DryStoneGarden

The New Low Water Planting

This lawn conversion is around the corner from the last one I showed. The lawns were similar, full sun and gently sloping, and we used a lot of the same plants, emphasizing purples, yellows, and green. It’s a bigger space, though, so things are on a somewhat bigger scale. Instead of one Chinese Pistache, we planted 3 Raywood Ash, and instead of one Plum we planted three Nyssa sylvatica. Instead of Sesleria autumnalis we used a larger grass, Lomandra ‘Breeze’, instead of fifteen Salvia nemerosa, there are twenty four. Overall though, it’s fairly similar, a plant palette we use regularly for front yards on that side of the hills — low-water, lowish-maintenance, deer-resistant, a mix of natives and other mediterranean species emphasizing purples, yellows, and green.

Star Jasmine and the Old Lawn

We covered this lawn with mulch from cutting trees in the yard and left it for six months while there was work done on the house. The mulch layer was partly to smother the lawn, but also to protect the soil from the construction workers, who always seem to park on the lawn despite efforts to dissuade them.

Google Earth View of the Front Door and the Old Tree

The original landscape didn’t have a pathway to the front door. There was one from the driveway to the door, but visitors parked at the curb and walked across the lawn. I’m not sure how that was tolerated for so many years. Visitors should have a proper way to get to the front door.

The New Pathwy to the Front Door

The path uses three different types of stone. The stone sleepers are flamed basalt, the fill pavers are handcut setts of black limestone, and the soldiers are tumbled granite.

Nepeta

Moonshine Yarrow, Salvia nemerosa, and Nepeta

As I was said at the top, this is one of our standard Contra Costa lawn conversion plant palettes. Purple and yellow/gold with mostly green foliage. Nepeta, Salvia nemerosa, Penstemon heterophyllus, and Geranium ‘Rozanne’ are the purples blooming now. Lavender and Salvia ‘Mystic Spires’ will add more purple soon. Moonshine Yarrow, Coleonema ‘Sunset Gold’, and Geum are compatible yellows. Lomandra ‘Breeze’ is a nice green backdrop, gives it a meadow-y feel. There are young shrubs in the background and of course the trees which are still getting established, but for now, while everyone is first looking and judging the lawn conversion, these are the plants they see.

Salvia nemerosa and Moonshine Yarrow

Penstemon heterophyllus and Lomandra Breeze

Coleonema Sunset Gold, Penstemon heterophyllus and Geum

The geranium and geum can be eaten by deer depending on the garden and where they are located in it. Salvia nemerosa ocassionally gets nibbled as well. I’ve never seen any of the others eaten.

Coleonema Sunset Gold and Geranium Rozanne

That concludes lawn conversion week (month) here at DryStoneGarden. There are a lot of resources out there for people considering doing it. Davis has a thorough pdf that I was looking at recently, the latest one to catch my attention. Anyone considering it should go for it. A garden is so much better than a tired old lawn.

This is how we usually do lawn conversions these days, a modified version of sheet mulching. Unlike the last lawn I showed, which was mostly just regular turf grass, this lawn had bermuda grass in it, a tougher beast to slay, really tenacious at fighting its way up through newspaper or cardboard. Instead of immediately sheet mulching and planting, I find it better to first cover the lawn with weed cloth and mulch for a few months — letting the Bermuda grass expend energy trying to fight up through the cloth — and then attack it wherever it makes it to the surface. It takes a little more patience, but it doesn’t add much labor or cost. It’s easy enough, once I’m ready to plant, to sweep the mulch off, pull the cloth, and finish off the Bermuda grass while I do the grading and prep for the new planting. Then, I do the new planting and put the mulch back on top of it, take the weed cloth off to use on my next project. Lawns are easy to kill, it’s the weeds in the lawn that sometimes take a little extra care.

Above is a before view from google earth, below is the lawn covered by mulch during the summer. The Bermuda grass came back especially strong at the edges, where it had roots going underneath the concrete of the front walkway and the curb. We got it pretty well by the time we finished the installation, but it still requires vigilance along the walkway.

A lot of lawn conversions involve adding a path through the new planting. This one needed steps as well.

Before and after views from a couple more angles are below. As I said in my last post, a front garden’s a lot better than a tired old lawn. (more…)

This is another way of removing a lawn, smothering it with newspaper or cardboard and a thick layer of mulch. I’ve posted about this in the past, but my proselytizing is an ongoing thing; I think it’s the most efficient way to convert a lawn. Now that the drought has ended (temporarily?), I suppose people might lose interest in taking out their lawns, but so far the momentum seems to be continuing. It helps that EBMUD still has its rebate program.

We started by turning off the irrigation and letting the lawn dry out in the sun for a couple of months.

We left most of the lawn in place, but we did dig out the edge of the lawn so the mulch wouldn’t spill onto the sidewalk. I then used the dug out pieces of sod and some compost to make a berm towards the back of the planting; I put the new tree in the berm. The berm always settles a fair bit after the compost and sod decompose, but it gives a subtle bit of topography to the new planting, helping it look a little less like a former lawn. After digging out the edges, we spread about an inch of compost over the rest of the lawn and then planted directly into it. That generated another little pile of old sod, which I added to the berm.

We then covered the ground with a layer of wet newspaper, 8-12 sheets thick and overlapping by about 4 inches. I presoak the newspaper in a bucket as I go, so that it sticks together like paper maché. We then run our drip irrigation on top of the newspaper and then cover everything with mulch before the paper can dry.

A bit of the lawn manages to fight it’s way up through the layers of newspaper over the next few months, but a couple of quick maintenance visits can deal with that, plus the new plants will also suppress the old lawn as they grow in. It all takes a lot less labor than digging out the entire lawn, and the lawn and newspaper layer enrich the soil as they decompose.

The newspaper also takes advantage of the fact that roots go through it but the tops of plants do not. The poppies scattered on top of the newspaper layer can send roots down into the soil, but any existing weed seeds cannot push their way up from beneath it. Simple and efficient and so much better than mowing and watering a lawn.