Serendipity: Growing Grama Pays Off with Blades of Glory
Cultivating grass from seed takes hard work and a lot of trial and error, but the results make it worthwhile.
I used to think that “watching the grass grow” was a euphemism for being idle. Then I decided to grow a patch of blue grama, a drought-tolerant native grass. Now, it’s hard to believe that seeds are a sustainable way to run the business of nature.
Soon we had a lush field of irrigated weeds. It wasn’t just the bushtits’ appetites. Consulting the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, I learned that blue grama was a warm-season grass. They advised us to weed all winter and spring, and then replant it with plugs grown from seed.
In April, I showed up for Andrew Wyatt’s seed-starting class, figuring it would be a cinch. What more was there to say but “stick the seeds in a container, water them and watch them grow”? I had just read an article about researchers in Israel coaxing a 2,000-year-old date palm seed to grow. If they could sprout an ancient seed, surely I could do the same with fresh ones.
Hours later, my head whirled and my hands gripped dirt-smudged handouts. They pointed out every conceivable combination of soils, seed covers and methods of extracting seeds from seed covers. If you gathered seed from the wild, you might have to soak it, freeze it, hammer it or maybe burn it to extract it from its cover.
Fortunately, my blue grama seeds were soil-ready. I had gathered egg cartons since Easter to use as planting containers. My first batch of 60 died when the shallow containers dried out more regularly than I remembered to water. Then I learned about plug flats. I bought five 6-inch-by-12-inch plug flats and began again. Most of them sprouted nicely with my daily spritzing, then withered in a few days. I added more seeds.
In early June, I prepared the field with four days of half-hour watering followed by two days of drying. My son and I began planting in the cool of the evening, after work. We labored until we could no longer see where we had sowed. I finished planting at daybreak.
At that moment, I felt the pride of a farmer. My back, knees and wrists were aching, but I was confident I had earned the right to watch the grass grow. The Middle East scholars must have felt something like this triumph, I decided, when they succeeded with the Judean palm, named Methuselah after the oldest person in Bible. Three years later, it is a 4-foot seedling.
My grass is growing, too. The plugs are healthy, and some of the original seed crop, planted out of season and decimated by birds, is sprouting. I’m weaning the grass off daily water. Next week, they graduate to a semi-arid schedule: 20 minutes every other week.
In the past century, this slope-turned-flat field has transitioned from foothill chaparral to cattle range to avocado orchard, succumbing to root rot. Now it will be a reasonably sustainable landscape, resistant to erosion and attractive to native insects and birds. I also hope it will be sufficiently attractive for a wedding reception or two, a healthy crop of grandchildren and time spent watching the native grass grow.
Karen Telleen-Lawton’s column is a mélange of observations supporting sustainability. Graze her writing and excerpts from Canyon Voices: the Nature of Rattlesnake Canyon at www.canyonvoices.com.
» wrote on 07/21/08 @ 09:57 AM
A hurrah to Karen Telleen-Lawton for the vision, the tired body, and the model of restoring native grassland in her own backyard! May this start a trend on the over-cultivated hills of Santa Barbara.
» wrote on 07/21/08 @ 06:09 PM
I’m inspired - growing grass, ponderin’ wedding receptions, grandkids, and the quirks of nature - all with a sore back and a farmer’s eye. Good stuff!
» wrote on 07/21/08 @ 06:26 PM
Charming article, Karen! Keep on watching the grass grow. Write a poem while you’re watching. Write a poem about grasses and water and little birds, and then when the grass gets to be intimate with your soil, that it will need less of the precious water.
» wrote on 07/28/08 @ 12:36 AM
Karen = you are indeed an inspiration. We, too, have suffered root rot in our effort to sustain an avocado orchard on our four acres in hopes of warding off fire. So far we have succeeded only in harvesting some peaches from a peach tree, no apricots from another tree, although we did have lots of blossoms. Yet, out of 48 or more avocado trees, we have yet to harvest any fruit, but I think some transients have. You are welcome to any you find along the road.
» wrote on 08/09/08 @ 04:49 PM
In another life, investigation into landscaping and water came up with these facts. (1) According to the tree handbook for every 12 inches of circumference the average tree takes 10 gallons of water a day to maintain. (2) With that fact it takes 30 gallons of water per month to keep the 12 inch circumference tree alive [pretty small tree]. (3)a well maintained smallish lawn will use approximately the same amount of water. So what is the big deal? Lawn produces as much O2 [in square footage] as a tree, binds carbon very efficiently [see those clippings?], in bio-mass conversion clippings makes excellent ‘benchmark’ light crude, and when a drought hits lawn water use can be turned off while the tree continues to draw down the water table. Congratulations to Karen, you are helping the environment, looks great, and provides a recreation space.