Adjusting From Excessive Watering

Reducing Excessive Water Usage

Having already discussed the damage that can occur from an excessive lawn watering regime in an earlier article, lets now discuss how to safely step down to a safe watering level.

The Need To Step Down Lawn Watering

All life, including simple plants like our lawns have survival mechanisms built into them, these mechanisms ensure the ongoing survival of the species, and initiate whenever certain events occur.

For lawns and plants that are receiving excessive amounts of water, the lawn or plants begins to recognise these amounts as being normal to it's survival, and the longer that excessive watering has been occurring, the bigger problem we can face in repairing the problem.

In suddenly reducing water supply to our lawn, the survival mechanisms kick into action, the lawn is now believing it is about to die, and quickly changes all of it's normal behaviour patterns to stop using its energy and food and water supplies for its normal growth, and shuts these actions down.

All food, water and energy is instead spent in producing as many seed heads as quickly as possible in order for the species to regenerate and survive when conditions again improve.

Pretty Clever!

Unfortunately, these brilliant survival mechanisms were falsely triggered by our behaviour, and our lawn now looks awful, full of seed heads and dying.

Watering Step Down

Stepping down simply means reducing the water supply to our lawns gradually, when we do this over several weeks, the lawn does not go into shock, does not believe it is about to die, and will not kill itself by using its energy producing masses of seed heads.

Reducing watering times by a few minutes a week is all it takes to step down gradually until you get to an appropriate amount of water to be used.