ACT EARLY TO PREVENT CRABGRASS INVASION.

Byline: JOSHUA SISKIN

Every year, about this time, I first notice the appearance of crabgrass in my front lawn.

Crabgrass is easily spotted because its blades are about twice as thick as those of tall fescue, which is sold under the names of `Marathon,' `Medallion' and `Bonsai' and is the most common lawn grass in our area.

My tall fescue lawn has shrunk from year to year as the perennial beds that surround it increase in size. At this point, I only have about 350 square feet of grass, yet still feel duty bound to have some sort of lawn, not wishing to stray too far from neighborhood norms.

For the next month or so, I will spend five or 10 minutes each day plucking out the beginnings of crabgrass clumps. Crabgrass, a type of bunch grass, will grow rapidly into matted clumps with nearly prostrate seed clusters. Crabgrass can easily take over and destroy a lawn between July and September. If not removed before they drop, crabgrass seeds will lie dormant until next spring, which is also the season for application of pre-emergent chemicals.

These chemicals kill crabgrass and other weed seeds just as they begin to germinate.

Once you see crabgrass sprouting in your lawn, it's too late for chemical treatments. The only way to conquer crabgrass in lawns at this time of year is by hand pulling.

Then again, you may want to do away with your lawn altogether, an option that becomes more popular as lawn maintenance costs, especially watering expense, increase.

I recently took a road trip through Arizona and New Mexico, and in a journey of nearly a thousand miles, saw no more than a dozen conventional lawns. The most interesting grassy area was at the Albuquerque Airport, where a slow-growing prairie or high-desert meadow grass had been seeded and then left alone. It was standing up well to the July heat, even if its natural color was closer to lime than to kelly green and it appeared never to have been mown.

Between Tucson and Santa Fe, the flowering plant you see more than any other is Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia). This is a drought-tolerant, 4-to-5-foot-tall perennial with generous spikes of lavender blue flowers as well as foliage that is silver gray, pungently aromatic and delicately cut. You encounter Russian sage in the Valley here and there, but it is definitely worthy of wider use. A bonus is its cold tolerance as it will survive winter temperatures down to 20 degrees Fahrenheit or lower.

On my trip, I also made the acquaintance of two highly attractive drought-tolerant woody plants that Valley gardeners could easily grow and enjoy. One is the three-leaf sumac (Rhus trilobata), a shrubby specimen with softly lobed leaves and clusters of edible and tangy red berries. The other is the gambel oak (Quercus gambelii), one of the few deciduous oaks native to the West, growing no taller than 30 feet and unusual, in this part of the country, for the distinctive autumn colors developed in its leaves.

Q: My husband and I are at odds about how many times per day we should water our lawn and for how long. I'm prepared for a hostile takeover of the sprinkler system, but I wanted the advice of a seasoned veteran first.

- Lisa Kaul, Santa Clarita

A: In warm weather, new lawns should be watered three times a day for the first week or 10 days, each time to the point of saturation.

Once established, a lawn with conventional spray sprinklers should be watered twice a day in summer - at 4 a.m. and 8 a.m., for example - with the water on for five minutes each time. With the new MP Rotator nozzles, leave water on for 10 minutes at a time and you will still save lots of water as compared to irrigation through spray nozzles.

TIP OF THE WEEK: One of the most popular plants in the Southwest is apache plume (Fallugia paradoxa), which is also native to California. A member of the rose family, apache plume's white flowers are followed by uniquely ornamental feathery wisps, which serve as seed dispersal agents.