There is a new way of going green and more people are starting to discover the effectiveness and the ease in which it can be achieved. The answer is to go brown. That is to say, to allow your lawn to go brown. The idea is that one of the biggest ways that water can be wasted is to pour it into our front or back lawn in the name of watering the garden. In fact, all we are doing is getting a short term burst of green from the lawn giving us little return for the water and money that has just been poured into the ground.

There have already been some dramatic drops in water usage in some cities as the realisation that watering the lawn less often is actually a good thing. Los Angeles has had an 18% reduction in water during 2009 compared to 25 years ago. The big news out of this is that the largest chunk of water conservation has come from residential water use rather than businesses or the city itself.

What that means is that more people are quite content to let their grass go brown. The brown grass doesn’t necessarily mean it has died. Instead it may simply have become dormant as it waits for conditions to improve. Many grasses come good again after a heavy downpour or prolonged periods of rain.

Another answer that some people have turned to is the installation of artificial grass as a replacement of their brown lawn. Doing this ensures that their front or back lawn always looks lush and green and with the improvements in the technology, these artificial grasses are very hard to distinguish from real grass. In some areas there are cash back incentives for installing synthetic grass, too.

Water restrictions imposed on residents is a further measure to ensure that the water conservation ideal is followed and while this has resulted in great water savings not everyone is happy. Gardeners who want to maintain their healthy garden are finding it difficult to keep their plants alive under the restrictions. This tends to result in new innovative methods of saving the water and ensuring that evaporation is slowed. Measures such as mulching and planting drought tolerant plants are being more commonly used.

The result is a greater consciousness when it comes to water use and a tendency to be a little more careful when the tap gets turned on.

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