Garden Plot: Consider fruit trees in place of water-heavy lawns

Apricots need summer heat to produce sweet fruit, so plant in the hottest part of the garden. Bleinhems are the most flavorful. (Diane Lynch / For The Ark)

So those welcome rains in May may have been it for the rainy season. Now it’s time to tune up the irrigation and grit our teeth about the cost of keeping the garden alive and well over the many months until we get substantial rain again. My Marin Water bills have more than doubled since the district made its tiers smaller and raised the price of hookup and watershed management. Each billing cycle, it costs me $118 before I draw a single drop of water. But we still have the same number of plants that need water, so what to do?

Start by not planting many, if any, new plants this growing season; wait until fall to put any in. Think about shrinking any lawn you might have. Unless you have small children who love to cavort on the lawn, maybe it’s time to rethink a lawn altogether. There’s nothing that uses more water, labor and inputs than a lawn. Is it pretty? For sure, but it makes almost no sense in dry California.

Now is the time to think about what you might put in place of a lawn, should you choose to repurpose it. I can see you rolling your eyes as I spout off on the virtues of natives, but they’re best suited to Marin’s climate, along with many other plants from Mediterranean climates worldwide. There’s a lot of beauty in these well-adapted plants.

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