From Lawn to Garden, Building Community
November 2nd, 2009 By Victoria Tatum
In neighborhoods around the globe people gather on their front porches to commune, but our busy street, while friendly, is not like that. Yet a landscape change Blue and I made for environmental reasons brought us unexpectedly closer to our own community.
A few summers ago we took out our front lawn, and by removing the weed and gopher-ridden turf and disabling the sprinkler system, we started saving 18,000 gallons of water a year. We put in a drip system whose sprinkler heads consumed a couple of gallons per watering, versus the hundreds per watering of conventional sprinklers.
We replaced the lawn with vegetable beds that soaked up the sun bathing the front of our house. Read More