3 ms·

replace most of the lawn with gravel.

• CydeWeys 10y ago
  It's actually way cheaper to simply pave a yard on a new construction house with gravel than to sod it and install an irrigation system, which is essentially required in the kinds of deserts I'm talking about. I know if I were buying a new house today, one of which had several hundreds of dollars per month in required water costs to keep the lawn alive, and one of which did not, I'm going with the latter one every time. Especially because you know the lawn is going to die on the former anyway at some point in the future when more severe water restrictions come into play and watering your lawn is (rightfully) prohibited.
• jdblair 10y ago
  We've done all three to our yard in Oakland, and its great. We xeriscaped most of our yard, with plants fed by drip irrigation. We put in a small patch of grass (about 300 square feet) with a sod called "native no-mow" that is literally that: it gets long and we don't mow it. We do have to weed it occasionally. The rest is covered in gravel. The project wasn't cheap, but it wasn't that outrageously expensive, either, especially not compared to the cost of housing. We have to irrigate some, but nothing like what a lawn would need. And we have a nice outdoor space to hang out and entertain in, way nicer than concrete.