The Lawn King

My new neighborhood is a rat's maze of impossibly green, manicured lawns. They're all so perfect, at first I thought they were fake. And from what I've been able to discern about the neighbors, that wouldn't have been a bad guess. But no, they're real. Astoundingly real. How on earth, you may ask, does a place that gets only 4 inches of rain a year, and where the average temperature (based on a week's observations) is roughly 120 degrees, manage to have such lush greenery?

Water, my friends.

Oh, not THEIR water. OTHER people's water. Water here is imported, or about 99.9% of it is. This is a desert. AND.... we're in a drought. But no one here is going to let those little facts get in the way of having putting green front lawns. And the key to having a putting green front lawn is to water it... Bako style. Essentially, what you do is turn on your sprinklers, preferably in the middle of the day (so that most of it evaporates) and... walk away. For hours. Just leave it on. Only once your lawn takes on the consistency of a kelp bed, and languid waves of water wash across the sidewalk, over the curb and down the gutter, only then do you turn them off. And every does it! Oh sure, there are rebels...... people who do it in the morning or evening. But they all do it.

Coming from a city that restricted turning on you hose to only two days a week, before 9 and after 4, I was gobsmacked. Drought? Overdevelopment? Importing water? Global warming?Who cares! I can putt from my front door!

But there is a bright side...