Considering we live in Southern California and our water situation is getting tight, I thought it might be a good idea to look into replacing our small front lawn with native plants. What I didn’t realize is just how deep this subject can get.
The first step was taking Theodore Payne’s annual Native Garden tour in April of this year.
This is where homeowners across Los Angeles open their gardens to the public. We saw first-hand just how beautiful native plants can be. So we decided we had to do it.
The next step was learning how to do it. I got some ideas from friends who have gone through this process. And there are many good online sources for info. But I had a lot of questions, so a workshop sounded best to me. Green Gardens Group offers free online workshops in Turf Removal, Garden Design, Rainwater Harvesting, and more; I attended those 3 – my oh my oh my. Sooooo much information! Who knew you could actually create your own little biosphere of plants. It’s simple:
- Get rid of your lawn
- Contour your soil to capture and use rainwater (scarce though it is)
- Enrich your soil
- Install plants that are native to your area
As was suggested, I made a rough plan on paper (see pix below), took some photos of the lawn, and applied for the Turf Replacement rebate from bewaterwise.com. After about 3 weeks, I got an email that we were approved and had 6 months to complete the project in order to get the rebate. Time to get moving!
We have a wonderful gardener who was happy to help us make this happen. (A few years ago, we would have done this ourselves. <sigh>). We talked about a few ways of getting rid of the grass: chemicals (big no), smothering it (we plan to do sheet mulching after the grass is gone, so this was gonna take too long), and finally digging it out. Digging won.
Our regular landscape caretaker is José Garcia, and he was up for helping us make this project happen. He and his crew began to remove the grass, which was filled with Bermuda grass and therefore had many deep, string-like roots. (Google bermuda grass for horror stories of people spending years trying to get rid of it). The goal of day 1 was to just remove the top layer of grass. Mission accomplished!
