Lawn-To-Garden-To-Awesome

I’ll admit it.  We had the worst front yard on the street.

My husband Nick and I felt badly about using so much water to keep our grass alive during these times of drought and water restrictions.

It was grass we never spent time in and on which dogs relieved themselves, so we made a brave decision to just stop watering it (or a tacky decision, depending on your perspective). 

And so we had half-dead Bermuda and crab grass for more than a year, maybe two.  It was embarrassing, but with leaking decks and plumbing issues, landscaping fell to the bottom of our triage list.

And then we found our Daddy Warbucks, the Lawn-To-Garden incentive program through the Long Beach Water Department (www.lblawntogarden.com).

Long Beach will pay you $2.50 per square foot to rip out your lawn and replace it with native, low water landscaping.  The process was surprisingly easy and I am very pleased with the results.  And believe me, if we procrastinators can do it, you can too. 

The first step is to file an application with Lawn-To-Garden, which we submitted on-line in a matter of minutes.  This is clearly the “admitting you have a problem” stage of the process.  The application itself is easy - you just need your water account number and the square footage of grass you are replacing.

Next we received a letter in the mail telling us our application was approved and we had 45 days to submit our garden design.  This is the reality check in the process – are you actually willing to do the work? 

Lawn-To-Garden has a lot of resources available, so you don’t need to hire a professional landscaper.  You start by taking a mandatory landscaping class (either on-line or at the water department).

Then, you review the list of approved plants and other requirements and make a drawing.  My husband and I looked at all the on-line examples, grabbed some graph paper, and went to work.  Our drawing was crude, but accepted without ridicule.  Then we waited…

A few weeks later we received a letter saying our stick figure drawings were approved and we had 120 days to construct our new garden.  And that’s when the wheels fell off.  We had Christmas, the flu, house guests, etc. and one night I woke up convinced we had missed our deadline and would be doomed to neighborhood mockery for eternity.  After checking the plans at 4 a.m., I realized all was not lost.  We still had four weeks.  It would be tight, but we had a shot.

Step one is to kill your grass.  Since ours was mostly dead, we were in good shape.  We hired the freakishly strong Miguel to dig up our remains and fix our sprinklers, which we converted to low flow rotator heads.

In the meantime, I showed our plans to my friend Leslie Grenier, a professional landscaper and extremely generous person.  She gently suggested a few changes to our design with phrases like “I consider this a freeway-quality plant.”  Yikes.  We ran the changes by the Lawn-To-Garden folks who didn’t even raise an eyebrow at the fact we were tweaking our design with two weeks to go.  I am sure they’ve seen it all.

Then we started visiting nurseries to collect the plants and mulch.  Seeing all those shades of green and beautiful flowers lined up in front of our house made me realize low water does not mean boring and monotone at all.  And in one very long day, Nick, Miguel and I did it – planted over 120 plants in our front yard and mulched every one.  We even had our first butterfly – a perk of going native.  We emailed the city, they came and inspected and we passed.  Glorious victory!

Joyce Barkley, Water Conservation Specialist, told me there are more than 500 Long Beach homes currently in various stages of the Lawn-To-Garden program.  The funding comes mostly from a refinanced bond and should fund garden conversions through the rest of 2011. 

According to Joyce, the Water Department “expects to see an average water savings of 30 percent per single family household" that converts to a low water garden.  She hopes the program will help change the perception that lawns are beautiful.  She says “a lawn is a water-guzzling plant that offers very little environmental benefit and is a lot of work to maintain.” 

She feels that by “seeding neighborhoods with these amazing California-friendly gardens” we are taking important first steps toward real water conservation.

For us, Lawn-to-Garden covered about ½ of the cost of replacing our lawn.  Our expenses were split about evenly between Miguel’s time and plant/mulch/paver materials.  If we were willing to dig out our own grass, we would have come close to breaking even (unless Leslie had charged us what she is really worth). 

More importantly, Lawn-To-Garden made the process simple.  They were constantly available for questions, were flexible with our changes, and really did provide all the on-line resources we needed to succeed.

As for the neighbors, I saw a few of them discussing our garden the other day.  Maybe they find the native garden a little shocking, or maybe they were just shocked we finally did the native landscaping we had talked about for so long.  Who knows, but I am glad we did it.