Turning Lawn into Vegetable Beds in Los Angeles

Crazy (but not crazy exactly if you know me. Or at least not surprising.) but I started this blog and promptly forgot all about it.  My last post was a year ago. I might have forgotten about the blog but I did not forget to garden. And the garden grew!  The plan was realized!  Within a year we grew enough fruits and vegetables that we stopped needing to buy any, and that's even with husband recently turning vegan on me. 

In a way, finding this blog is a lot like having planted a seed and being surprised when a year later you have a whole plant full of delicious something. What a surprise! What bounty!

Good that I remembered to take pictures.  I'll add some and try to retrace my steps.  So you saw the before: a big waste of a lawn, all full of holes, dog poop, and dried up weeds from us deciding it was too much of a waste of water.

The inspiration was a pretty image found on Instagram.

And there was the $5,000 the city gave us to turn our lawn into anything we wanted as long as it was drought tolerant. (Note: the surface of the vegetable bed was deducted from the square footage. We did not cheat the system. Still our water bill came down drastically. I'll add a copy of my water bill later when I have a moment.)

Building a vegetable garden in hostile territory

We used some math (mostly my husband did, while I put my hand over my ears and hummed nananana) to draw a circle and separate it pizza-style into 12 chunks: 6 large chunks that would become the beds, and 6 smaller ones that would become the paths between beds.

My husband and I spent countless hours and arguments creating the shape using sticks and strings.  We needed the paths to not be too narrow at the center. We wanted a big space in the middle to put a table or something. Thank goodness we had not bought the stones yet because we might have used them on each other.

Note: our pathetic first attempt at stacking rocks. Our technique would eventually improve but not much.

We did not bother removing the lawn but instead followed some permaculture principles that say that you don't need to dig out the lawn or remove it. It's science-backed. The paper smothers the grass and the grass and paper eventually turn to organic matter.  It was a bit of a leap of faith that went against all conventions. We resisted the idea but eventually realized we were kidding ourselves: we were much too lazy to start digging up the lawn anyway.

We covered the lawn with thick layers of newspaper about 8 sheets-thick. We could have used cardboard but we happen to be part of the dinosaur era humanoids that actually enjoy a physical newspaper with our morning coffee. Using newspaper is cheap and convenient but it flied off (that's why we have rocks there, until I realized that I could simply hose down the paper and it held in place just fine) It is also super distracting. I kept reading headlines and bits of articles and would sit down and start reading and forget all about what I was doing.)

In the paths, since I did not plan to add dirt there but wood chips, I did not trust that the newspaper would be a sufficient barrier against the weeds, so I put a weed barrier instead. That was a mistake: it was slippery and because it is perforated for drainage, I did get weeds there. A year later, I ended up raking off the wood chips, removing the plastic/alleged weed barrier, and replacing it with newspaper.

We used two 4x4 planks that added up to 8 feet in length on top of each other for the sides, and stacked stones for the circular parts.  We drilled holes in the 4 by 4s and put rebar in and through the ground so that they would not come apart. Our neighbors really enjoyed the clanking of hammer and colorful language emanating from our yard as we hammered the wood and our fingers. Later they forgave us (or resented us more) when we gifted them wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow filled with cucumbers.

Gardening tip: there is such thing as planting too many cucumbers plants.

One beautiful morning this happened: You hear me laugh in the background because there is something insane about watching a truck dump seven cubic yards of dirt in your driveway.

We made a thousand trips between the driveway and the backyard bringing the dirt in and filling the beds. Oh, and we had to remove all the stones we had so painstakingly piled up to make way for the wheelbarrow. Turns out that it was easier to roll the wheelbarrow into the beds and tip it than to shovel the dirt out of it. 

Here is the "et voilà" moment. I'm standing there looking forlorn but really, I'm absolutely thrilled:

Gone With the Lawn

DWP is offering us an offer I can't resist. They're paying us. Paying us! to remove our lawn and replace it with a drought tolerant landscape.  How much will they pay? A whooping $3.75 per square foot of lawn removed. Please pardon the delay as I rub my eyes and pinch myself. That's square foot, not square yard!

Joe and I measured and it seems that between our back lawn and the grass on the parking strip we have about 1,500 square feet of lawn. Actually more than that, but we badly want vegetable beds and those cannot be included in the financial incentive.

So we made our design, measured a million times, calculated, measured some more, cursed, pouted, tried again and found out that once we remove the surface that the raised beds would occupy, it comes to 1142 square feet.

Once the landscaping is complete (now that the project was approved by DWP we need to complete it by mid May) DWP will reimburse us $1142 x $3.75 = $5572.5

Ploc.

That was the sound of me fainting.

No, this is not an alien's design to take over the Earth one crop circle at a time. It's my hideous, not to scale design. 

Basically, the idea is to remove the lawn and the existing water-siphoning sprinkler system, replace those with a drought tolerant landscape mighty enough to thrive in our Southern California climate (add to this the gift of a super arid microclimate in our town) and a drip system, and finance all this with the DWP incentive.

You can see above that we are removing a total of 1810 square feet of lawn, but we are deducting a 344 square feet area (the circle above) to create raised beds. In those raise beds we'll plant a permaculture style (more on that later) vegetable crop.

I found this circle/medicine wheel design on Pinterest and fell in love.  I wish I could give proper credit to the people who made this garden, but I could not find it anywhere. If you know, please email me.

You know what it's like. Fall in love first, think later. The decision is made. So let's go! 

Here is the before, so that you know what we're starting with. These pictures were taken in the middle of winter, so the summer grass had died in patches. It's pretty bad I admit.  In the background, you can see a few Echium, Euphorbia, and Phormium. Clearly, when given just the right amount of neglect, drought loving plants love it here.

Lawn, I will not be missing you.