As Spokane’s summer watering restrictions kick in, adapt or kill your lawn

It’s summer in Spokane, the temperature is regularly crawling into the 90s, and even the occasional thunderstorm is doing little to water the lawn.

With drought conditions settling in, the city has restricted how often residents are supposed to water their yards, requiring the public to conserve water for the aquifer and the Spokane River. For residents who have long insisted on maintaining lush lawns all summer, this generates annual complaints.

Many of the city’s summer restrictions are best practices that homeowners should be doing for much of the year – water deeply but infrequently, and either early in the morning or later in the evening.

“When I’m driving into Spokane and see people watering at 2 p.m. or 5 p.m., it makes me sad,” said Tyler Beasley, a horticulturist in Spokane Community College’s environmental sciences department. “A lot of that water is just hit by the sun and evaporates into the atmosphere.”

But when water levels drop in the middle of summer and Level 2 restrictions limit watering to two days a week, homeowners should expect a grass lawn to go brown.

Researchers point to two routes a local homeowner could take: learn to accept that they live in an arid environment and that grasses will go brown, or rip out that lawn and create a landscape at home in Spokane.

A SpokaneScape, so to speak.

Kill your lawn

For seven years Spokane, like many arid cities, has been encouraging its residents to rip out their lawns and replace them with native and drought-tolerant plants interspersed with mulch.

“Grass is really not suitable for the climate we have in Spokane,” said Hannah Walker, a coordinator for the city’s SpokaneScape program.

Instead of struggling with a water-hungry lawn that gets patchy and brown in the summer, the SpokaneScape program encourages residents to get creative with lush bushes of lavender and Oregon grape, bright bunch grasses and purple Echinacea, and myriad other plants that can be aesthetically pleasing and better suited to the local environment.

Residents who apply and are accepted into the SpokaneScape program can receive up to a $500 credit toward their utility bill for removing as much as 1,000 square feet of lawn or as little as 300 and replacing it with drought-tolerant plants and mulch.

The savings for a resident’s wallet can continue long after the credit is used: One resident interviewed by The Spokesman-Review in 2021 reported that ripping out 1,000 square feet of grass and replacing it with SpokaneScaping fed by drip irrigation saved 19,000 gallons of water annually.

And those plants can make use of something that grass lawns can’t: drip lines, which can make yard maintenance significantly more efficient in more ways than one.

“Not only do drip lines help conserve water and get the water directly to the roots, it prevents a lot of weeds,” Beasley said. “When you’re watering overhead with a hose, there’s water loss, but you’re also watering weed seeds.”

“I did all of my landscape garden, and even my vegetable garden, with drip,” he added. “I very rarely deal with weeds, and I’ve never seen a whole lot of drought response from my plants.”

Green lawn, white picket fence

Not everyone wants to break more than 200 years of American tradition and forgo the classic grass lawn, and the good news is that it is very possible to keep one alive during Spokane’s summers.

It’s just going to be brown, said Michael Neff, a professor at Washington State University whose specialties include grass and turf science.

Most grasses used in lawns are cool-season varieties, which grow rapidly in the spring and fall but go dormant in the summer, Neff said in an interview. Yes, a sports field or golf course can keep that grass green year-round with a lot of fertilizer to trick the grass into growing along with other chemical inputs, copious water and effort, but Spokane residents are legally limited in how much water they can give their grass.

Luckily, the grass doesn’t care if it looks green.

“I’m looking out at my neighborhood right now … and almost all of the lawns are brown or turning brown, but none of them are dead,” Neff said. “They’re just storing water at the crown of the grass.”

It’s certainly possible a lawn will die in the summertime, but not inevitable. The drought and heat can be stressful, but taking steps to ensure the grass is healthy at the end of spring can keep it coming back, come fall.

“If you have a healthy lawn going into the heat of the summer, then the chances are very good your lawn will be fine after the summer, unless you’re playing sports on it or your dogs are pooping and peeing on it – grasses, the way they deal with abuse is recovery growth, and during that summer dormancy, they’re not growing,” Neff said.

Lawns are also going to be more susceptible to pests during the summertime, though it may well be ineffective to try to control those pests by the time you notice them in July, Neff added. Whether identifying the right approach to a particular pest or the specific needs of a particular yard – such as mitigating clay – or sand-rich soil or balancing the pH, it can often be useful to turn to an expert for help.

But many general tips apply more or less universally.

Less frequent, deeper watering throughout the year will permeate further into the soil and push the grass to grow deeper roots to suck up that water, Neff said. Thatching and occasional aeration by pulling out plugs can also help promote healthy root growth and allow water to more easily penetrate the soil.

Taller grass can also preserve water in the soil, Beasley said.

“Don’t scalp it,” he explained. “You don’t have to let it go crazy, but if you just raise the blade one notch and just do that each week, slowly starting to raise your blade and have a 4-inch-tall turf, it takes a lot less water, from my experience.”

Different grass species can respond very differently in the summer as well. For those absolutely determined to have a year-round green lawn that isn’t breaking Spokane’s watering laws, a tall fescue might be appropriate for the front yard, Neff said. With 6-foot-deep roots, it’s well adapted to droughts and receptive to deep but infrequent watering, though it’s also got a course blade that might be less appealing to a playing child’s bare feet.

In the backyard where children play, the classic Kentucky bluegrass may still be ideal, so long as the owner can accept the yard going brown in the summer.