4 Water Wasting Mistakes With Commercial Landscaping

Posted on: 2 August 2022

A large portion of your building maintenance and operation cost, especially in the summer, is water usage. This is especially true if your building has a large campus that requires quite a bit of irrigation to look its best. You may need to work with your landscaping service to lower water usage if you notice any of the following water-wasting mistakes around your building.

1. Too Much Green

Large expanses of lawn may look nice and seem pretty easy to maintain with regular mowing, but lawns tend to need a lot of water. Combine water needs with other costly input requirements, like fertilizer, and too much green grass can cost a lot to maintain. Your landscapers can replace grass with other ground covers that use less water, such as prostrate rosemary or a lovely sedum. Reducing grassy areas and replacing them with mulch, either wood chip or rock, can also reduce water needs.

2. Water-Hungry Plantings

Some plants simply need more water than others. Swapping out water-hungry trees, shrubs, and flowers for native plant options that don't require a lot of additional irrigation in your climate can greatly reduce irrigation needs. Native plants may need watering during the driest part of the year due to lower water tables around a commercial building, but they won't require as much water as an ornamental plant growing outside of its native climate range.

3. Poor Irrigation Design

An outdated commercial irrigation system may waste more water than it supplies to the landscape. A common issue with older systems is that the emitters either spray too high or wide, which results in water loss through evaporation, or the old emitters water the sidewalks and parking lots more than the landscaping. Switching out old emitters for drip emitters or those with a low and properly aligned spray profile will reduce irrigation needs.

4. Weak Rain Catchment

Many commercial properties are heavily paved, so a lot of natural rainfall simply runs off into storm drain systems or sits on the surface of the pavement until it evaporates away. Improving the landscaping to provide some catchment for rainfall, reduces water needs by keeping more rain moisture on the property. Your landscapers can install dry creek beds, retention ponds, and other attractive catchment options to help recapture some of the rainfall. 

Contact a commercial landscaping service for more ways to reduce water usage while maintaining the curb appeal of your business. 

Share