Green Goodness

We have a lawn in back again. YAY!

Patching in a lawn with drought tolerant grass

My feeble attempts at getting some kind of lawn in our backyard seem to be continually thwarted each year. Upon moving in, our original backyard had a massive pit full of sand in it from the Previous Owner's sandbox. Since we started working on the house, the backyard has been a massive traffic area and a natural construction staging area full of all kinds of debris and materials for our second floor remodel and kitchen renovation, ruining any attempts we make at reviving it.

Add in the fact that our backyard is small to begin with, has several tall trees and buildings surrounding it, and receives probably only 5 hours of sunlight, it seems like a continually futile battle. So futile in fact, that Jen has repeatedly said she is ready to throw in the towel and just make our backyard grass-free and turn it into a big landscaped area with pea gravel or pavers etc.

Since we still haven't decided what we're going to do with this space (we need a plan!), I am making a last ditch effort this year to once again plant grass seed. Since I want to avoid watering the lawn, I found a hardy variety of grass called tall fescue that is promised to be drought tolerant once it's established and good for cool areas and even shady spaces. After some research, this showed up as one of the "greener" species of lawn grass that would be appropriate. I especially liked this description of tall fescue:

Low maintenance. Tall fescue has excellent tolerance for heat stress and drought. It will tolerate moderate traffic and infrequent mowing. This species is not well adapted to high altitudes.

So I've sowed some seed in one last desperate attempt to salvage a grassy spot in our yard. I figure we'll eventually carve out some kind of plan out of the grass anyway, but it would be nice to have a "green" canvas to begin with. It will be interesting to see how this blends in with the existing (spotty) lawn grass, which I believe is typical Kentucky bluegrass. I'll have to get some photos up of our yard soon to show its progress.

Installing a Loopy Rain Barrel

The city of Chicago offered a rain barrel initiative this year so people could purchase these at a discount. The city benefits because, during a period of heavy rains like we had in August, less water goes into the storm sewers, reducing the chance of basements flooding. Personally, I just like the idea of using natural water for our garden plants rather than treated chlorinated water.

Jen is cool with almost any idea that helps keep her plants green. Normally, a rain barrel is installed directly beneath a downspout. The problem is, none of our downspouts are near our backyard plants. When I mentioned this idea to my friend Mark, he said he had just watched a TOH episode where they not only installed a rain barrel, but did so with a neat backflow diverter kit. Once the barrel is full of water, this sends the excess water back down to the gutter. That sounded perfect for our situation, so I picked one up when Jen and I checked out a green building supply house in Chicago.


So last weekend, with the supplies in hand, Mark and I set to modifying our gutter system to install this two-part system. Our setup was a bit more challenging as the gutters were much larger than what the diverter was designed for, but we finally decided to create a loop branch off one of the main downspouts.

As shown here, most water continues uninterrupted through the downspout, but some water is caught by a flap and brought IN to the rain barrel loop. Once the barrel is full, the water level will feedback and rise to the diverter, and excess water will flow through the OUT branch of the loop.

Since this downspout was about 12 feet from the rain barrel's desired location in our backyard, we couldn't install the supplied hose that came with the kit, and had to adapt a longer garden hose shown in the photos above. I think I may need a can of spray paint to make the white diverter brown, but other than that, the system is complete.

After a quick hose test, the barrel started to collect some water, so all we need is a nice downpour to see how quickly the barrel fills up!