The city of Petaluma offered a deal where they’d give you appropriate materials for sheet mulching, some drip irrigation components, and a discount of plants if you’d convert your water hungry lawn to something else. We decided that’d be a good idea, but our front lawn was smaller than the minimum area for delivery. Since our long-term plans include doing away with most of the back lawn we decided to do it all at once.
We had some plans drawn up by a local garden designer to give us a starting point on plants, and decided that we wanted a small flagstone patio out front on which we could put a table and chairs and eat dinners while conversing with the neighbors who walk by.
So we committed got a yard of compost and 5 yards of bark dumped in our driveway. These are some pictures from back in October when I was just trying to make the driveway usable again.
Content over at my personal blog.
-- Dan Lyke, Petaluma California, http://www.flutterby.net/
5 comments so far
MsDebbieP
home | projects | blog
628 posts in 5488 days
posted 02-04-2011 04:33 PM
wow – a very forward-thinking community!
Nice to see
-- ~ Debbie, Ontario Canada
Dan Lyke
home | projects | blog
331 posts in 5474 days
posted 02-04-2011 05:21 PM
Yeah, Petaluma is within the enlightened sphere of “The Bay Area”, but enough on the fringe of it that we aren’t all Marin County “progressive”. So we get some good forward-thinking about things like reducing overall water consumption rather than just building more canals and pipelines to further-flung places, but we still have struggles over things like funding our really cool new sewage treatment plant.
-- Dan Lyke, Petaluma California, http://www.flutterby.net/
MsDebbieP
home | projects | blog
628 posts in 5488 days
posted 02-04-2011 11:20 PM
2 steps forward, 1 step back… :)
-- ~ Debbie, Ontario Canada
Sergios
home | projects | blog
1 post in 4005 days
posted 04-11-2012 03:20 AM
The support given is indeed wonderful news. It encourages residents to consider doing the right thing. Although there’s no perfect community, being in the landscape and lawn maintenance Phoenix line of work ourselves, this is better compared to other areas that lack support.
Dan Lyke
home | projects | blog
331 posts in 5474 days
posted 04-11-2012 04:12 AM
Last year I spent some time volunteering at the Fair, coincidentally in the Department of Water Conservation booth. Turns out they see this as a long-term investment, and because of that they have a substantial budget to do this. It’s either help citizens change their infrastructure to consume less water, or build the pipelines and canals and desalinization plants to pull in water from who knows where.
Seems like this is an argument you can take to pretty much any water agency. It helps that Sonoma County is fairly well built out and new development is hit up with a hefty impact fee, but…
-- Dan Lyke, Petaluma California, http://www.flutterby.net/