5 SUSTAINABILITY FEATURES TO CONSIDER FOR YOUR GARDEN

When renovating your garden it is important to consider all possibilities.  Features that will be beneficial to the environment and overall well being of your garden.  

The first feature is a berm.  A mound created at one or a few points in the garden to create levels with plants in and around it.  This will mitigate water runoff.  

The second is a dry riverbed.  This feature creates a visually appealing feature that when it is not raining looks like a beautiful work of art.  When it does rain, the water is collected and begins to percolate into the soil.  

The third is a rain barrel.  This is perfect to connect to the gutters to collect the rain water.  The water can be used to water the garden or for just about anything.

The fourth is a rock garden in which in certain areas in the garden you would use rocks and gravel as mulch instead of wood chips.  

The last feature is a planted swale.  This feature create a divot in the center of the area that water can collect.  It is filled with rocks and gravel with other larger rocks around.  

In this video I describe these feature is greater detail with more images of what the features look like in a garden setting.

Costa Mesa Garden Makeover

This front garden in the city of Costa Mesa got a lawn gone transformation.  All the turf was removed and replaced with drought tolerant plants and a sustainability feature.  This garden is now a great place for the local birds and butterflies to hang out.  This is also a project that took part in the turf rebate program.  If you would like to participate in the turf rebate program then click here.  

IRVINE FRONT YARD TURF REBATE GARDEN

I love killing lawns.  I will design with lawn if it is adamantly desired, but I do enjoy proposing to kill them.  Drawing on paper what will go in their place.  Some drought tolerant (perhaps native) plants, a sustainability feature of some sort.  Definitely an energy efficient irrigation system.   

For this project in the city of Irvine, I did just that.  For budget reasons, we kept the existing hardscape but everything else was gone.  A few plants we kept.  The palette is a mostly native palette as the client already had two native Manzanitas that was kept.  

If you have turf that you would like to kill and take part in the rebate program then click here.