Using California natives in your gardening scheme can be very easy. There is a big trend now to hiring landscapers to transform your lawn into California natives, but this can be very expensive. In the Mountain View area, some quotes are 15k to do this.
I’m here to say you may be able to create a California native and drought tolerant landscape yourself much cheaper than hiring a professional. Here’s what we did:
1. Kill the lawn. Just stop watering it and it will die itself over time. There is no shame in that these days, in fact having a green lawn means you are not conserving water. Almost 50% of the water used by a household goes to watering a lawn so this will be an easy way to meet your reduction quota.
2. Look around your neighborhood to see landscapes you like. If you live near Menlo Park you can see many homes near the Sunset magazine that have low water yards. Take a look at Burgess Park, which has a nice low water area with signs telling you what the various plants are. Anywhere else in California you will also be able to find yards that have already transitioned.
3. Get a book. Here’s one we like: Reimagining the California Lawn
4. Create a plan on paper. Measure the dimensions of your yard, and sketch in walk ways you already have and think of where you might want to add a small path. The more of your yard you cover with pathways, mulch, planters, rocks and “dry creek beds” the less watering you will do.
5. You may want to consult with a plant designer at a place like Summerwinds or other garden center. They often will do landscape plans for much less than a landscape architect.
6. Decide if you are going to do the work yourself or hire someone to do it. We hired labor (Craigslist) to do the rip up of dead grass, placement of soil, river rock and planter rock, as well as installation of decomposed granite for pathways. What we did ourselves was add a few more rocks, do the planting of the plants, change the lawn sprinklers to drip irrigation (very easy, you can get the new heads at the hardware store that will replace the sprinkler heads), and install redwood mulch over the sprinkler hoses and around the plants.
7. Buy your plants or purchase seeds and start them yourselves. This is the most fun part of this project. We are selling some seeds for California Natives on Ebay (just look for Calnatives.garden in the Ebay search bar or check out our Post on this site)
8. Water a little to get going. Many low water plants will be able to get established with 5 minutess of drip water twice per week. If they are stressed, water a little more often. The best time to start is the fall so that the rain will do most of the watering for you.