How these Sacramento homeowners converted lawns to drought-resilient yards

Jack McKeon’s drought-friendly front yard may not be the prettiest in town, but he loves it.

Last year, McKeon and his wife, Rebecca, bought a home in Sacramento’s La Riviera neighborhood.

The home’s small front yard looked just like nearly every other one on the block: Green grass, a lawn that they’d have to soak with water even as state regulators were urging Californians to cut back their water use to address the state’s worsening drought.

Last summer, the McKeons chose to do what a growing number of Californians have done to cut their water use as the state faces drought after drought — they killed their front lawn.

“We just never really had a use for a lawn,” said McKeon, a 34-year-old contractor who works for NASA’s Ames Research Center. “We don’t really like them. Because they consume a ton of petrochemicals in terms of fertilizer. They’re a huge water waste. They are terrible for the environment, because it’s like a wasteland for food for insects.”

They gave their lawn a final soaking from their sprinklers. Then they smothered the grass with some sheets of cardboard that they covered with a layer of compost and shredded bark.

Instead of grass, they now grow heirloom varieties of corn, tomatoes, squash and other veggies bred to do well in deserts with only a few splashes of water each day.

The total cost of the new “yarden:” About $800, which, for the McKeons, was money well spent.

The best part: As soon as they made the switch, they reduced their water use by about 2,000 gallons a month.

As green dries to gold, the primary color of Sacramento’s summers, and as lawn-watering restrictions become nearly an annual occurrence, regulators and policymakers are encouraging more residents to do what McKeon did and replace their grass with something less water intensive. As much as half of the water used in the state’s urban areas is poured on outdoor landscaping, predominantly to keep residential lawns green.

And they’re giving out money for people to make the transition to a less-grassy future.

Many water districts in the region are offering rebate programs that reimburse their customers to pull out their grass. For instance, the Sacramento County Water Agency is offering up to $2,000 per household for its “Cash for Grass” program. The city of Sacramento’s turf replacement program recently celebrated a milestone of replacing 1 million square feet of lawns with drought-tolerant landscaping. Sacramento offers a rebate of up to $3,000.

High-end, low-water-use option

The turf-replacement program hasn’t really caught on in east Sacramento, judging from the lush green lawns on Jeff and Desiree Cherye’s block.

Unlike their neighbors, the couple’s front yard is a little shaded oasis of neatly manicured bottlebrush, giant agave, aloe and other plants that buzz with the sounds of bees and other bugs paying the flowers a visit for their nectar.

Jeff Cherye said he paid about $10,000 to have the grass removed back in 2008 at a time when much of Sacramento still didn’t even have water meters, and discussions about drought crises were still years away.

He said he and his wife, both registered nurse anesthetists at area hospitals, never looked back.

“It’s maintenance free mostly,” he said. “It looks beautiful … and I just feel good about not wasting that water.”

His landscape designer was Roberta Walker, whose business in Sacramento has been brisk as customers seek to design their outdoor spaces to be adapted to the reality of today’s California where drought is increasingly becoming the norm. Still, a lot of people think a yard that uses only a little bit of water has to be an ugly one, she said.

“People have this idea that a drought-tolerant landscape is all rock and cactus, and it’s not,” Walker said. “A drought-tolerant landscape can feed your family and feed pollinators — the birds, the bees and the butterflies.”

Lawn conversion for less

And you don’t necessarily need to hire an expensive landscaping designer to get that, said Chris Brown, former executive director of an organization now called the California Water Efficiency Partnership.

He said he spent $600 converting his yard in Sacramento’s Oak Park neighborhood into a landscape of native plants.

Like McKeon, he did the work himself. He bought the plants from local landscape shops that sell them. He said the starter plants were only $5 to $10 each, and they quickly took off.

“It’s full of all sorts of plants that belong here,” he said. “So they don’t really stress out during the drought, and I don’t have to overwater the lawn because I don’t have a lawn. I have a yard. I don’t have to overwater the landscape.”

Brown acknowledges, though, that grass is going to be hard for some to give up.

For those who wish to keep grass around their homes, he urged them to consider replacing water-intensive varieties with more drought-tolerant species such as tall fescue and Bermuda grass.

“You’re going to save water,” he said. “And those grasses are going to tolerate infrequent watering.”

So say you’ve already made the switch to a drought-tolerant outdoor space.

How do you convince your lawn-loving neighbors to lose their grass without getting all preachy about it?

Desiree Cherye, who has that fancy drought-tolerant yard in east Sacramento, offered this advice.

“Mostly, it’s me just saying, like, ‘Oh my God, this is so easy to take care of, and it looks so nice,’ ” she said. “It’s more like promoting without shaming.”

This story was originally published June 19, 2022 at 5:00 AM.