WHY DO WE WATER OUR LAWNS?

This morning I was researching some little green gizmos for door prizes at TT Parma events (first one this Saturday!) and was specifically looking at water conservation. I read site after site espousing all sorts of tips, one of which was all the ways you can water your lawn and conserve water.

But why do we water our lawns?

Oh, I know the standard answer: So it's green and verdant and soft on our toes (although I would bet most of us never really walk on our lawns barefoot). There are city codes and social standards and what the neighbors will think. I believe someone has even written a book about society and lawns. Green grass is that important.

Well, guess what? We never water our lawn. Never. And it looks just as good as the one maintained by our neighbor. A neighbor who agonizes to make every blade perfect. Who fertilizes other people's lawns (including mine) on our street because it is just that important to him to have beautiful grass as far as the eye can see.

He waters. We don't. Our lawns look the same. His is ready for a close up in Better Homes & Gardens while we have a few spots of crab grass and maybe ours browns first at the end of the season or during dry spells, but the overall effect is the same. Well, except for the caveat that we've probably given our neighbor a facial twitch with the way we don't keep up our lawn.

Why don't we water our lawn? Not because we are trying to conserve (which would be the right answer) but because we are lazy and cheap and don't care about our lawn. We water food growing plants or flowers (usually) and that's about it. So please don't think I'm talking from my green high horse here, I'm not. I am green on this issue purely through sheer sinful laziness.

Aside from the fact that you now know sloth is one of my sins, tell me, am I alone here? I googled 'no water lawn' and 'do I have to water my lawn' and all I got back were pages and pages of results with tips and techniques on how to water my lawn. I don't get it.

Do you water your lawn? Have you thought about seeing what would happen if you didn't? Or what if you watered your lawn or garden with harvested rain water? We haven't done the rain water thing yet, but plan to start this year since we will be attempting to really garden this season (versus killing plants by ummm...not watering them. Have I mentioned I'm lazy?).

Edited to add: I did find an article Greener Grass, Less Water on Science Daily that talks about the environmental impact of lawn upkeep. The advice, though, still involves watering grass. Be sure to watch the video accompanying the article which is interesting as well.  And, this is tangential, but I'd just like to say that every single public park I've been to in Arizona (which is, you know, a desert) violates every single one of the article's suggestions for water conversation which makes no sense to me.