Native Garden I

Hello! Welcome back! It’s certainly been a very long time since I last posted, which is to say, an embarrassingly long amount of time, because life became very very busy, and also, I couldn’t think of any ideas to write about. BUT NOW. Life has become more settled, I’ve moved into a new house, I’ve done some renovations, my work life is marginally more stable, and now I’m taking on new projects that take up a lot of my thought process, so why not document them here?

Firstly, and the focus of this post, will be my future native garden! So my new house has both a front yard and a back yard, full of beautiful green grass that takes up quite a bit of water. Since I don’t really need al that grass to lay around in, I want to convert my front lawn and parkway into a native garden for a few reasons: to save on my water bill, so make my yard more sustainable, and to have something more interesting to look at. And also if I do a native garden, LADWP has a rebate program to help me pay for all those new plants! Which honestly is super great since I spent all my money on the house and renovations…

Which also means I’ll probably be doing most of the work myself, with recruited friend labor to help with all the digging and mulching and whatever hard labor ends up being involved.

This is a journey that I’m just starting out on, so I just wanted to share some resources that have been super helpful in figuring things out. This will be particularly relevant to anyone who lives in Los Angeles and is served by LADWP, but if you don’t, maybe your city will have similar programs that can get you started on your own lawn conversion!

First, LADWP has a turf replacement program, and will walk you through how to do it, including free design consultations and even hand on workshops where you work on converting someone’s lawn into a native garden. You can even host a workshop in your own home! For more information: lawnbegone.ladwp.com

They’ll even provide free trees! www.cityplants.org

And if you can’t make it in person, Green Gardens Group, who partners with LADWP to host the workshops, has so many zoom workshops and tutorials available: www.greengardensgroup.com They even offer classes in Mandarin!

Overall, I am so so excited to be able to do this and go more sustainable in my house, especially since it looks like the drought problem in California is ongoing.

In somewhat related news, I recently started a worm compost system (thank you Subpod! www.subpod.com) and got my worms from Will’s Worms, a local worm farm in Studio City run by the most adorable kids. So far my worms are doing great (as in they’re still alive…) and I would highly recommend this worm farm, if only so you can learn worm facts from the cutest kids ever. www.willsworms.com