Removal of the front Lawn: Part 2 Full Swale ahead!

Howdy All!

Bye bye lawn, hello beautiful California natives! After three weeks, our grass is dead! Here is an awesome photo of the grass after the 3 weeks:

Here is our original front yard plan: Lots of California natives! We changed things up slightly, for instance we put some stepping stones from the sidewalk to the front hose.

You only get so far with a plan, so in the end we needed to buy the plants. We have a local native nursery that both fortunately and unfortunately went out of business. Fortunately because we got all of our plants on sale. Unfortunately because now we can never go back!

We planted these native plants:

Front yard plants - right side from side walk

Bee's bliss Sage x2

White monkeyflower x1

Pink monkeyflower x3

Artemisia x3

Dymondia mixed in with pavers

Purple needle-grass x2

Grass (can't remember which kind) x2

Cleveland sage x1

Front yard plants - left side from side walk

Ceanothus 'yankee point' x1

blue-eyed grass x2

showy blue penstemon x4

purple rock cress x4

red buckwheat x1

cleveland sage x1

We first started by making a swell swale to catch the run off from our roof. N dug the trench first:

The bottom of the swale we covered with weed cloth to prevent weeds from growing up from below. We placed "All purpose gravel" on the bottom, to maybe an inch. You can see it here holding the weed cloth down:

On top of the "All Purpose Gravel" we put "River Rock" which has a better look to it and is a bit bigger than the other rock

We then laid out all of the plant and where we were going to plant them.

After that, N got to planting. It was kind of hard to dig through the cardboard. You can see G in the background, giving moral support as he worked on his crawling.

Here you can see the detail of our front drain, which will be going into the swell. We may be in a drought, but it is supposed to rain in a couple of days, so I'll try to get a picture of it in action!

Here is a photo of the lay out of the plants on the left side of the the front yard:

A picture of the far left side of the front yard, showing the existing rose bush, and some plantings:

Here is a photo of the front "lawn" about 3 weeks after we did all the plantings. All of the plants are a bit small still, but hopefully in a year we will have a beautiful front yard! So far we are seeing a lot more butterflies and hummingbirds in the front, which before we only saw in our back yard!

Happy plantings!

M & N