The University of Florida has come up with a new tool for property owners to make significant strides in water conservation: the peanut, or at least, a distant cousin called rhizoma perennial peanut. The colorful groundcover does not bear edible goobers, but it does have lush foliage and light orange flowers. Looks aside, it can thrive on half the water that turfgrass uses.
Perennial peanut groundcover offers another advantage over turfgrass, too. Being a legume, it makes its own nitrogen and therefore requires very little fertilizer. Although excess nitrogen is typically thought of as a water quality issue in commercial agriculture, according to the U.S. EPA homeowners tend about 40 million acres of turfgrass, making it the fifth largest crop in the country.