawn look like a golf course. A lot has changed since then. From a lawn that was infested with crabgrass and dandelions, it transformed into a real nice and thick low cut lawn. Sadly, I don't have any photos to show so you will have to take my word for it đ. Early this year, we rented out the old house and moved to a new one. I took all the learning from the past year and applied to this new lawn successfully.
This is how it looks now. The front looks way better than the back or the sides of the house. The summer has been brutal this year and the yellowed out area suffers the most from direct sunlight, reflected sunlight from the windows and lack of water because of how the sprinklers are laid out. Since 2020, we are in a state of drought and stage 2 water rules prohibit running the sprinklers outside of an assigned day during the week. Thankfully, bermuda grass is resilient enough to survive on whatever water it gets. The heat stressed areas (front and back) are taking its time to disappear but will have to wait to see how the grass responds to the weekly mowing. I cut the grass low at 1.5 inches tall to encourage lateral growth that conserves water and crowds out any weed over the course of time. I would love to go even lower to an inch but the heat stress will be fatal which is how the backyard got out of hand in the first place.
We have travel plans this year so the yard will be neglected for a considerable amount of time but once the winter is over, I plan to plant a garden in the backyard along the fence with some native plants that can thrive in the summer. I am still trying to figure out how to do drip irrigation for such a garden. My initial experiment with a simple set up taught me a lot of things. Especially, how NOT to do drip irrigation. The drip irrigation needs to be hooked up to two bougainvillea plants as a POC before I go on vacation. Hopefully, I can get it running fine soon enough to talk more in another post.