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

Howdy All!

Howdy All!

Welcome to Nicole and Michael’s blog - A Menagerie on the Farm!

We decided to start this blog to share with our friends and family our adventures in urban gardening in Los Angeles, California. We hope you enjoy our stories, our strategies, our recipes, and our
on-going battles with weeds!

We bought our house over a year ago, and found a large yard with nearly nothing going on. In fact, we bought it especially because of this massive yard. We had lots of weeds, two large birds of paradise (which we later hacked out), as well as a massive (and poisonous) Oliander tree (which we also hacked out). We found a large concrete slab, which we still haven’t figured out what it was for - a shed? a bomb shelter? we are takings votes :) We found an orange tree, and a beautiful yellow rose bush.

We did a lot of hacking and shoveling and digging over our first year here, spending many hours toiling away. But as always with gardening, things are never quite done!

Our goals for our garden are to maximize the amount of vegetables that we grow, so that we eat locally
and decrease our carbon foot print. We are moving towards organic vegetables, we never use pesticides or herbicides, although still **rarely** use fertilizers. One of our goals is to stop using fertilizers; we currently have 3 compost heaps which will replace our reliance on chemical fertilizers. In an effort to save money, we also want to decrease the amount of young plants that we purchase from home depot, and grow more plants from seed. Amazon and Burpee are great online sources for seed purchases! We also want to grow more heirloom plants. In addition to the veggies, we are also planting California natives, butterfly and hummingbird attractors - yay for native habitat!

Our goals for ourselves are simple: Get in shape by being more active (and eating healthier), and
get in better touch with nature.

In the future we plan to build a green house, and a hen house. Churn our soil to help break up the clay
and oxygenate future roots. Expand our veggie garden so that we have more room for gourds, squashes and zuchini. Eventually replace our water sucking lawn with California natives.

The adventure on our "Farm" (and with our menagerie of pets!) is just beginning...

We hope to see you in the future!

Mike and Nicky.