News

Saving water on their minds

More homeowners are moving away from the water-gobbling St. Augustine grass.

By DAN DEWITT, Times Staff Writer
Published October 13, 2007

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SPRING HILL - Many builders assume home buyers prefer their lawns to conform to the Florida standard - dense, fibrous mats of St. Augustine grass.

Nestor Matos feels just the opposite.

The Bahia grass in the back yard of his house in the Silver Ridge subdivision thrives with little water or care. The St. Augustine in front has been consumed by pests and can barely survive with the once-a-week soaking allowed under current restrictions.

"It takes so much water," said Matos, 63, who moved to Florida from New Jersey in January and said he "hates to waste anything, especially water. It's a miracle thing. ... But with this grass you don't know where to turn. You either waste the water or let your grass die."

Grass, long taken for granted, is a subject of intense debate around the state and county - mostly because of the ongoing drought that has left groundwater levels below normal, even at the end of the summer rainy season.

Researchers around the state are trying to develop grasses that are both more attractive and more drought resistant than St. Augustine. In Hernando, the Development Department is rewriting the county landscape ordinance to reduce the amount of water devoted to lawn irrigation.

The current law limits the area of each yard covered by thirsty species such as St. Augustine to 75 percent. On Monday, county staffers released a new draft that proposed reducing that to 50 percent, only to be told by the Southwest Florida Water Management District it probably won't work.

That advice was based partly on a common practice in Pasco, where the county already limits intense watering to 50 percent of each yard, said Kathy Scott, the district's conservation projects manager.

Builders plant half the yard in Bahia, she wrote in a letter analyzing the county's ordinance. "After closing, an irrigation system may be extended to the backyard with the homeowner choosing to replace the low water use zone with a high water use zone."

That does not appear to be happening in Hernando, based on interviews with more than a dozen homeowners in new subdivisions, including Silver Ridge, Sterling Hill and Villages of Avalon.

To meet the current Hernando requirements, most builders in these subdivision plant Bahia grass in the back yard and, in the front, St. Augustine - usually the Floratam variety developed more than 30 years ago to resist chinch bugs.

Only one resident interviewed - a Sterling Hill homeowner who declined to give his name - had replaced the Bahia, and only because it had died, he said. More than half of them, on the other hand, preferred Bahia - developed as a pasture grass. That included the only other resident interviewed with an all-St. Augustine lawn, Diana Black.

"Considering that I just got a $740 water bill, I'm sort of hating this grass," said Black, 37, who moved to her home in Villages of Avalon from a rental house in the same neighborhood about a month ago. She began watering daily after moving in, which is allowed because her lawn is newly established.

After receiving the bill, however, she and her husband decided to cut back to once a week.

"Right now I could care less if it dies," she said.

Her builder, Denver-based Richmond American Homes, told her the county had allowed the company to plant the entire yard in St. Augustine. The company declined an interview for this story. Vic Heisler, a county landscape inspector, confirmed the county had issued a landscape permit, maybe because the company met the requirement by creating mulched beds over at least 25 percent of the lawn.

Whatever the reason, Black's neighbor, Jill Vaccaro, is jealous.

"It's horrible," she said of the Bahia in her back yard.

"It looks like weeds. I want to rip it out and put St. Augustine in," said Vaccaro, 42, who has lived in Villages at Avalon for about a year. Soon after Richmond completed her house, she said, the company began planting lawns entirely with St. Augustine.

She listed the common complaints with Bahia: It grows in clumps that do not blanket the ground as completely as St. Augustine. It grows rapidly in the summer, meaning it needs frequent mowing, and puts out unsightly seed heads.

But it can last almost indefinitely without water, said Chris Dewey, the coordinator of the Florida Yards and Neighbors program in Pasco County.

"When it runs out of water, it just hunkers down to keep itself alive. Floratam is basically a vine growing on top of the soil. If it runs out of water for six days, it's dead," said Dewey.

Growing it on sand, he said, "is basically growing it hydroponically."

But under all conditions, Floratam and other St. Augustine varieties require more fertilizer and pesticides than Bahia, he said. That is another reason the county has tried to limit its use, said Heisler, who said it has been able to enforce the 75 percent limit because, unlike Pasco, Hernando inspects every house before issuing landscape permits.

Before settling on the 50 percent limit as a compromise with builders and landscaping companies, he said, the county considered banning St. Augustine altogether.

That would be fine with Oswaldo Gonzales, 40, who stopped mowing his lawn in the Trillium subdivision Friday morning to talk about his turf. Gonzales, who recently completed Florida Master Naturalist classes at the cooperative extension office in Citrus County, said he is disturbed by the amount of water that St. Augustine consumes.

"Actually, they should replace it all," he said.

Dan DeWitt can be reached at dewitt@sptimes.com or 352 754-6116.

[Last modified October 12, 2007, 21:40:15]