How to Garden With California Natives: Lessons from the 2016 Theodore Payne Garden Tour

...nsible and thoughtful irrigation. We can transition away from water hungry lawns and plantings and towards California natives and other climate-appropriate plants. But we will still need to irrigate to establish those new plantings. And we should continue to irrigate mature trees. OK, enough with the rant. One of the great benefits of garden tours like the one Kelly and I went on this past weekend, sponsored by the Theodore Payne Foundation, is th...

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Water Conservation

...can also reduce the amount of outdoor water usage. Above all remember that lawns are the wasteful and evil thought-spawn of generations of golf-obsessed Republicans. Replace them with edible landscaping, or decomposed granite. 10.8% Toilet All toilets should be low-flush, and todays low-flush toilets are considerably better than the first generation. A low-flush toilet uses less than 1.6 gallons of water compared to 3.5 to 5 gallons for an old toi...

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Plantain!

.... It’s exactly what we’d like to see more of–folks growing food instead of lawns and everyone sharing the abundance. While there’s a lot of banana trees in Los Angeles they tend not to yield edible fruit since our climate is not quite hot and humid enough. But plantains, judging from the delicious taste of the ones we fried up, are a different story. They do require a lot of water to grow, but greywater expert Art Ludwig calls bananas (the same fa...

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An Open Letter to Our Mammalian Friends

...then the possums. To the mountain lions of Los Angeles: maybe it would be best to stay out of our crawl spaces. You’re scaring our plumbers. To the humans of Los Angeles: you’re mammals too! What’s up with the lawns, corrupt politicians, freeways, ugly mini-malls . . . oh, wait this could go on forever. You drive like a bunch of jerks. Anyways, I hope you all get this memo. Don’t make me put up signs....

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Planting in a Post-Wild World

...nce landscapes. You end up with beds of annuals that need constant upkeep, lawns which need mowing and chemical CPR, and sad perennials floating like lonely islands in barren seas of mulch. These gardens may look tidy (and somehow tidy has become perhaps the single most important virtue in landscape design) but they are a lot of work to maintain, and they don’t do much other species, or the air, or the soil, or the water… and they don’t speak to o...

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