Anyone letting their garden die or their lawns go yellow?

Anyone have any good tips on how to reduce water consumption?

At this point our area allows garden/lawn watering twice a week, no more than 15 minutes a session, etc.  I'd been going longer intervals and a longer soak for the lawn (fairly heavily thatched St. Augustine) so may have to change the pattern.  Perhaps reduce mowing intervals and leave it somewhat taller, too. My front side planting is mostly native plants, not all weeds, but it would likely do reasonably well with more limited watering.  

The last time watering was curtailed we got stupid notes from the HOA noting lawns were looking unkempt and could impact property values.  I wrote back giving them a red ass that we were complying with water district instructions and they'd best see to it that they didn't get the HOA fined for excessive watering and not following the restrictions.  So doesn't look too bad yet but I think different areas have different provisions.  My in-laws neighborhood, a different city, looks like almost all the lawns are past the yellow stage.  A few lush lawns stand out.  But that's those folks issue to deal with.

I’ve limited mine to the specified periods and I have the timers set for 3 or 4 am. What I’ve also done is keep buckets around the showers to collect the water until they get up to the correct temp. I’ll then dump that water on the areas needing attention. I’ll go out and hand water every once in a while. I think the one thing keeping my lawn really green are the trees that are giving the lawn shade all day. Most of my neighbors without trees have brown lawns.

Down to once a week here. The front is surviving, for now, the back lawn looks awful. Thankfully the vegetable garden and fruit trees seems to be doing alright for the time being.

I am building a grey water collection off my washing machine to water my yard,trees and gardens. I have kids so we do a bit of laundry and have a high efficiency washer it uses about 15 gallons a load. Older non high efficiency machines do anywhere from 25 gallons and up. You do have to switch your detergent to an eco friendly detergent but if you go online there is plenty of choices to meet your needs. Also from your grey water set up a drip system for garden plants, flowers and shrubs. It keeps the plants watered and the weeds down because your not watering the dirt just the plants.

If I were to cut back on the lawnwatering, I think I would just forego an area, altogether.  I'd just let it go dry and yellow.  It seems a waste of water to give it less than it needs to survive, yet keep watering it.

I developed a design for this during the last major drought.  At that time, they were illegal to install and using the water, even in the landscape, was also illegal.  

The water collection tanks were surprisingly inexpensive, even for a massive tank.  I planned to have at least part of the tank sub-surface and have a pump extract the water for use in the garden.

No water restrictions here yet, so no changes on my end this year.  

Having said that, I upgraded a few years ago all our sprinkler heads to multi stream rotational heads and went to a smart controller, lawn is greener and usage went down about 30%.