Business for you guys in drought areas > lawn painting!

bigmoose

bigmoose

1 MW
Joined
Aug 6, 2009
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Location
North coast USA
Here is a link to an article from AP on Lawn Painting in Arizona. Guess with the drought some entrepreneurs are taking the green organic dye used on golf courses and professional athletic turf fields and spraying it on burn out lawns to spruce them up. They are charging $0.15/sq foot.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-07-27-04-11-02

a48e205f-7919-43b5-94e8-e5fe98b1ac74-big.jpg
 
Wow, I never thought of that. Things are still green here in central TX, but could get brown soon.
 
Before I opened this thread I thought you were goin to propose, just painting lawns with green paint.... I was wrong :eek: . This is much better than I thought it would be! If you were to show me the picture of the finished product, I would never have guessed that it was painted.
I might have to get something started if things over here continue to worsen
 
I noticed that Home Depot and Lowes here in Southern Oregon are stocking a lot of green astroturf. Wouldn't want kids playing on it though.
 
In El Paso, they will send you a check for removing lawn and subtituting rocks or other landscape that requires no additional irrigation.

But I don't think painting the lawn qualifies.

My lawn doesn't need painting, but does get water once a month. Greener now because the winter dormant bermuda grass got rain. Most of the grass is native desert stuff, green in spring, brown in summer. So the mix works great. Xeric flowering plants and shubs add color and interest. Mowing height is usualy 5 inches. Spring is best, when the whole lawn is spring wildflowers.

Oddly, to get the spring flowers the lawn needs regular watering in the winter. So I water all winter, and only water in summer if it doesn't rain for 30 days. In winter evaporation losses are low, so bills stay low.

How it looks today.

Xeriscape lawn.jpg
 
http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/showimage/2200/
Camas lily would be happy in Dogman's lawn. If anyone is interested in seed for camas lily (Camassia quamash) I have enough for 10 or 15 packets. It takes about 3 years from seed to flower.
I was originally going to do this on a pay it forward basis but found a web site that wanted money to pay it forward for you. WTFIWWTW. Anyway if you want some seed PM me for an address to send a SASE to.
 
Water my lawn, are you crazy? I can't wait for dry season, and don't care if things brown up a bit, as long as I don't have to cut the grass. Regular grass grows like bamboo here. I've cut our soccer field on consecutive days before.
 
I cut along our road once a year w/ our lil tractor. I wait until, oh, about now. One pass on each side, in low 2nd, w/ the deck spinning 2x its rating. It's beefy and well maintained so I'm not worried about it running at 2x for 15mins, once a year.

Our neighbor cuts his field 3 times a year, at least, and uses a conventional riding mower. Stupid. He could call someone out and have it turned into hay bales = free money, but, nah...he'd rather spend his time and money doing it so that his field looks like a lawn. We've offered to bring our animals over so he doesn't have to mow but he'd rather call the cops when they find a way over. Anyway.

sparks=bad news when the grass aint green, so be careful w/ your mowing - carrying an extinguisher isn't a bad idea, and you might wanna wait around a few minutes afterwards, just in case you lit it up w/o realizing.

Painted lawns...too funny. :lol:
 
The state and city both do this sort of thing on the medians of roadways, but they paint the wrong color (blue-green) and they paint the rocks, curbs, whatever, with lots of overspray--they don't care what the result really looks like I guess. When I first saw them doing it I thought it was pesticide or herbicide, but it didn't kill anything (lots of ants and weeds still around after).

If I had a really cheap source for the dye I'd do it to my own lawn to keep the neighbors all happy, cuz I can't afford to water enough to matter, except for the trees and Lantana, which I need for shade. I considered just spraying with green food coloring but I haven't found even that cheap enough in a large quantity to be worth doing. :lol:

Also, TylerDurden beat you to posting it:
http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=615521#p615521
;)
 
amberwolf said:
The state and city both do this sort of thing on the medians of roadways, but they paint the wrong color (blue-green) and they paint the rocks, curbs, whatever, with lots of overspray--they don't care what the result really looks like I guess.
Click to expand...

When I have seen such color on highway medians and embankments, it's a mixture of seed, fertilizer, and mulch. They spray it to develop ground cover on areas that they've torn up with construction or earthworks. It probably helps that it isn't the color of natural vegetation, so they can clearly see where it has and hasn't been applied.

Chalo
 
Hydromulch comes in many colors, but often some kind of green is used.

Herbicide is also dyed green or blue so the operators can tell where they sprayed. Often a pre emergent herbicide that only inhibits seed sprouting, and not 100% effective. That's why you see them cover entire areas. Looks like the idea is to paint it, or spray weeds that aren't there stupidly. But it's done to limit new weeds sprouting. That color is not real permanent, and sun fades fairly soon. Some times they will use stronger soil sterilant herbicides that are very effective, but not in an area anywhere near desireable plants. Expensive too so not used that much.

Roundup is often sprayed on live weeds in medians and gravel landscapes, but needs no coloring because they want to spray just the visible plants.
 
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