Pictures of the Turf being… Murdered

Here are the photographic steps of the black plastic method I used to kill my turf:

Step 1) Mow the turf short. Grass grows from its tips so if it's short, it—and its roots—will die faster. Remember this turf murder is about effectively killing the turf’s roots so they won’t grow back, which will leave plenty of room for the gorgeous, drought tolerant plants that will be planted. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Step 2) Buy the biggest, thickest sheet of black plastic available. At The Home Depot I found one that was 10 feet x 25 feet and bought two rolls of it. The color is important because black will A) Prevent any sunlight from getting to the roots while simultaneously B) Warming in the sun’s heat, which will slowly burn the roots to death. Hey, murder is never pretty. 

Step 3) Lay the black plastic on the grass and pin it down with heavy things like bricks, wood or your heart, because having the entire front yard covered in plastic is a happiness killer to any homeowner.

And now the very hardest step:

Step 4) Wait. For six weeks.

ARRGH!

Murdering... the Turf

Waking up to the sun shining, a mockingbird singing and children playing I said, “Today I’ll commit murder.”  Murder… my Turf, that is.

I had to kill my grass to save my soul. Or at least my water bills and/or sanity, whichever I had more of. (Answer: water bills.) My first step was finding a murder plan, so I grabbed an Agatha Christie mystery and began reading. With all the dozens of murders Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot and Luke Fitzwilliam had solved, none of them detailed killing grass. I needed to speak to a professional turf murderer.

“Harold, I need help,” I said waving to my 86 year-old neighbor as he stood in his front yard. He swatted the air with a flick of his wrist while watching the lawn sprinklers douse the barren dirt patch in front of his house. His yard was so defunct it looked like a bomb had been dropped on it eighty-four times. “Wow,” I said with admiration. “Your lawn is super dead.”

“I didn’t kill it intentionally.”

“But when you don’t set out to kill something, you really kill it.”

“Since I washed my car, nothing will grow here,” he said kicking the dirt.

If I killed my lawn the same way he’d killed his, I wouldn’t be able to grow so much as a weed ever again. I took one step back, then another.

“You want my help killing your grass?” he asked.

“I can’t hear you—” I said sprinting to my front door and slamming it behind me.

Inside I raced to the internet. I found sites full of information on killing the lawn with a silver bullet. The method was so quick it took just 24 hours. What a difference one day could make! I read on—the silver bullet used chemicals. But then… weren’t these quick chemical options just like Harold’s murder method of car washing? This wasn’t a rhetorical question. It was the truth. And I answered it truthfully: Moving on!

I opened a new search window and googled “organic methods + killing grass”. Apparently vinegar was a popular method embraced by fellow turf killers but it entailed buying whole glasses, bottles and vats of vinegar to kill the grass. Full Disclosure: yes, I wanted to murder my grass but if I were going to buy vats of anything it would be water, whiskey or wine. Moving on!

I sought out wholesome organic methods of “taking care of the grass”, which is an Italian mob euphemism for “whacking the turf” and found one called “Lasagna”.  This method's recipe had my mouth watering: Lay six (6) layers of cardboard and/or newspapers on the grass then atop that, pile six (6) inches of organic mulch. Let it cook in the sun for two (2) months then with a shovel dig through the mulch and paper mess and plant your drought tolerant plants directly in the muck. Serves 1 hernia to the idiot doing this by herself.

Several things bothered me about this: 1) Where would I get enough cardboard to create six layers (?!) to cover my whole yard? 2) Who would do the back-breaking work of piling on the six inches of mulch to cover the entire lawn? (Answer: moi). And 3) A cooking time of two months?! Yes, I was lacking sanity but I wasn’t crazy! Moving on!

Approaching my wit’s end, which actually was a short journey considering how few wits I possessed to have even embarked on this Quixotic murder endeavor in the first place, I found a last option: Plastic. This method entailed mowing the grass short, covering the lawn in large sheets of black plastic and pinning the plastic sheet down with bricks, boards or the lawn mower since I wouldn’t be needing that thing ever again. Denied sunlight by the opaque black plastic for six weeks, the grass would wither and die. 

Ahhh, yes. Murdering with plastic, how shrewd, inexpensive and effortless. Or as Agatha Christie said Murder is Easy. And the Queen of Murder would know.

Next: Pictures of the Turf being... Murdered

Sharing Grass

I’ve never done things the way others do.

I didn’t get a college degree; I got two.

I didn’t date a bunch of losers; I married one great guy.

I didn’t want green grass; but had the lushest, greenest yard in all of Southern California.

Ahh! Life's cruel ironies.

I’d already made the big decision to delete the lawn plus I’d been approved to rip it out but when it came to the logistics of actually removing the emerald green sod I… just… couldn’t… do… it.

The reason? I felt terrible tossing out a living plant—albeit one whose weekly water needs sucked the Mississippi River bone-dry and required a mowing, weeding and fertilizing regimen that was more complicated and time-consuming than a bride preparing for her big destination-wedding day. Nope, when guilt struck me, it hit hard wiping out all the painful months I had suffered maintaining the %#*$ grass and replacing rational thought with sentiments like: 

I can't rip out the turf.  It's not fair to the turf.  The turf was here first.

I was like the woman who was sick and uncomfortable throughout her entire pregnancy, but the moment her baby was born--Whoosh!--she forgot about the previous nine months of agony and got pregnant... again.

My guilt about removing the turf taught me a vital lesson about myself, I had a mothering instinct... for plants.

Clearly, I’ve never done things the way other people do.

Yes I was a plant lover and as horticulturalists know the greatest defining characteristic of plant lovers was, we never threw out plants. No, sir-ee, we shared them! 

In our neighborhood finding someone who needed green grass was as easy as giving away candy bars on Halloween. I looked at my neighbor's brown lawn and sashayed over to Harold and Norma’s house where I found Norman hoisting his American flag. Of course, they'd take my grass because nothing was more American than green grass! Except maybe baseball, oh, and football. Football was American and so was apple pie, hamburgers—and despite the name—“French Fries”, Girl Scout Cookies, yellow ribbons, oak trees, jazz, disco, grunge, crab cakes, the Constitution, throwing horseshoes, s’mores, fire pits, fireworks—okay, okay! So clearly plenty of things were American and food related. But lush green grass was on that "very American" list, too.

“Harold, do you want our grass?”

“Sure I’ll take it,” he said looking at our yard with envy.

“Great!—”

“If you pick it up and plant it over here.”

Now I was a plant lover but not a fool. Doubling my work by ripping out my lawn and fixing up his was not in my grand plan of sharing grass.

"If you want it," I said. You can come get it. Deal?"

Harold laughed and entered his man-cave garage.

I telescoped the area and spotted another neighbor working in his garden.

"Hi Jerry," I said bounding over to him.  Jerry was a San Francisco sports fan, a rose fan and a true plant lover. He had dozens of beautiful roses in his front yard. Of course Jerry would want my grass!

“I hear you’re making some changes to your yard,” Jerry said snipping off a stalk from a rosebush.

“We’re getting rid of the turf.”

"But your grass is real nice," he said tossing a look to our yard.

“Do you want it?"

He shook his head. "But if you're getting rid of any roses, I’ll take those."

Correction: Jerry wasn't a plant lover but a rose hog. 

Maybe I could call a local library.  Donate the grass to them.  Or a—wait a minute.  What was I doing? If I wanted to get rid of the grass in my yard to improve my quality of life and decrease water bills it didn't make sense to pass the grass along to someone else because that meant the total number of yards with grass in L.A. would remain the same.

If I wanted to enact change, I didn't need to share grass but my vision of a water wise garden and push my yard from turfed to turf-free.  Without my neighbors or a charity taking my grass the only option I had was to kill my grass... myself. 

Nope, I’ve never done things the way others do.

Next: Murdering... the Turf

What is a Turf Inspector? Or The Steps to Remove a Lawn

I would have to follow several steps to transform our lawn from a Pebble Beach putting green to a haven for California plants.  Here are the first steps: 

Step 1: In the dead heat of summer grab the water bill and stand in the yard.  Look from my water bill to the lawn and say: I spent that much on this itty-bitty, minipatch of green? 

Step 2: Kick myself.

Step 3: Explore different options of a front yard without green grass.  Like doing a California native plant garden or Xeriscaping.

Step 4: Look up “Xeriscaping”: Xer-i-scape (noun): a decorative type of landscaping developed in the Southwestern U.S. that plunks down cacti, rocks and an American flag to simulate the moon’s surface.

Step 5: Tell the moon and Neil Armstrong, “no offense”, then opt to go the California native plant route instead.

Step 6: Take a deep, deep breath.

Step 7: Decide to rip out the grass, in toto.

Step 8a: Discover that the City of Los Angeles is operating a Turf Removal Program to encourage its open-minded homeowners—or just the stupid ones—to remove their turf to lower their water bills.  To make it exclusive—and oh, so Hollywood—the Turf Removal Program is “by application, only”.  There’s even a red carpet and velvet rope.

Step 8b: Read on the application that the City will refund me some of the costs of this Turf Removal.

Step 8c: Re-read the “refund” part 10 times to make sure I've got it right: The City will refund moi if I ditch the grass?! 

Step 9: Give myself a fist bump for googling this issue so effectively.  Maybe I’m not one of the stupid homeowners after all!

Step 10: Read the application’s fine print stating that L.A.’s Department of Water and Power will send a Turf Inspector to our home to confirm that we have grass that can be removed and we are coo-coo enough to do it.

Step 11: Realize the government will be involved.  Sigh.

Step 12: Complete the first part of the application and mail the sucker off!

Step 13: Welcome the Turf Inspector who confirms we have grass and we are nutso enough to remove it ourselves.  She tells us with a warm smile that we now have 120 days to delete the putting green and replace it with something that will rival the Huntington Gardens, Descanso Gardens and Griffith Park combined.

Step 14: Cry with sheer terror!

Step 15: Realize Rome was not built in a day and neither will our turfless yard.

This process is most definitely To Be Continued…