Your Texas Lawn is Really Expensive
Since the mid 20th century, lawns have become the default option for home and public landscapes across the country. Far from being an exception, Texas is, if anything, the national capital of lawn culture (for evidence, see the lawn care habits of the main characters in the popular animated comedy/documentary series King of the Hill). The history of lawns is an interesting topic for another day, but one might reasonably assume that lawns have spread in part because they’re a cost effective solution for beautifying outdoor spaces… right? Well, maybe not, as it turns out. How much does your lawn cost if you live near San Antonio or Austin, anyway?
This is a really complicated question with a lot of variables. How much rainfall do you receive? What type and how deep are your soils? What kind of grass are you growing? What are temperatures like during the growing season? Sun or shade? This is a blog post and not a PhD dissertation in Lawn Care Studies at Texas A&M, so let’s pick a simple and common scenario for the San Antonio area; St Augustine growing in partial to mostly sun on reasonably deep soils (about two thirds of Bexar County would have conditions like this, and the vast majority of our urban land has similar conditions). In Bexar County we receive about 30 inches of rainfall a year on average, which is not enough to sustain a St Augustine lawn, especially when you consider that average conceals some extremely lean years where even more irrigation is required.
Since I don’t have a research laboratory (yet), I have outsourced my data collection to an estimate done by New Braunfels Utilities, which considered this exact scenario (St Augustine in mostly sun) in the drought year of 2011. If you’ve been operating on the widespread assumption that lawns are an economical choice for landscaping, the numbers might surprise you (see figure at left):
Adjusted for inflation in 2023 dollars, that’s $3,777 a year for a typical 2,000 square foot lawn, or about $1.88 a square foot! If you’re a Hank Hill type you of course won’t let any other person touch your lawn, so let’s assume labor is “free”. Even then, your relatively modest lawn is still costing you about $2,800 in a drought year.
And what do you get in return for your hard earned money and our scarce water? A patch of green that doesn’t put food on your table and doesn’t do much to benefit Texas wildlife. A fuller study of appropriate uses for turf grasses is a post for another day, but for now let’s say that it’s clear that Texans aren’t getting much for their money here.
The lawn in its natural habitat, the Château de Versailles in France. If you are not an aspiring 17th century French aristocrat, consider alternative gardening options.
So we’ve established that lawns are expensive to maintain in the Texas heat, but perhaps the low installation costs make it worth it? Again, the answer might surprise you. We can head down to the Home Depot today and buy a pallet of St Augustine for about $1.18 a square foot. For the curious, this is roughly the same as mid to low end carpet available at the same store (more on the outdated idea of plants as outdoor furnishings in another post). So assuming we have a typical situation with no need for regrading or other site prep work and no labor costs (again, Hank Hill DIY), our lawn will cost us about $2,360 to install, or a little less than a year’s worth of upkeep. Like the lawn I grew up with at my parents house, we’ll assume that there is no irrigation system and the homeowner is watering the old fashioned way with regular hose sprinklers.
Now let’s compare this to a basic garden bed full of native plants. In this case, I do have my own research facility; my extensive personal gardens developed over many years. As with turf grass lawns, there are many ways to grow your garden. But let’s try and keep it simple as we did with our grass cost estimate and assume 2,000 square feet of soils of average depth in full sun planted with nursery grown transplants at retail prices planted in a mulched bed with free woodchips from a Chipdrop and free DIY labor. As with our lawn, we will not install an irrigation system.
For installation costs, my rule of thumb for material costs for native beds is about $1.20 a square foot DIY. This will vary depending on what you want to plant, but in my experience a $1.20 per square foot gets a decently densely planted bed. To take a simplified example, a mature esperanza bush costs about $12 for a one gallon plant at a local nursery and takes up about 10 square feet in a garden bed. For our 2,000 square foot bed we’ll need 200 of those. Therefore, the total for the installation of a native bed is about $2,400. Sharp readers will notice that this is about the same as our DIY St Augustine lawn! You could even cut this almost in half with a Watersaver Rewards rebate if you’re a SAWS customer removing your lawn, but for the sake of this post let’s assume you don’t get a subsidy. Though you could go even lower by seeding a wildflower meadow or prairie.
The cost savings for natives begin to kick in with the maintenance. The amount of water you use will vary depending on what you’ve planted. Our hypothetical esperanza-only bed from above actually requires exactly zero water in even the worst years (it is after all a Chihuahuan desert plant). However true Bexar County natives require a bit of water to look their best. Coming up with water figures for a typical mixed native bed is close to impossible, so we’ll try to back into this using my own personal SAWS bill as our guide. The total irrigated area of my garden is about 3,000 square feet. This includes a vegetable garden and fruit trees on drip irrigation as well as large native beds that I hand water or use a sprinkler on in droughts. In the hot and dry as hell summer of 2022, my water bill was only about $125 a month, including residential usage for 4 people. Subtract from that our winter average of $75, and we can estimate that watering my garden costs about $50 a month, rounding up. On a square foot basis that’s about $0.016 a square foot per month. In the most dire of years, the garden needs to be irrigated about 6 months of the year, for a total water cost of $192 a year. Fertilizer cost is zero for this garden. Like any home landscape it does require periodic maintenance, but this all pretty minimal and by hand so we have no fuel expense for the mower. Plants do occasionally need to be replaced (just as lawns often need to be overseeded) because plants don’t live forever, and experience tells me we can count on a maximum 10% replacement cost in a year, or about $240 in this example. Therefore, the “hot as hell” total yearly maintenance bill for our irrigated garden comes to only $432 a year! A fuller post is forthcoming about the non-monetary benefits to your native garden, but we can already tell we’re getting excellent value for our money here in terms of food on our table and food on the tables of birds, insects and other valuable Texas critters.
Now, even as I type I can already hear the objections streaming forth from the suburbs. To all this I say, yes, of course, as I said there are a lot of variables and it’s going to depend. But I do have some general rebuttals for you to consider:
“But I have Bermuda/Zoysia/magic grass”. Grass type is important of course. Bermuda uses less water than St Augustine, and a bermuda grass lawn can soldier on through most dry summers and live, but for it to look halfway decent you have to water a couple times a week in full sun (and bermuda won’t grow at all in the shade). And a bermuda grass lawn that isn’t irrigated regularly tends to thin out, allowing weeds to come in, increasing your labor and herbicide costs.
“I have a well so the water is free”. Your well water is probably a little less free than you think. Every gallon you drag up from the ground costs you energy and wear and tear on your pump. I won’t begin to estimate those costs, but it’s also worth considering the cost to your friends and neighbors as well. Those gallons on your lawn are gallons that aren’t available for people and wildlife for essential use during drought years.
“My HOA makes me have grass”. Fair enough, HOA’s vary on a spectrum of tricky to ultra toxic. But keep in mind that as of 2020, Texas HOA’s are prohibited from banning drought tolerant landscaping, which would include native plant gardens. The most they can legally regulate is how that garden is implemented (height and location of vegetation, that sort of thing). Now, whether you want to fight the HOA over this is another matter, but the law is ultimately on your side. I personally wouldn’t be caught dead living in an HOA but there are resources on the internet that can help you navigate the process.
“I am a lawn care professional born on a sod farm with an MBA in lawns and 3,000 years of lawn growing experience and I do it much cheaper than that!” Well, maybe you do. You can certainly seed a lawn for much less than the cost of sod. This is also a pretty difficult strategy that is typically only used by homebuilders and highway departments. By the way, you could also grow a native prairie or wildflower meadow for much less than the cost of a seeded Bermuda grass lawn (just saying).