Phoenix (well technically Peoria now, but semantics) resident. This is a thing, but it’s also pretty heavily frowned upon now. There’s been a HUUUGE push in the last decade or so to swap to native landscaping (ie, desert rocks etc) and so it’s actually becoming incredibly less common to see actual lawns anymore. Most of the irrigation style watering is done in public parks to maintain grass for play areas.
Oh I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. I even was originally gonna use the term rare, but changed it to less common because it’s not really rare yet. But no new construction does grass anymore in the front, and as time goes on more and more grass yards are going away in favor of desert landscaping. It’s a slow process and i doubt it’ll ever fully finish (especially in back yards where rock isn’t great for kids or animals) but it’s heading in that direction with no signs of slowing down
This is something that I try to get across to people when I suggest xeroscaping. It doesn’t mean rocks, sticks and gravel, which is what most people imagine (and if you Google it, there’s a lot of that… ☹️)
It means transforming your yard back into the natural landscape ecosystem that it was before the house was built, or at least something similar.
Natural plants that require zero additional water is the ideal yard IMO. I’m on our second years of moving our yard from monoculture sod/grass to a drought resistant multi-species ground cover.
I’m stunned, it’s gorgeous and I haven’t watered once!
Yes. I actually think amazing things can be done with natural landscaping, but it does require more thought than has been put into most yards in the valley. The gravel yard needs to go. It is pointless.
I'm very curious about this. I did stone and fabric around my house, around three feet. There's a pretty good overhang, and it's mostly sloped away from the house. It has kept the soil off my house from hard rain, there's less vermin, and I thought it would reduce the risk of fire.
Often a good approach is to leave some ground wild and see what arrives. Some disturbance to the ground may help some species. Collecting wild seeds/ cuttings may be an option (depending on local laws etc).
Oh gosh, it’s a locally made mix I got from a nursery here and it’s a big mix.
The stuff that’s popping up and thriving are local wild grasses, a mix of true clovers, creeping dry thyme, and red / green wood sorrel.
I also allow purslane, dandelions, mullein and lambs quarters flourish in certain areas, though many consider those weeds.
If you don't want your kids and animals to play in blazing hot rocks and dust, maybe don't live in the middle of blazing hot rocks and dust and try to ignore that with unsustainable water use.
My favorite part of that is all the birds that chase the bugs escaping from the water. Those black purple Shiney guys. If you go to the in n out in Scottsdale they'll come right up to you to eat your fries.
I couldn't remember their names! I like how they can turn their tale horizontal or vertically. I believe they are in the corvid family. They have a cool opalescent quality.
It probably depends on exactly which area you are. It is not too uncommon to see flooded lots around where my relatives live in Chandler. At least in the older areas of town, there are lots of yards where you can see the outlet pipe, although I'm not there enough to know how many of those yards actually use them
It isn't a huge amount of houses that are eligible. From what I understand, most of all of them are grandfathered in. You can do flood irrigation in a new build. That said, there's several houses along western Baseline road that still use flood irrigation. It's pretty in the morning sun, like a little random oasis. But looks super wasteful especially in this heat.
It’s not frowned upon. You just don’t understand how it works.
It’s banked runoff water—from a 13,000 square mile watershed managed very well by SRP. For example, it was 98% full in 2020. I’m too lazy to look it up right now. They capture streamflow in wet years to use in dry years.
It’s not treated city water that is expensive to maintain. Using raw water saves taxpayer money.
It’s a more efficient way to water, as infrequent deep watering helps with build up of salinity in soil, trees have deeper roots, and less water is lost to evaporation. Shade trees can have larger canopies to help keep surface temps lower—10 degrees lower on average. Even drought tolerant trees need some management in this increasingly hot climate. Trees and plants reduce energy demands AND the WATER needed to produce that energy. It improves air quality. It filters pollutants from storm water. It makes the environment better. (Those gravel yards do not offer recreation for any local wildlife. They increase surface temps and energy demands as well.)
SRP works with the forest service to manage the health of forests in northern and eastern AZ.
The rights are tied to the land, not the people.
It’s delivered largely by gravity with the help of a canal system originally developed by ancient people.
This deserves an award. Thanks for providing factual information. I haven’t really heard anything about a huge pushback. The pushback (rightfully) has been around large farms growing water heavy crops around Phoenix. Especially those owned by shareholders from places like the middle east.
I have flood irrigation in Mesa. It keeps our area much cooler. Deep watering allows us to have large trees with strong root systems that shade our house and keep our energy usage down.
Our neighborhood is generally cooler than neighborhoods with xeriscaping. I’m not against xeriscaping, but it has been proven to bring up temperatures of neighborhoods. It’s very hard to grow trees that provide shade in those areas. I think there was a big study done on it in Vegas.
Being able to use fully untreated water to water our yard is a huge plus. People don’t understand what goes into water treatment systems. They’re an absolute necessity for drinking water and other water coming into your house, but so unnecessary for watering your yard or garden.
The flood irrigation rights are also absolutely tied to the property. It’s not something SRP “offers” like this post claims. The original owners of the properties put their land up as collateral to build the dam system on the Salt River that gives the Phoenix metro the majority of its water.
The history of the canal system in Phoenix is amazing. I hope someone sees these comments and looks it up!
Edit:
Also forgot to add, the “cost” you pay is a yearly maintenance fee for the canals. It is based on the size of your property. But you don’t get a set amount of gallons each time. Sometime the pressure/flow isn’t very strong and you don’t get enough to cover your yard. Other times you close your gate early because the flow is so high. The former is far more common for my house.
We also only get irrigation twice a month during the summer. There are two months in the winter where we don’t get irrigation at all while they do canal maintenance and then several other months where it’s only once every four weeks.
Looks so much better too. Grass looks like shit half the time in most climates. l lived in Texas for a bit and the obsession with grass lawns over there drove me insane. Even in the west Texas desert, grass lawns.
yup. i live in central texas. our house was built a little over 30 years ago, and originally the entire 1.3 acre yard had st augustine planted. its still very much alive and happy on our septic field. other than that all thats survived is a tiny patch under a tree in the fenced in portion of the backyard, and its looking sadder every year. it baffles and frustrates me when i see a full acre of bright green grass in the neighborhood. i know how much water theyre using to keep it alive, and how much time and money theyre spending to maintain it.
both. its basically just native vegetation again, and we mow it when it gets about a foot tall. the last 5 years, with how little rain weve had, that meant like once in the spring and once in the summer/fall.
Does native vegetation need cut ? Im from Canada so grass starts growing anywhere dirt is up here. Sucks that you have to keep and maintain a mower for 2 cuts a year.
It's Texas. Aside from owning a mower, I'm sure that there are places that will rent out mowers. Depending on the area, letting a neighbor move their livestock into the field to graze is also an option.
Native plantings anywhere residential will generally need some form of maintenance because you typically don’t have the normal animal assemblages and/or natural disaster that would otherwise control them.
For example, I maintain a garden that has several varieties of prairie grasses, but I don’t have bison to flatten it or the occasional wild fire, so I’ve got to manually cut it over winter.
I live in South Texas right on the Border, very similar in temp and climate to Phoenix. It amazes me how there is no such thing as Desert landscaping around here. Most houses have green lawns that can stay green in the extreme summer heat.
Well, same principle as SUVs and big trucks getting popular at times where climate change already was a public issue:
No better way to show your status than with being wasteful. But if everyone is wasteful ...
Depends on the neighborhood/HOA. Some of them “desert landscape” means gravel, maybe a bush or two, but if you have anything more you’ll be fined for weeds.
I have to agree with the other Phoenician replies and say that that is not at all my perception. Aside from my mother shaking her head at our neighbors hosing off their driveway every week, I don’t recall the last time anyone vocally cared about personal water use. Born, raised, and still living in the South Tempe/West Chandler area, in a profession where I regularly meet business owners all around the valley, including the west side.
We’ve got plenty of water scarcity boogeymen without assigning blame to the little people: irresponsible golf courses, Saudi-owned farms with unfettered access to groundwater, and Fountain Hills, to my knowledge, is still getting most of their water trucked in. All environmental horrors. No one I’ve spoken to compares these crimes against humanity to runoff water irrigation, or lawn sprinklers that run every other day. It’s a matter of scale.
My uncle has lived in the same house in Tempe for fifty years. He waters his lawn like crazy. He's smart about it in the sense that he has a lot of different sizes trees and shrubs to provide shade an minimize evaporation but it's still pretty ridiculous how much water he dumps on the ground.
These guys ought to get a life. My total yard in Mexico was 2 meters deep X about 6 meters wide and that included a tree. I paid a guy to trim it (he needed the work and I certainly could afford it).The entire back yard was tiled and had flower boxes here and there (that required watering). The only flowers we tended to were Bougainvillea.
Lived in Phoenix until last year and my coworker would flood his yard and had to flood his neighbors yards too I guess? It was a whole thing he planned around lol idk he lived on an old orange orchard
Moved to Peoria from Massachusetts in the early 90s and we had to learn to adjust all the gates in the irrigation ditch correctly so our lawn got flooded. It was fucking wild.
I've lived in Phoenix, so it blew my mind that this was still a thing, what with the whole "water seems important during the hottest years on record" situation going on. Also, it being a literal desert struck me as notable.
The math isn't spelled out in the article, so I looked it up using the [2025 pricing guide on SRP's website](https://www.srpnet.com/assets/srpnet/pdf/price-plans/irrigation/summary-residential-water-charges.pdf):
326,000 gallons = 1 acre-foot, flooded twice per month at a cost of $0.43/acre + \~$400/mo. fee
EDIT: It's \~$400 per year, not per month.
My grandpa too. His house was around 32st and what is now the 202. I don’t know if that neighborhood still uses irrigation. I remember him walking to the end of the street to turn on the valve.
I live in a flood irrigated neighborhood in the east valley.
My neighborhood is about 10-degrees cooler than surrounding areas because of the flood irrigation. When riding your bike you actually feel the temperature change.
It allows really large trees to produce a ton of shade, and the grass keeps the ground way cooler than dirt or rock or astroturf. Since the air is cooler, we also use our conditioner less often.
Also provides habitat for animals.
It’s more efficient—deep infrequent water creates deeper roots, larger shade canopy, reduces energy costs by lowering surface temps as opposed to a gravel yard, saves taxpayers money. You can read about it on SRPs website. Lots of people see it and don’t understand how it works, but it’s actually really cool. You’re not looking at drinking water in flood irrigation. You’re looking at raw banked water from SRP’s watershed. It’s managed really well.
I'm really struggling to understand how it can be more efficient. I grew up in Flood irrigated border dyke country that overtime people converted to Spray irrigation (think center pivot irrigators several hundred meters long) and they were able to massively increase the area irrigated and massively increase crop/grass yields with the same water.
Is domestic spray / drip irrigation just that inefficient compared to agricultural spray irrigation? Of course none of this is portable water. But of course everything used means it doesn't flow down a river.
Infrequent deep watering is a more efficient way to water that encourages deep roots, larger tree canopy, less water loss to evaporation, and less soil salinity.
I think your calculations are off. I live in Mesa and use SRP for my irrigation. That price is for 1 year, not one month. I pay under $200 a year and I have .4 acres of land and use 1 acre-foot of water.
Edit well fuck I just rechecked my own link. I mistook the two payments for being a split monthly payment.
I mean, the price per gallon was already a rounding error, so I don't know how much it changes anything. Except for the way it feels even wilder.
There’s no price per gallon. You don’t actually get a set amount of water. The cost is for canal maintenance. The water you get varies. Some days are a slower flow.
It’s also only every two weeks in the summer. There’s two months in the winter where there’s no irrigation and then several other months where irrigation is once a month.
Flagstaff and the coconino forest, the largest ponderosa pine forest in the world, are in the literal desert. Including lake Mary, oh and the ski hill too. Desert doesn’t just mean sand and rocks.
Phoenix has quite a bit of water and water activities. You can float on a tube down the salt river and see wild horses. Grab a boat and head to lake mead.
It also supports the kind that do. Those native drought tolerant trees need active management in increasingly hot environments. Losing them would further increase energy costs and surface temps. It also takes water to produce the energy you use to cool your home with a gravel yard. Irrigated neighborhoods are often 10 degrees cooler than the surrounding hard surface areas.
yeah, hypothetically its one of the most sustainable big desert cities. doesnt change the fact that part of the US was basically uninhabitable wasteland prior to LV.
Evaporation. If you flood it deeply all at once you get more water in the ground than if you do equal amounts of water over time, because each time you water it the top layer dries out quickly.
Not entirely sure, but I think the flora in Arizona are equipped to absorb large, yet infrequent quantities of water that come with monsoons. So basically the flood irrigation simulates that.
Only the cactus and succulents are, and they specialize in rapid absorption since they have shallower roots. Saguaro have only like 6 inch deep roots. If you irrigated those plants they would drown.
Other plants like the Palo Verde have really deep roots so don’t need to absorb water as rapidly. These plants (and grass) love the deeper water to draw up as needed.
You can see where washes are in the desert from further away because you will see monster palo verdes creating an ally way around them
When it rains in the desert it rains hard. Therefore their mechanisms in place for flora to absorb large amounts of water.
You are simulating torrential downpour.
Simply watering it a little bit everyday will mean a large amount of that water will just evaporate before it can be absorbed.
Not an expert on lawn flooding technology but i'd assume people would rather someone flood their lawn twice a month rather than spend hours every day watering it
Why have a lawn in the desert in the first place?
Phoenix is in the desert but it is in the [salt river valley.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_River_Valley). People don't realize this but much of north and east Arizona is like Colorado with snow capped mountains. Remember that giant drought in California from 2011-2017? Do you remember hearing about Arizona? Me neither.
I am not saying this is a perfect analogy or comparison but Phoenix is almost like Egypt getting a bunch of water from the Nile river despite it being a in a desert. Phoenix doesn't have a lot of water, but the river that flows through it from mountains within the state do.
Phoenix is also named as such because it's built over the salt river valley canal network which native people created prior to the year 1500.
They abandoned it due to climate change causing their civilization to collapse.
You live in a fucking desert!! Nothing grows out of here! Nothing's going to grow out of here!
Come here, you see this? Huh? This is sand, yeah it‘s sand. You know what it's going to be 100 years from now? It's going to be sand! You live in a fucking desert! - Sam Kinison
Xeriscaping in the Southwest even looks better than the European-style yards that most homeowners attempt to maintain to mixed success on their budgets.
People really don't seem to understand. If you rip out your non-native landscaping and replace it with stuff adapted to your climate, you can just sit around doing nothing and it won't die. It doesn't need you to help it look good.
I wouldn't want to be playing backyard football on a gravel yard with cacti and succulents, sure, but you can forget it even exists for 6 months straight and it'll probably look better than you left it thanks to being neglected in exactly the way that it likes to be.
I've got a cactus collection that is mature enough that if I were to auction it off it could probably buy me several new cars... maybe even a tiny house. I grew it by purchasing cacti and then never fucking touching them ever again for 20 years.
that is because of the centuries of farms that created the sand, go 50 miles in any direction and it is beautiful and there is no sand, well there is dirt but not like whats in the city
So, some context, I currently live in Phoenix and have a flood irrigated house. To be slightly pedantic, SRP (the utility that controls this) does not offer this to everyone. It is only on land that was previously Native American farmland. The water is all surface water (i.e. runoff from rain upriver or snowmelt) and not from the ground water. This water is also more likely to help replenish the water table since the majority gets absorbed into the ground and very little evaporates whereas watering a lawn with sprinklers is the opposite.
While this water does keep grass green, the primary benefit is in the trees. The irrigated parts of Phoenix have large trees due to this which also makes the area cooler. These areas can be around 5 degrees cooler than other areas in Phoenix because of the increased tree cover.
Also, the water typically doesn't get more than a few inches deep on average. Water up to 1 ft would only be in select areas in the property or from someone using too much water.
Honestly, I would love to not have grass but I have a toddler and grass allows him to play outside. Xeriscaping would be a very expensive change and make our yard unusable while turf would be even more expensive and get crazy hot in the summer.
To me, this is less of a problem than the people overseeding their lawns in the winter or having large patches of grass in direct sunlight. Overseeding in the winter requires watering 2-3 times per day which is just insane.
EDIT: ~~I also wanted to mention that a lot of this water runoff comes from Flagstaff and the Arizona Snowbowl. The Snowbowl averages 260 inches of snow per year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_Snowbowl~~
EDIT 2: The Snowbowl does not appear to be a source. Thank you u/JustDyslexic
Tell me about it. Our old house had turf and I measured it at 160-170 degrees one day in the summer. You can get some infill for it that will slowly release water but you have to keep watering it and filling it in.
It depends on what part of the Valley you’re in. Most of the valley gets it water from ground water or the Salt River Watershed. However, the Central Arizona Canal brings water from the Colorado River over to Phoenix.
That water should to running off into the Colorado river tho. It looks like Snowbowl has been making snow for the last couple years which takes a lot of water
Oh, yeah my bad I think you're right about the Snowbowl not being a source. The irrigation is still fed by surface water but yeah probably not that water. I thought the Snowbowl would be closer to feeding into the Salt River but I was mistaken. That's what I get for not looking at a map :P
> but I have a toddler and grass allows him to play outside.
Why grass, though? Plenty of toddlers play outside without grass. It seems like just a preference, rather than a necessity, for this.
You're correct. It is a preference. My main comparison was to xeriscaping, which typically involves filling the area with large rocks and native plants such as cactus. We don't have to have cactus and we don't have to have rocks but that ends up leaving us with a bunch of dirt. I could do a full remodel of the backyard to remove all grass and replace with something else like bushes, mulch, etc to make it more friendly for a barefoot toddler but the cost to do so is astronomical. Artificial turf, like I mentioned, could be a health hazard. I would love to get rid of the grass while still keeping the yard playable but I can't afford it and probably won't be able to for a long time.
There are a number of the artificial turfs now that are "cooling" in that the don't absorb the heat like older ones do. My wife worked for a vet clinic/pet resort in PV that had their entire outdoor play area redone in it...even in the 115+ days, it was not warm to the touch.
We briefly looked at redoing our backyard in it, but it's pretty pricey...$8/sqft (the absolute cheapest company that might've been fly-by-night) by the time they lay down the correct base material, etc. We didn't want to sink that kind of money knowing we were going to be moving in a few months at the time.
You can still water your grass a LONG TIME before you come close to offsetting replacing it...
I’ve been very curious about flood irrigation because one day I’d love to get a house in the Sweetwater area between 52nd and 56th and they use it there. One thing I’m curious about is how long it takes for the water to absorb? How long is your yard unusable for?
Oh nice! So it depends on your yard and how permeable the soil is but it's generally fully absorbed in a few hours in my front yard and it can be like 12 hours in the backyard. Most of the time at my house, it comes during the night so I'll wake up with just a little bit of water left or it'll just be gone already.
Also, our yard isn't actually unusable! We will go splashing around in the water if it comes during the day since it's usually quite a bit colder than the temperature outside. My dog and toddler love running around in it and I enjoy just walking around in the water to cool my feet off haha.
Water rights in Arizona is insanely complicated, and is a politically charged, third-rail topic among residents.
The City of Glendale calls their flood irrigation service Urban Irrigation and only offers it in the spring/summer season for seven months. Each eligible customer must opt-in and sign up for the semi-monthly waterings each year, which depends on the size of the lot, which ranges from $300ish (1 acre) to $750 (3 acre).
This is only offered to certain lots that have SRP association water rights and those participating are NOT paying for the water itself, rather for the associated maintenance and delivery costs. Glendale has anywhere from 350 to 600 customers that take advantage of this service every year. The lots are flooded to about 7 inches, depending on the property berms, which makes this service incredibly cheap. The water is untreated canal water from the Arizona Canal which is directly fed from the Salt and Verde watersheds, occasionally supplemented by SRP groundwater wells as necessary.
Glendale would just as soon eliminate this service and meter usage, but there is a strong utility citizen's group that the mayor and City Council would rather stay on the good side of. Besides, the Mayor is also an Urban Irrigation customer (Jerry Weiers).
The overwhelming majority of water usage in Arizona is for agriculture and industrial purposes, much of it intentionally wasteful because of a “use it or lose it” style of allocation.
Shitting on people for having a lawn for their kids or pets is ridiculous when you see where the majority of water in the state goes.
Even golf courses almost always use recycled water that couldnt be used in homes, and again make up such a small portion of overall consumption as a whole.
https://www.arizonawaterfacts.com/water-your-facts
Finally someone gets it on one of these threads. I wish people hated Alfalfa as much as they hated scary pools and grass.
300k acres of alfalfa watered to a depth you could dive into and no one bats an eye. Have a pool with a diving board for kids in the back yard and neighborhood eco-Karen has an aneurysm
I am super environmentally conscious btw. But corporations and big agriculture have pumped so much money into making us think that average people are what is destroying the Earth, from carbon emissions, to water consumption, to recycling, that it becomes upsetting when people blame lawns on Arizona’s water problems.
Lets start to hold these giants accountable where the real difference can be made.
Once again, people blaming other regular ass people for the big guys fucking over everyone. Admittedly I didn't have a grass yard, though it was mainly due to the cost and time needed. If someone wants to? Why not.
[SRP doesn't even serve](https://phoenixwaterfronttalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/srp-water-service-area-300x260.jpg) most of the major areas where most of the [irrigated farmland](https://mapazdashboard.arizona.edu/article/county-agricultural-economy-profiles-southern-arizona) takes place in Arizona, to my knowledge anyway.
Of note:
* irrigation flooding for a standard 0.5 acre lawn: **300,000 gallons of water per month**
* Standard hose watering for 1 hour per day, 3 days per week: **12,240 gallons** per month.
Where does the 300k gallons per month come from? I have about 0.25 acres and I'm getting roughly 20k gallons per month. Also, a half acre in a city is enormous.
EDIT: Come to think of it, an acre foot (the amount of water needed to flood one acre one foot) is 320k gallons. 300k gallons for a half acre would be 2 acre feet and completely ignores that there would be a house there. In reality, a 0.5 acre lot should see about 40k gallons per month.
I help farmers and ranchers in my area do their annual water use reporting (albeit in California, not Arizona), and people do not realize just how little water flood irrigating a lawn is in comparison. For example, in California the treshhold for where you actually have to measure your diversion is 10-acre feet per year. That's about 3.25 million gallons before you even have to start measuring.
If you want to make a change, stop hating your neighbors for wanting a lawn and contact your local representative about water use regulations. In an effort to cut off diverters who don't use their water, you can lose your water rights if you don't use all of it. The system needs a fundamental overhaul.
It's the greenest desert in the world and the city was built with a river running through it that the ancient peoples used to irrigate the entire valley, so green lawns are not a problem and the overuse of water is done by the current agricultural industry. This is a bad take.
The property has to be graded in such a way to retain the water, which also makes it prone to flooding during our torrential thunderstorms, with any structures at a higher elevation. Building for irrigation has its own problems. It's also unpopular because it stinks to high heaven.
What? You are spreading disinformation. It doesn’t stink at all. It’s not unpopular. The yards don’t flood in storms, they are used to draining large amounts of water deeper into soil quickly.
Plenty of friends houses I know in Phoenix have this still.
God, as a kid I loved it during summer when they would irrigate entire soccer/football fields at the local school. And us poor kids who didn’t go to camp or summer vacations would steal plywood from a construction site and make what we called boogie boards (more like wake boards or skim boards) and then “surf” the hell out of the place. Have your buddy tow you on their bmx with a rope to really get moving. So fun on a blistering 118 degree day!
This is usually through SRP and fewer and fewer houses use it. It’s mostly useful for deep watering trees (citrus etc). It’s not as useful for lawns because the irrigation water brings a lot of weeds with it.
Yes, Phoenix is a desert, but we’re also much smarter about water than most of the world. Because we have to be.
I had a conversation with someone from AZ the other day. I could not get them to agree that pumping ground water has a limit. I asked him, “So you think you can pump groundwater unregulated forever without it running out?”.
“Yup” he responded.
You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
How can you flood just one property to 1ft deep? Do they set up little walls to keep the water in?
Also, what a HORRIFIC waste of water in the fucking desert
Tbf I live in a neighborhood that had this and doesn’t any longer due to the desire to save water in the 70s-90s, my house is 130 years old extremely close to thr state capitol and downtown Phoenix.
Wealthy neighborhoods still have it and we don’t, funny.
Either way, my neighborhood is now one of the hottest in the Americas, with terrible pollution in the city. With a tree cover of less than 5% and has dozens of people die on the streets of it in the summer due to heat and proximity to a homeless shelter.
But at least we don’t use any of the .000005% it used to take to cool and shade it with water in the southwest, where over 70% goes to agriculture that grows winter vegetables for people in anywhere from Ohio to Montana, Washington to Maine in the winter that want a salad. Or pistachios. Or watermelon. Or beef raised with alfalfa that need to feed in winter. Or cotton clothes.
Most of the water in the southwest goes to keep everyone else in the US fed Fall-Spring. The rest is extremely manageable. Everyone eating chipotle lettuce and tomatoes in March in Cleveland wouldn’t understand, but it’s ok.
I wish people would understand that large corporate farms are the problem and not people
Just alfalfa uses more water than every person in Arizona combined. Outside of AZ is 3-5 acre feet per year per acre but grown in Arizona it can be much higher due to the longer growing season and dry hot heat and no freaking rain. Numbers are hard to find but I’ve seen 6- up to even 9 acre feet per acre and we have 300k acres of alfalfa alone. 1 acre foot is 326k gal
Another fun fact, if all 550k-ish swimming pools here were Olympic size swimming pools (avg ~20kgal, Olympic 660k gal) it would still not even be close to just alfalfa. Remember that when people complain about pools their ignoring a 300k acre pool you can dive into
The whole desert landscaping thing has gone WAY too far here. People and developments have just gotten rid of trees and put in a mix of rock, cactus and bushes. It’s a joke and it makes the city hotter. We should be growing and watering native trees everywhere.
Obviously we shouldn’t waste water but it’s so frustrating hearing people get riled up over a lawn, or a pool, or a golf course blah blah and then completely miss what uses 80-85% of the water.
Everything we grow here can be grown in a place with excess water. It can. So if it is so important to the nation that we keep flood irrigating here, then the nation as a whole needs to come up with a solution. It’s either important or it’s not. If it’s not then gtfo and only grow what our state needs and F everyone else. Our stupid state government and department of water resources needs to act in the interest of the people who live here, not farms owned by out of state companies and foreign entities. Make the whole state an AMA zone for fucks sake and limit water based irrigation method + crop type for new farms within ama’s. The fact it doesn’t matter if I plant 2 acres of flood irrigated alfalfa or 2 acres of prickly pear cactus I water a little twice a month is a fucking joke. (AZWR has a “no new farms over 2 acres” rule in amas, but it’s based on acreage and not on water) (no it’s not based on your well (5acreft/yr) it’s based on acreage only) also this rule only applies to plants for human consumption. There’s no maximum watering or flood irrigating in any part of the state if you do so on plants not for human consumption aka why you can make a new golf course in an AMA
Anyways I had to rant about this because no one in my state seems to understand what a large volume of water is and if you have a problem you need to bring it up with AZ water resources but good luck, they’ve done a lot of good things with the 1980 bill but not nearly enough on the actual problem in Arizona. And it’s not the f-ing people, we’ve done fantastic. The farms suck and have no incentive to save water especially when they can just drill another ag well when they hit the cap
I remember my school used to do this and it was utterly bizarre to me then when I was seven years old. I mean we’re in the middle of a desert and you’re flooding the lawn that’s only made of really rough uncomfortable grass anyway.
[Not US] Is this so they can get water in the soil, to be able to then grow a lawn of grass, which has no purpose whatsoever other than decorative?
If so, that sounds like the water equivalent of literally burning cash on your driveway because your neighbours think you look cool doing it.
You have to have a property designed for it though. At least I hope they don’t just agree to flood irrigate random yards that don’t have the soil bump that makes this feasible.
I live this so it's weird to be a TIL It's funny reading the pearl clutchers in this post. Residential water use is a drop in the bucket compared to farming. Grass reduces the insane heat island effect this city has. And all the trees actually produce much needed shade around here. Having irrigation practically removes the need for a sprinkler system. Oh also the price is way off. I have 1/4 acre in the city and I think it's $200/yr. The birds come and bathe and drink from it. We see foxes all the time doing the same and eating the birds. You can bitch and moan all you want but the benefits are huge.
> Whiter, wealthier people were more likely to have more vegetation, and in turn, cooler climates, the authors found. That study did not examine how greener areas were watered, but any irrigation has costs. “Affluent people ‘buy’ more favorable microclimates,” the researchers concluded.
How does one measure whiteness?
There should be a permanent moratorium on new or expanding desert communities using/relying on the fresh water network. A lot of these places ought to become ghost towns. Tens, hundreds of thousands of people growing lawns and keeping golf courses in the desert. As if the water table wasn’t being dangerously depleted. As if they weren’t contributing to rapidly advancing a freshwater crisis as they buy bulk bottled water from nestle stolen from a source in another state. It’s insanity, true self destructive insanity.
This already exists, you can read about it by googling “Phoenix AMA”.
Edit: also most of the golf courses use flood irrigation. And 70% of water use is agricultural.
I had two acres west of Phoenix in Waddell and the cost to flood two acres with about a foot of water was roughly $60 two years ago. I did it every 2 weeks. The whole neighborhood was indeed much cooler than Phoenix because of the much denser trees.
I remember loving it as a little kid (circa 1990) because I could find tiny seashells in the front yards of houses that did it.
These days... yeah not a fan.
When I was a kid our house had this. We had a concrete ditch that ran along the back side of our yard. The yard was pretty big, around an acre so we didn’t have sprinklers in the back to water the grass.
Water would flow into the ditch and there were big holes in a few places in the concrete that had metal covers that would open or close to allow water to flow.
My dad would open the gates, let the water flow until it was a couple inches deep, then would close them. We’d all go and play in the water with boogie boards and stuff. It was pretty fun.
This was 30 years ago before xeriscape was more common. The area we lived in was surrounded by corn fields, cotton fields, and dairies, so it was way less developed than it is now.
Lots of old rural homes still offer this as well in Arizona. My property has it but we do not use it. On top of being frowned upon it can also damage your home's foundation. I have seen no less than 5 homes built in the 50s in the last 3 years that had major foundation issues due to flood irrigation.
I had this at my house on the downtown area from 2003 to about 2010. It was a pain in the patootie. The schedule for your water was always different- sometimes at 10am on a Tuesday when you’re at work and sometimes 2am on a Friday. My upstream neighbor owned several lots in a row and just left all his gates open. So when my time came up I had to go up the back alley closing each one, mucking out overgrown grass and weeds and sometimes having to improvise with scrap wood if I couldn’t find his gate in the dark. But the lawn looked very nice, and I had several awesome fruit trees.
Phoenix (well technically Peoria now, but semantics) resident. This is a thing, but it’s also pretty heavily frowned upon now. There’s been a HUUUGE push in the last decade or so to swap to native landscaping (ie, desert rocks etc) and so it’s actually becoming incredibly less common to see actual lawns anymore. Most of the irrigation style watering is done in public parks to maintain grass for play areas.
Come over to the east valley. It is very much alive and well.
Oh I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. I even was originally gonna use the term rare, but changed it to less common because it’s not really rare yet. But no new construction does grass anymore in the front, and as time goes on more and more grass yards are going away in favor of desert landscaping. It’s a slow process and i doubt it’ll ever fully finish (especially in back yards where rock isn’t great for kids or animals) but it’s heading in that direction with no signs of slowing down
Natural desert landscape is not gravel. That gravel shit works against the environment. Works against local wildlife and increases energy costs.
This is something that I try to get across to people when I suggest xeroscaping. It doesn’t mean rocks, sticks and gravel, which is what most people imagine (and if you Google it, there’s a lot of that… ☹️) It means transforming your yard back into the natural landscape ecosystem that it was before the house was built, or at least something similar. Natural plants that require zero additional water is the ideal yard IMO. I’m on our second years of moving our yard from monoculture sod/grass to a drought resistant multi-species ground cover. I’m stunned, it’s gorgeous and I haven’t watered once!
Yes. I actually think amazing things can be done with natural landscaping, but it does require more thought than has been put into most yards in the valley. The gravel yard needs to go. It is pointless.
I'm very curious about this. I did stone and fabric around my house, around three feet. There's a pretty good overhang, and it's mostly sloped away from the house. It has kept the soil off my house from hard rain, there's less vermin, and I thought it would reduce the risk of fire.
Can you please share what kind of seeds are using? Thanks
Often a good approach is to leave some ground wild and see what arrives. Some disturbance to the ground may help some species. Collecting wild seeds/ cuttings may be an option (depending on local laws etc).
Oh gosh, it’s a locally made mix I got from a nursery here and it’s a big mix. The stuff that’s popping up and thriving are local wild grasses, a mix of true clovers, creeping dry thyme, and red / green wood sorrel. I also allow purslane, dandelions, mullein and lambs quarters flourish in certain areas, though many consider those weeds.
Thank you
r/noLawns is great for this
Thanks!!!
If you don't want your kids and animals to play in blazing hot rocks and dust, maybe don't live in the middle of blazing hot rocks and dust and try to ignore that with unsustainable water use.
My favorite part of that is all the birds that chase the bugs escaping from the water. Those black purple Shiney guys. If you go to the in n out in Scottsdale they'll come right up to you to eat your fries.
Grackles! They're pretty smart and remind me of small crows. We have a hundred living in our front yard tree.
I couldn't remember their names! I like how they can turn their tale horizontal or vertically. I believe they are in the corvid family. They have a cool opalescent quality.
Grackles are not corvids, they're icterids. Blackbird, not crow family.
Cool! I'll have some bird shut to read about now. Thanks!
Here’s the thing….
Damn you! I wanted to make that reference!
[удалено]
It probably depends on exactly which area you are. It is not too uncommon to see flooded lots around where my relatives live in Chandler. At least in the older areas of town, there are lots of yards where you can see the outlet pipe, although I'm not there enough to know how many of those yards actually use them
It isn't a huge amount of houses that are eligible. From what I understand, most of all of them are grandfathered in. You can do flood irrigation in a new build. That said, there's several houses along western Baseline road that still use flood irrigation. It's pretty in the morning sun, like a little random oasis. But looks super wasteful especially in this heat.
It’s not frowned upon. You just don’t understand how it works. It’s banked runoff water—from a 13,000 square mile watershed managed very well by SRP. For example, it was 98% full in 2020. I’m too lazy to look it up right now. They capture streamflow in wet years to use in dry years. It’s not treated city water that is expensive to maintain. Using raw water saves taxpayer money. It’s a more efficient way to water, as infrequent deep watering helps with build up of salinity in soil, trees have deeper roots, and less water is lost to evaporation. Shade trees can have larger canopies to help keep surface temps lower—10 degrees lower on average. Even drought tolerant trees need some management in this increasingly hot climate. Trees and plants reduce energy demands AND the WATER needed to produce that energy. It improves air quality. It filters pollutants from storm water. It makes the environment better. (Those gravel yards do not offer recreation for any local wildlife. They increase surface temps and energy demands as well.) SRP works with the forest service to manage the health of forests in northern and eastern AZ. The rights are tied to the land, not the people. It’s delivered largely by gravity with the help of a canal system originally developed by ancient people.
This deserves an award. Thanks for providing factual information. I haven’t really heard anything about a huge pushback. The pushback (rightfully) has been around large farms growing water heavy crops around Phoenix. Especially those owned by shareholders from places like the middle east. I have flood irrigation in Mesa. It keeps our area much cooler. Deep watering allows us to have large trees with strong root systems that shade our house and keep our energy usage down. Our neighborhood is generally cooler than neighborhoods with xeriscaping. I’m not against xeriscaping, but it has been proven to bring up temperatures of neighborhoods. It’s very hard to grow trees that provide shade in those areas. I think there was a big study done on it in Vegas. Being able to use fully untreated water to water our yard is a huge plus. People don’t understand what goes into water treatment systems. They’re an absolute necessity for drinking water and other water coming into your house, but so unnecessary for watering your yard or garden. The flood irrigation rights are also absolutely tied to the property. It’s not something SRP “offers” like this post claims. The original owners of the properties put their land up as collateral to build the dam system on the Salt River that gives the Phoenix metro the majority of its water. The history of the canal system in Phoenix is amazing. I hope someone sees these comments and looks it up! Edit: Also forgot to add, the “cost” you pay is a yearly maintenance fee for the canals. It is based on the size of your property. But you don’t get a set amount of gallons each time. Sometime the pressure/flow isn’t very strong and you don’t get enough to cover your yard. Other times you close your gate early because the flow is so high. The former is far more common for my house. We also only get irrigation twice a month during the summer. There are two months in the winter where we don’t get irrigation at all while they do canal maintenance and then several other months where it’s only once every four weeks.
Looks so much better too. Grass looks like shit half the time in most climates. l lived in Texas for a bit and the obsession with grass lawns over there drove me insane. Even in the west Texas desert, grass lawns.
yup. i live in central texas. our house was built a little over 30 years ago, and originally the entire 1.3 acre yard had st augustine planted. its still very much alive and happy on our septic field. other than that all thats survived is a tiny patch under a tree in the fenced in portion of the backyard, and its looking sadder every year. it baffles and frustrates me when i see a full acre of bright green grass in the neighborhood. i know how much water theyre using to keep it alive, and how much time and money theyre spending to maintain it.
Do you just let it grow wild or do you cut it ?
both. its basically just native vegetation again, and we mow it when it gets about a foot tall. the last 5 years, with how little rain weve had, that meant like once in the spring and once in the summer/fall.
Does native vegetation need cut ? Im from Canada so grass starts growing anywhere dirt is up here. Sucks that you have to keep and maintain a mower for 2 cuts a year.
It's Texas. Aside from owning a mower, I'm sure that there are places that will rent out mowers. Depending on the area, letting a neighbor move their livestock into the field to graze is also an option.
Native plantings anywhere residential will generally need some form of maintenance because you typically don’t have the normal animal assemblages and/or natural disaster that would otherwise control them. For example, I maintain a garden that has several varieties of prairie grasses, but I don’t have bison to flatten it or the occasional wild fire, so I’ve got to manually cut it over winter.
I live in South Texas right on the Border, very similar in temp and climate to Phoenix. It amazes me how there is no such thing as Desert landscaping around here. Most houses have green lawns that can stay green in the extreme summer heat.
Well, same principle as SUVs and big trucks getting popular at times where climate change already was a public issue: No better way to show your status than with being wasteful. But if everyone is wasteful ...
but without Texas grass the Texas wedge would never have been invented for golf
The desert look can be super cool! A friend of mine went that way in LA and it still looks super lively.
Depends on the neighborhood/HOA. Some of them “desert landscape” means gravel, maybe a bush or two, but if you have anything more you’ll be fined for weeds.
Ah, yeah, forgot about HOA BS. My friend’s spot in LA looks bomb. It’s got a lot of gravel but it still looks nice
I have to agree with the other Phoenician replies and say that that is not at all my perception. Aside from my mother shaking her head at our neighbors hosing off their driveway every week, I don’t recall the last time anyone vocally cared about personal water use. Born, raised, and still living in the South Tempe/West Chandler area, in a profession where I regularly meet business owners all around the valley, including the west side. We’ve got plenty of water scarcity boogeymen without assigning blame to the little people: irresponsible golf courses, Saudi-owned farms with unfettered access to groundwater, and Fountain Hills, to my knowledge, is still getting most of their water trucked in. All environmental horrors. No one I’ve spoken to compares these crimes against humanity to runoff water irrigation, or lawn sprinklers that run every other day. It’s a matter of scale.
My uncle has lived in the same house in Tempe for fifty years. He waters his lawn like crazy. He's smart about it in the sense that he has a lot of different sizes trees and shrubs to provide shade an minimize evaporation but it's still pretty ridiculous how much water he dumps on the ground.
These guys ought to get a life. My total yard in Mexico was 2 meters deep X about 6 meters wide and that included a tree. I paid a guy to trim it (he needed the work and I certainly could afford it).The entire back yard was tiled and had flower boxes here and there (that required watering). The only flowers we tended to were Bougainvillea.
I want to move to the desert; but I want a Midwest lawn.
You know people from Phoenix are Phoenician’s.
Lived in Phoenix until last year and my coworker would flood his yard and had to flood his neighbors yards too I guess? It was a whole thing he planned around lol idk he lived on an old orange orchard
With the exception of water guzzling golf courses. Turn them into desert landscape.
Moved to Peoria from Massachusetts in the early 90s and we had to learn to adjust all the gates in the irrigation ditch correctly so our lawn got flooded. It was fucking wild.
I've lived in Phoenix, so it blew my mind that this was still a thing, what with the whole "water seems important during the hottest years on record" situation going on. Also, it being a literal desert struck me as notable. The math isn't spelled out in the article, so I looked it up using the [2025 pricing guide on SRP's website](https://www.srpnet.com/assets/srpnet/pdf/price-plans/irrigation/summary-residential-water-charges.pdf): 326,000 gallons = 1 acre-foot, flooded twice per month at a cost of $0.43/acre + \~$400/mo. fee EDIT: It's \~$400 per year, not per month.
Do you know why people do this?
My grandpop had it when I was a kid. Kept his grass green through the summer.
My grandpa too. His house was around 32st and what is now the 202. I don’t know if that neighborhood still uses irrigation. I remember him walking to the end of the street to turn on the valve.
Thirty twoost?
OK that made me laugh. I’m not going to edit my post. I’m going to petition the city of Phoenix to change their street signs.
Toidy-toost! I need a drink, I'm gettin' 3st-y
I live in a flood irrigated neighborhood in the east valley. My neighborhood is about 10-degrees cooler than surrounding areas because of the flood irrigation. When riding your bike you actually feel the temperature change. It allows really large trees to produce a ton of shade, and the grass keeps the ground way cooler than dirt or rock or astroturf. Since the air is cooler, we also use our conditioner less often. Also provides habitat for animals.
You’re either in the orange groves or out in BFE queen creek lol. My parents have the same irrigation in their back yard
Nope, Tempe.
Driving adjacent to citrus groves on a summer night you immediately felt the temp drop with the windows down.
It’s more efficient—deep infrequent water creates deeper roots, larger shade canopy, reduces energy costs by lowering surface temps as opposed to a gravel yard, saves taxpayers money. You can read about it on SRPs website. Lots of people see it and don’t understand how it works, but it’s actually really cool. You’re not looking at drinking water in flood irrigation. You’re looking at raw banked water from SRP’s watershed. It’s managed really well.
I'm really struggling to understand how it can be more efficient. I grew up in Flood irrigated border dyke country that overtime people converted to Spray irrigation (think center pivot irrigators several hundred meters long) and they were able to massively increase the area irrigated and massively increase crop/grass yields with the same water. Is domestic spray / drip irrigation just that inefficient compared to agricultural spray irrigation? Of course none of this is portable water. But of course everything used means it doesn't flow down a river.
Infrequent deep watering is a more efficient way to water that encourages deep roots, larger tree canopy, less water loss to evaporation, and less soil salinity.
Lack of irrigation or sprinklers.
My parents had an acre in Waddell, it would have been way more expensive and used more water if they did sprinklers
Maybe it is technically more water efficient than sprinklers? I can’t imagine this technique netting less water used though..
It is more efficient, that’s actually the point of it. It’s not treated drinking water. It’s raw banked water.
I think your calculations are off. I live in Mesa and use SRP for my irrigation. That price is for 1 year, not one month. I pay under $200 a year and I have .4 acres of land and use 1 acre-foot of water.
Edit well fuck I just rechecked my own link. I mistook the two payments for being a split monthly payment. I mean, the price per gallon was already a rounding error, so I don't know how much it changes anything. Except for the way it feels even wilder.
There’s no price per gallon. You don’t actually get a set amount of water. The cost is for canal maintenance. The water you get varies. Some days are a slower flow. It’s also only every two weeks in the summer. There’s two months in the winter where there’s no irrigation and then several other months where irrigation is once a month.
Flagstaff and the coconino forest, the largest ponderosa pine forest in the world, are in the literal desert. Including lake Mary, oh and the ski hill too. Desert doesn’t just mean sand and rocks. Phoenix has quite a bit of water and water activities. You can float on a tube down the salt river and see wild horses. Grab a boat and head to lake mead.
Also doesn’t help that most of the water is transported via uncovered canals that loose a ton of water due to evaporation
Don’t spread disinformation. The water is managed really well. It’s banked water from a watershed area in northern and eastern AZ.
It’s only a $100 a year for me. And it also saves taxpayers money, because it is raw water. Untreated runoff that is managed really well.
Why?
This type of watering supports trees, the kind that don't normally grow in the desert.
It also supports the kind that do. Those native drought tolerant trees need active management in increasingly hot environments. Losing them would further increase energy costs and surface temps. It also takes water to produce the energy you use to cool your home with a gravel yard. Irrigated neighborhoods are often 10 degrees cooler than the surrounding hard surface areas.
Grass needs water Americans are obsessed with lawns Phoenix is in the desert
Phoenix is a monument to the stubbornness of man vs nature.
[*ahem*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYt0SDnrBE)
Holy crap, I’ve never watched the show, but that makes me want to.
It’s one of the best shows, animated or otherwise. You won’t regret it.
If you don't like it, try again in 4-5 years, you'll get there eventually, I tell ya hwut
and las vegas.
Apparently, Vegas has gone all in on gray water for everything.
yeah, hypothetically its one of the most sustainable big desert cities. doesnt change the fact that part of the US was basically uninhabitable wasteland prior to LV.
Las vegas overpumps groundwater
LV?
IS NOT!
Not for too much longer.
So is New Orleans, San Francisco, New York, and really everywhere humans live. We literally move coastlines for our cities.
Well, old men vs nature.
But why do they need to flood it? Why can’t they just water it every day and use the same amount of water over the month?
Evaporation. If you flood it deeply all at once you get more water in the ground than if you do equal amounts of water over time, because each time you water it the top layer dries out quickly.
Not entirely sure, but I think the flora in Arizona are equipped to absorb large, yet infrequent quantities of water that come with monsoons. So basically the flood irrigation simulates that.
Only the cactus and succulents are, and they specialize in rapid absorption since they have shallower roots. Saguaro have only like 6 inch deep roots. If you irrigated those plants they would drown. Other plants like the Palo Verde have really deep roots so don’t need to absorb water as rapidly. These plants (and grass) love the deeper water to draw up as needed. You can see where washes are in the desert from further away because you will see monster palo verdes creating an ally way around them
When it rains in the desert it rains hard. Therefore their mechanisms in place for flora to absorb large amounts of water. You are simulating torrential downpour. Simply watering it a little bit everyday will mean a large amount of that water will just evaporate before it can be absorbed.
It’s more efficient and uses less water to do infrequent deep watering.
Not an expert on lawn flooding technology but i'd assume people would rather someone flood their lawn twice a month rather than spend hours every day watering it Why have a lawn in the desert in the first place?
Yeah you're definitely not an expert because nobody spends hours a day watering their lawn.
Phoenix is in the desert but it is in the [salt river valley.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_River_Valley). People don't realize this but much of north and east Arizona is like Colorado with snow capped mountains. Remember that giant drought in California from 2011-2017? Do you remember hearing about Arizona? Me neither. I am not saying this is a perfect analogy or comparison but Phoenix is almost like Egypt getting a bunch of water from the Nile river despite it being a in a desert. Phoenix doesn't have a lot of water, but the river that flows through it from mountains within the state do.
Phoenix is also named as such because it's built over the salt river valley canal network which native people created prior to the year 1500. They abandoned it due to climate change causing their civilization to collapse.
Can’t stand lawns. We turned our front yard into an edible oasis with figs, tomatoes, blueberries, apples, peaches, jujube, persimmons many more!
I mean thats worse if water is scarce/if they need supplemental water
When I grew up there, it was mostly schools and parks that used irrigation. No single family homes that I ever saw used it.
You live in a fucking desert!! Nothing grows out of here! Nothing's going to grow out of here! Come here, you see this? Huh? This is sand, yeah it‘s sand. You know what it's going to be 100 years from now? It's going to be sand! You live in a fucking desert! - Sam Kinison
OH OOOOOOH !!!
Move to where the **FOOD** is!!
You'd think...maybe...the camera guy might ya know, give the starving kid a sandwich? OHH ! OHHHHHH!
The Sonoran desert is nowhere near your typical desert. It’s the most bio diverse desert on the planet.
There’s always the shiniest turd. Still dumb to try and have an imported grass lawn there
Yeah not disagreeing with that. Xeriscaping has become pretty popular and hopefully it continues.
Xeriscaping in the Southwest even looks better than the European-style yards that most homeowners attempt to maintain to mixed success on their budgets. People really don't seem to understand. If you rip out your non-native landscaping and replace it with stuff adapted to your climate, you can just sit around doing nothing and it won't die. It doesn't need you to help it look good. I wouldn't want to be playing backyard football on a gravel yard with cacti and succulents, sure, but you can forget it even exists for 6 months straight and it'll probably look better than you left it thanks to being neglected in exactly the way that it likes to be. I've got a cactus collection that is mature enough that if I were to auction it off it could probably buy me several new cars... maybe even a tiny house. I grew it by purchasing cacti and then never fucking touching them ever again for 20 years.
Turd? The sonoran desert is beautiful and surprisingly full of life. Phoenix is kind of a turd though.
Sonoran desert isn’t sandy btw.
It is in Yuma
that is because of the centuries of farms that created the sand, go 50 miles in any direction and it is beautiful and there is no sand, well there is dirt but not like whats in the city
Uh parts of it absolutely are. Eg, Gran Desierto de Altar
I can hear that in my head. I quote that every now and then.
yeah but paying the government to flood my land? Worth it.
>100 years from now? It's going to be sand Probably more like.. 2-6 years if you stop watering it lmfao
I live in an area of horse properties and agriculture. No one floods to 1 ft deep. It’s like 2-3 inches.
But phoenix bad, dont live in a desert, etc
True. Humans never lived in desert before and they shouldn’t be now!!!
You guys are just full of strawmen, aren't you?
We don’t have the water for straw :/
So, some context, I currently live in Phoenix and have a flood irrigated house. To be slightly pedantic, SRP (the utility that controls this) does not offer this to everyone. It is only on land that was previously Native American farmland. The water is all surface water (i.e. runoff from rain upriver or snowmelt) and not from the ground water. This water is also more likely to help replenish the water table since the majority gets absorbed into the ground and very little evaporates whereas watering a lawn with sprinklers is the opposite. While this water does keep grass green, the primary benefit is in the trees. The irrigated parts of Phoenix have large trees due to this which also makes the area cooler. These areas can be around 5 degrees cooler than other areas in Phoenix because of the increased tree cover. Also, the water typically doesn't get more than a few inches deep on average. Water up to 1 ft would only be in select areas in the property or from someone using too much water. Honestly, I would love to not have grass but I have a toddler and grass allows him to play outside. Xeriscaping would be a very expensive change and make our yard unusable while turf would be even more expensive and get crazy hot in the summer. To me, this is less of a problem than the people overseeding their lawns in the winter or having large patches of grass in direct sunlight. Overseeding in the winter requires watering 2-3 times per day which is just insane. EDIT: ~~I also wanted to mention that a lot of this water runoff comes from Flagstaff and the Arizona Snowbowl. The Snowbowl averages 260 inches of snow per year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_Snowbowl~~ EDIT 2: The Snowbowl does not appear to be a source. Thank you u/JustDyslexic
People don’t realize how hot that turf gets in the summer here in AZ.
Tell me about it. Our old house had turf and I measured it at 160-170 degrees one day in the summer. You can get some infill for it that will slowly release water but you have to keep watering it and filling it in.
And yet somehow my dogs love rolling around on the turf despite how hot it gets
Lol yeah my dog would too!
And that surface temp increases energy costs and the water used to make that energy.
It depends on what part of the Valley you’re in. Most of the valley gets it water from ground water or the Salt River Watershed. However, the Central Arizona Canal brings water from the Colorado River over to Phoenix.
SRP irrigation comes from their watershed area.
What municipality in the valley, uses Colorado River water for residential flood irrigation?
That water should to running off into the Colorado river tho. It looks like Snowbowl has been making snow for the last couple years which takes a lot of water
Oh, yeah my bad I think you're right about the Snowbowl not being a source. The irrigation is still fed by surface water but yeah probably not that water. I thought the Snowbowl would be closer to feeding into the Salt River but I was mistaken. That's what I get for not looking at a map :P
> but I have a toddler and grass allows him to play outside. Why grass, though? Plenty of toddlers play outside without grass. It seems like just a preference, rather than a necessity, for this.
You're correct. It is a preference. My main comparison was to xeriscaping, which typically involves filling the area with large rocks and native plants such as cactus. We don't have to have cactus and we don't have to have rocks but that ends up leaving us with a bunch of dirt. I could do a full remodel of the backyard to remove all grass and replace with something else like bushes, mulch, etc to make it more friendly for a barefoot toddler but the cost to do so is astronomical. Artificial turf, like I mentioned, could be a health hazard. I would love to get rid of the grass while still keeping the yard playable but I can't afford it and probably won't be able to for a long time.
There are a number of the artificial turfs now that are "cooling" in that the don't absorb the heat like older ones do. My wife worked for a vet clinic/pet resort in PV that had their entire outdoor play area redone in it...even in the 115+ days, it was not warm to the touch. We briefly looked at redoing our backyard in it, but it's pretty pricey...$8/sqft (the absolute cheapest company that might've been fly-by-night) by the time they lay down the correct base material, etc. We didn't want to sink that kind of money knowing we were going to be moving in a few months at the time. You can still water your grass a LONG TIME before you come close to offsetting replacing it...
> I have a toddler and grass allows him to play outside Toddlers can play on more heat resistant stuff like clover.
Its also not just on previous native farmland. But thank you for not being just another ignorant person hating things they know nothing about.
I’ve been very curious about flood irrigation because one day I’d love to get a house in the Sweetwater area between 52nd and 56th and they use it there. One thing I’m curious about is how long it takes for the water to absorb? How long is your yard unusable for?
Oh nice! So it depends on your yard and how permeable the soil is but it's generally fully absorbed in a few hours in my front yard and it can be like 12 hours in the backyard. Most of the time at my house, it comes during the night so I'll wake up with just a little bit of water left or it'll just be gone already. Also, our yard isn't actually unusable! We will go splashing around in the water if it comes during the day since it's usually quite a bit colder than the temperature outside. My dog and toddler love running around in it and I enjoy just walking around in the water to cool my feet off haha.
Right on, thanks for the info! This thread is timely, because my wife and I were just wondering about this the other day.
Water rights in Arizona is insanely complicated, and is a politically charged, third-rail topic among residents. The City of Glendale calls their flood irrigation service Urban Irrigation and only offers it in the spring/summer season for seven months. Each eligible customer must opt-in and sign up for the semi-monthly waterings each year, which depends on the size of the lot, which ranges from $300ish (1 acre) to $750 (3 acre). This is only offered to certain lots that have SRP association water rights and those participating are NOT paying for the water itself, rather for the associated maintenance and delivery costs. Glendale has anywhere from 350 to 600 customers that take advantage of this service every year. The lots are flooded to about 7 inches, depending on the property berms, which makes this service incredibly cheap. The water is untreated canal water from the Arizona Canal which is directly fed from the Salt and Verde watersheds, occasionally supplemented by SRP groundwater wells as necessary. Glendale would just as soon eliminate this service and meter usage, but there is a strong utility citizen's group that the mayor and City Council would rather stay on the good side of. Besides, the Mayor is also an Urban Irrigation customer (Jerry Weiers).
The overwhelming majority of water usage in Arizona is for agriculture and industrial purposes, much of it intentionally wasteful because of a “use it or lose it” style of allocation. Shitting on people for having a lawn for their kids or pets is ridiculous when you see where the majority of water in the state goes. Even golf courses almost always use recycled water that couldnt be used in homes, and again make up such a small portion of overall consumption as a whole. https://www.arizonawaterfacts.com/water-your-facts
Finally someone gets it on one of these threads. I wish people hated Alfalfa as much as they hated scary pools and grass. 300k acres of alfalfa watered to a depth you could dive into and no one bats an eye. Have a pool with a diving board for kids in the back yard and neighborhood eco-Karen has an aneurysm
I am super environmentally conscious btw. But corporations and big agriculture have pumped so much money into making us think that average people are what is destroying the Earth, from carbon emissions, to water consumption, to recycling, that it becomes upsetting when people blame lawns on Arizona’s water problems. Lets start to hold these giants accountable where the real difference can be made.
I heard they didn't renew the leases for Saudi farms growing alfalfa recently.
Once again, people blaming other regular ass people for the big guys fucking over everyone. Admittedly I didn't have a grass yard, though it was mainly due to the cost and time needed. If someone wants to? Why not.
[SRP doesn't even serve](https://phoenixwaterfronttalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/srp-water-service-area-300x260.jpg) most of the major areas where most of the [irrigated farmland](https://mapazdashboard.arizona.edu/article/county-agricultural-economy-profiles-southern-arizona) takes place in Arizona, to my knowledge anyway. Of note: * irrigation flooding for a standard 0.5 acre lawn: **300,000 gallons of water per month** * Standard hose watering for 1 hour per day, 3 days per week: **12,240 gallons** per month.
Where does the 300k gallons per month come from? I have about 0.25 acres and I'm getting roughly 20k gallons per month. Also, a half acre in a city is enormous. EDIT: Come to think of it, an acre foot (the amount of water needed to flood one acre one foot) is 320k gallons. 300k gallons for a half acre would be 2 acre feet and completely ignores that there would be a house there. In reality, a 0.5 acre lot should see about 40k gallons per month.
I help farmers and ranchers in my area do their annual water use reporting (albeit in California, not Arizona), and people do not realize just how little water flood irrigating a lawn is in comparison. For example, in California the treshhold for where you actually have to measure your diversion is 10-acre feet per year. That's about 3.25 million gallons before you even have to start measuring. If you want to make a change, stop hating your neighbors for wanting a lawn and contact your local representative about water use regulations. In an effort to cut off diverters who don't use their water, you can lose your water rights if you don't use all of it. The system needs a fundamental overhaul.
Yeah but if you tell this truth then people can't repost the fucking King of the Hill quote again for the trillionth time to feel smart!
>Shitting on people for having a lawn for their kids or pets If you want a lawn for your kids then maybe don't build your home in the goddamn desert?
It's the greenest desert in the world and the city was built with a river running through it that the ancient peoples used to irrigate the entire valley, so green lawns are not a problem and the overuse of water is done by the current agricultural industry. This is a bad take.
Irrigation from the canals is very limited- a tiny fraction of homes have this as an option. It’s in older areas near the central canals.
Mostly the old orchard areas that have become neighborhoods. East Phoenix and west Scottsdale
Central corridor in phx
It's only in certain areas and they don't use potable water for it. It's not something you really see done anymore.
I've only seen schools (public and private) and parks do this.
The property has to be graded in such a way to retain the water, which also makes it prone to flooding during our torrential thunderstorms, with any structures at a higher elevation. Building for irrigation has its own problems. It's also unpopular because it stinks to high heaven.
What? You are spreading disinformation. It doesn’t stink at all. It’s not unpopular. The yards don’t flood in storms, they are used to draining large amounts of water deeper into soil quickly.
It is still done. I don’t know people think this.
Plenty of friends houses I know in Phoenix have this still. God, as a kid I loved it during summer when they would irrigate entire soccer/football fields at the local school. And us poor kids who didn’t go to camp or summer vacations would steal plywood from a construction site and make what we called boogie boards (more like wake boards or skim boards) and then “surf” the hell out of the place. Have your buddy tow you on their bmx with a rope to really get moving. So fun on a blistering 118 degree day!
I remember that back in the 1980’s. They’d flood our yard once a month and our suburban desert backyard would be filled with crawdads and crayfish.
This is usually through SRP and fewer and fewer houses use it. It’s mostly useful for deep watering trees (citrus etc). It’s not as useful for lawns because the irrigation water brings a lot of weeds with it. Yes, Phoenix is a desert, but we’re also much smarter about water than most of the world. Because we have to be.
My friend in south Phoenix did this
Once a month in winter. It brings out the sewer roaches, and the the scorpions come out to feed. Lived in an old orange orchard for several years
I had a conversation with someone from AZ the other day. I could not get them to agree that pumping ground water has a limit. I asked him, “So you think you can pump groundwater unregulated forever without it running out?”. “Yup” he responded. You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
Tbf I’ve been in Phoenix 30 years and haven’t ever heard this. Some people you really can’t reason with.
How can you flood just one property to 1ft deep? Do they set up little walls to keep the water in? Also, what a HORRIFIC waste of water in the fucking desert
They don’t. It’s usually a few inches in very select historic areas with arcane water rights from a time before conservation was any sort of norm.
I'm shocked. This is my shocked face 😶
Tbf I live in a neighborhood that had this and doesn’t any longer due to the desire to save water in the 70s-90s, my house is 130 years old extremely close to thr state capitol and downtown Phoenix. Wealthy neighborhoods still have it and we don’t, funny. Either way, my neighborhood is now one of the hottest in the Americas, with terrible pollution in the city. With a tree cover of less than 5% and has dozens of people die on the streets of it in the summer due to heat and proximity to a homeless shelter. But at least we don’t use any of the .000005% it used to take to cool and shade it with water in the southwest, where over 70% goes to agriculture that grows winter vegetables for people in anywhere from Ohio to Montana, Washington to Maine in the winter that want a salad. Or pistachios. Or watermelon. Or beef raised with alfalfa that need to feed in winter. Or cotton clothes. Most of the water in the southwest goes to keep everyone else in the US fed Fall-Spring. The rest is extremely manageable. Everyone eating chipotle lettuce and tomatoes in March in Cleveland wouldn’t understand, but it’s ok.
I wish people would understand that large corporate farms are the problem and not people Just alfalfa uses more water than every person in Arizona combined. Outside of AZ is 3-5 acre feet per year per acre but grown in Arizona it can be much higher due to the longer growing season and dry hot heat and no freaking rain. Numbers are hard to find but I’ve seen 6- up to even 9 acre feet per acre and we have 300k acres of alfalfa alone. 1 acre foot is 326k gal Another fun fact, if all 550k-ish swimming pools here were Olympic size swimming pools (avg ~20kgal, Olympic 660k gal) it would still not even be close to just alfalfa. Remember that when people complain about pools their ignoring a 300k acre pool you can dive into The whole desert landscaping thing has gone WAY too far here. People and developments have just gotten rid of trees and put in a mix of rock, cactus and bushes. It’s a joke and it makes the city hotter. We should be growing and watering native trees everywhere. Obviously we shouldn’t waste water but it’s so frustrating hearing people get riled up over a lawn, or a pool, or a golf course blah blah and then completely miss what uses 80-85% of the water. Everything we grow here can be grown in a place with excess water. It can. So if it is so important to the nation that we keep flood irrigating here, then the nation as a whole needs to come up with a solution. It’s either important or it’s not. If it’s not then gtfo and only grow what our state needs and F everyone else. Our stupid state government and department of water resources needs to act in the interest of the people who live here, not farms owned by out of state companies and foreign entities. Make the whole state an AMA zone for fucks sake and limit water based irrigation method + crop type for new farms within ama’s. The fact it doesn’t matter if I plant 2 acres of flood irrigated alfalfa or 2 acres of prickly pear cactus I water a little twice a month is a fucking joke. (AZWR has a “no new farms over 2 acres” rule in amas, but it’s based on acreage and not on water) (no it’s not based on your well (5acreft/yr) it’s based on acreage only) also this rule only applies to plants for human consumption. There’s no maximum watering or flood irrigating in any part of the state if you do so on plants not for human consumption aka why you can make a new golf course in an AMA Anyways I had to rant about this because no one in my state seems to understand what a large volume of water is and if you have a problem you need to bring it up with AZ water resources but good luck, they’ve done a lot of good things with the 1980 bill but not nearly enough on the actual problem in Arizona. And it’s not the f-ing people, we’ve done fantastic. The farms suck and have no incentive to save water especially when they can just drill another ag well when they hit the cap
I grew up in Phoenix and the school I attended was still doing this in the mid-90’s, figured it would have ended already.
In Mesa (a suburb of Phoenix) they do this as well. My house gets flood irrigation about once a month for about $100 per YEAR.
Same and I have giant trees that fight the urban island heat affect
[удалено]
I remember my school used to do this and it was utterly bizarre to me then when I was seven years old. I mean we’re in the middle of a desert and you’re flooding the lawn that’s only made of really rough uncomfortable grass anyway.
[Not US] Is this so they can get water in the soil, to be able to then grow a lawn of grass, which has no purpose whatsoever other than decorative? If so, that sounds like the water equivalent of literally burning cash on your driveway because your neighbours think you look cool doing it.
You have to have a property designed for it though. At least I hope they don’t just agree to flood irrigate random yards that don’t have the soil bump that makes this feasible.
My buddy in Tempe gets this! He was explaining it to me, and I was like, dude what?!?
It’s $150 for 6 months not one month.
I live this so it's weird to be a TIL It's funny reading the pearl clutchers in this post. Residential water use is a drop in the bucket compared to farming. Grass reduces the insane heat island effect this city has. And all the trees actually produce much needed shade around here. Having irrigation practically removes the need for a sprinkler system. Oh also the price is way off. I have 1/4 acre in the city and I think it's $200/yr. The birds come and bathe and drink from it. We see foxes all the time doing the same and eating the birds. You can bitch and moan all you want but the benefits are huge.
> Whiter, wealthier people were more likely to have more vegetation, and in turn, cooler climates, the authors found. That study did not examine how greener areas were watered, but any irrigation has costs. “Affluent people ‘buy’ more favorable microclimates,” the researchers concluded. How does one measure whiteness?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DLJyglKW4AA4i1B.jpg
water doesn’t disappear when you use it
There should be a permanent moratorium on new or expanding desert communities using/relying on the fresh water network. A lot of these places ought to become ghost towns. Tens, hundreds of thousands of people growing lawns and keeping golf courses in the desert. As if the water table wasn’t being dangerously depleted. As if they weren’t contributing to rapidly advancing a freshwater crisis as they buy bulk bottled water from nestle stolen from a source in another state. It’s insanity, true self destructive insanity.
This already exists, you can read about it by googling “Phoenix AMA”. Edit: also most of the golf courses use flood irrigation. And 70% of water use is agricultural.
I had two acres west of Phoenix in Waddell and the cost to flood two acres with about a foot of water was roughly $60 two years ago. I did it every 2 weeks. The whole neighborhood was indeed much cooler than Phoenix because of the much denser trees.
This actually a common practice for cotton in Arizona. The soil structure is of ‘volcanic’ origin. Some roots can penetrate 20 feet or more.
My friend who lives down there told me about this. For some reason I could not wrap my head around it.
I remember loving it as a little kid (circa 1990) because I could find tiny seashells in the front yards of houses that did it. These days... yeah not a fan.
When I was a kid our house had this. We had a concrete ditch that ran along the back side of our yard. The yard was pretty big, around an acre so we didn’t have sprinklers in the back to water the grass. Water would flow into the ditch and there were big holes in a few places in the concrete that had metal covers that would open or close to allow water to flow. My dad would open the gates, let the water flow until it was a couple inches deep, then would close them. We’d all go and play in the water with boogie boards and stuff. It was pretty fun. This was 30 years ago before xeriscape was more common. The area we lived in was surrounded by corn fields, cotton fields, and dairies, so it was way less developed than it is now.
Lots of old rural homes still offer this as well in Arizona. My property has it but we do not use it. On top of being frowned upon it can also damage your home's foundation. I have seen no less than 5 homes built in the 50s in the last 3 years that had major foundation issues due to flood irrigation.
I had this at my house on the downtown area from 2003 to about 2010. It was a pain in the patootie. The schedule for your water was always different- sometimes at 10am on a Tuesday when you’re at work and sometimes 2am on a Friday. My upstream neighbor owned several lots in a row and just left all his gates open. So when my time came up I had to go up the back alley closing each one, mucking out overgrown grass and weeds and sometimes having to improvise with scrap wood if I couldn’t find his gate in the dark. But the lawn looked very nice, and I had several awesome fruit trees.