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.
