Signs of Summer 11: My Front Yard (Two Years On) (Part 1)!

our house in Greeley when we moved in (July 2020)

(To listen to an audio version of this blog, please click on the following link … My yard part 1 )

When we moved to Greeley in July 2020, the yard of our new house looked like most of the yards in our neighborhood. With the exception of some small, ornamental spruce trees that were planted in the middle of four stone rings, and a narrow, surrounding border of cobble-sized stones, the broad, front yard was a dense, thick mat of bluegrass and fescue, and the backyard, with a slightly wider, stone border, was the same. There was an automatic, underground sprinkler system located in the garage controlled by a bewilderingly complicated control box  that somehow my daughter figured out how to use (those millennials, is there anything they can’t do?). She programmed the system to soak the 6,000 square feet or so of lawn with water several times a week.

When we moved in, I was faced with a densely packed lawn that was six or seven inches high. My little electric mower struggled to get though the grass, and I ended up have to cut it back with my string trimmer. LOTS of grass!!! Amazing production!!

Photo by D. Sillman

According to the extension office at Colorado State University most lawns in Colorado are a mix of Kentucky bluegrass, tall fescue and perennial rye. The “Kentucky bluegrass” is not actually from Kentucky, by the way. It is an introduced plant native to Europe, Asia, and northern Africa! It is incredibly common in lawns all across the United States and Canada but is classified as an invasive and destructive species in most natural grasslands. Tall fescue is also an introduced grass species that thrives in marginal environments primarily because of a endo-symbiotic fungus. That fungal symbiont, however, has toxic effects on horses or cattle that might graze on it. Perennial rye grass is also an exotic, introduced plant species that is native to Europe, Asia and northern Africa.

So the lawns all around us are green swaths of exotic and, potentially, invasive and toxic plant species! Add to these disturbing features that fact that a bluegrass lawn, according to the Colorado State Extension service, requires 2.5 inches of water a week in order to survive! Over the five, “Colorado summer” months (May through September) that would mean that a bluegrass lawn will consume 55 inches of water! That represents almost 400% of the average annual rainfall here in northern Colorado!

I could not be a part of this immoral use of water, so I turned my sprinkler system off and, over the next few weeks, watched the thick, ecologically sterile grass ecosystem of my yard slowly turn brown and crispy. My neighbors commented that my sprinkler system must be broken! The people who previously lived in this house, they said, had had such a lush lawn! They had also had summer, monthly water bills that ranged between $300 and $400 dollars!

Once the grass was dead I contracted with a local landscaping company to come out and remove the sod. For a very reasonable price, they came in with their scraping machines and in a few hours had peeled way the front yard sod layer and piled it into several of their trucks (to take to a composting site). They left behind a smooth expanse of grassless, sandy soil.  We wanted our yard to support three things: 1. (in the back yard) a place for our grandson, Ari, to play, 2. (in the front yard) an area of native grasses that would resemble a mini-shortgrass prairie, and 3. (also in the front yard) a place where we could have planting areas to grow as many of the native, dry steppe plants as we could. Our guiding themes in all of this were limiting the amount of water requird to sustain the systems and using only native plants which would, inturn, support pollinators and as many other insects (and their larvae) as possible!

Photo by D. Sillman

The back yard was easy. We shut off the sprinklers and let the grass die. The next summer we raked up the dead grass and covered the area with landscape cloth. We then spread five cubic yards of playground mulch (a very soft mix of shredded wood chips) and put up the swing set, slide and climbing dome and were done! Nothing but fun!!

Early growth buffalo grass. Summer 2021. Photo by D. Sillman

The spring after we had had the sod removed from the front yard, we rototilled the prairie area and spread a good layer of compost over it. There are two dominant grasses that make up between 70 and 90% of the plants in a shortgrass prairie: buffalo grass (Boutelouia dadyloides) and blue grama (Boutelouia gracilis). So we seeded our area first with buffalo grass (in May) and then over-seeded it with a mix of buffalo grass and blue grama (in mid-June). The new seed required watering, so every morning and every evening we watered the area for 20 minutes. Our water bills stayed just under $100 a month during this period, so we were using considerably less water than the previous home owner to support our developing grassland. The May seeding germinated slowly but, eventually grew into a 30 or 40% surface cover of buffalo grass along with a 60 to 70% cover of some remarkably hearty and tenacious weeds!

Close-up of buffalo grass runners. Photo by D. Sillman

Before we could do the June over-seeding of our prairie-to-be, we had to remove those weeds. The list of species that were growing in this limited area is impressive as were the weight and volume of pulled weeds. We filled a wheelbarrow every morning (we could only work out in the yard until about 11 am because of the heat) and packed  large trashcans full of weeds every week for much of the summer!  Some of the most abundant weeds in the yard were field bindweed, Canada thistle, buffalo bur, lambs quarters, kochia, spurge (both spotted and prostrate), common purslane and storksbill.  You can read about these “good” and “bad” weeds in Signs of Summer 9 and signs of Summer 10,  August 5 and 12, 2021.

Buffalo grass over the winter (2021-2022). Photo by D. Sillman

In the fall (2021) we stopped watering the prairie and the grasses got dry and crispy and turned a tawny, golden brown. They stayed like that all through the winter. We anxiously waited for the spring rains to come to wake up plants and bring back the green.

Unfortunately, instead of the almost 10 inches of precipitation (snow and rain) that the U. S. Climate Data website predicts as the average for Greeley, Colorado from January to July, we only received 3 ½

Buffalo grass starting to green up, early June 2022

inches. The May/June short burst of rain started the greening of the buffalo grass, but then it began to slip back into its dry, dormant state.

What to do? I could start up the sprinklers and drive the prairie into a lush green state, or I could rely on the inherent resilience of these dryland grasses to remain alive and healthy in their dry, quiescence forms and wait for rain to come to re-awaken them,

I chose to wait.

My front yard prairie looks like the dry, rolling grasslands out on the nearby Pawnee Grasslands. You can feel the ecological anticipation and the built-up need for the arrival of precipitation! The summer monsoon, the long fall rains, the steady winter snows: anything! Very few weeds are growing in our prairie this year (the grasses are too dense and the weeds can’t grow without water). The grasses, though, can wait out dry spells of considerable lengths. They have evolved in our on-and-off, fluctuating climate and are able to abide. It would be so easy to flip on the sprinkler, though! Patience is a very hard thing to practice!

(Next week: the rest of the front yard!)