Filed under: Cash for Grass | Tags: butterfly, cash, grass, habitat, lawn, neighbor, pickaxe, property, roots
There is a strip of lawn between my driveway and my next-door neighbor’s that is about 12 feet wide. While working with a pickaxe on the grass removal in the main part of my lawn, which is getting increasingly difficult due to the many thick roots as I get nearer the tree in the middle of the yard, my neighbor came out to see what I was up to and to suggest that I stop swearing loudly in front of the neighborhood children. I explained the project, and suggested that when I get to the driveway strip I could take out the whole strip out between our driveways instead of just my half, and include it all in the project, if he would chip in for the additional rock.
He is “thinking about it”, which I interpret as wondering if it is safe to say “no way” directly to a mentally defective neighbor who is swinging a pickaxe around while ranting about accursed butterfly habitats.
Filed under: Cash for Grass | Tags: bees, butterflies, California, cash, grass, habitat, hummingbirds, landscape, native, plant, plants
After some research into what is available in the drought-tolerant-plant category, my children and I decided that we want to put in a landscape consisting entirely of plants native to our area of California. The reason for this is to help preserve native species as well as meeting the drought-tolerant goal, and particularly to attract more butterflies, hummingbirds, and endangered species of native bees, so that my children can catch them and put them in a jar. Or something.
We hope to create a purely native “California micro-habitat” to help preserve the things that naturally lived in our area before the explosion of subdivisions like ours.
I am not without misgivings. For economy, I plan to execute the landscape transformation with my own labor (and the forced labor of my children). We’ll see if that works. We are also not certain what the neighbors in our little subdivision, every single one of which has a lawn, will think of the result. Fortunately, we have no homeowner’s association, so no one can veto my plan or design! (ha, ha, ha!)
