What's up with the lawn?

Once upon a time, not long after we bought the house, our front yard looked decent:

But after more than a year of under-watering, not to mention a severe drought, it was starting to show some suffering:

We understood for a while that we needed to do something about it but we could not decide on what. A "polite warning" letter from our neighborhood association forced us to decide fast that we needed a new yard. (I'll admit a large part of this was neglect, but in our defense, most houses in the neighborhood had similar yards after Summer 2009.)

After a good long period of planning and research, I decided the best new yard would require FAR less water and FAR less maintenance. I bought an old truck to help with the effort and set to work.

The new yard would have a small (~300 ft² ) patch of Zoysia turf grass, a patch of clumping grass, a dry streambed, and an expanse of decomposed granite over everything else.

In the areas that would hold the two grasses, I rototilled twice on two separate weekends...

Raked and smoothed the dirt, then set up borders...

Then bought the Zoysia sod and laid it down! Linda and Dan were huge helps with the sod laying process.

If I were to do this part again, I would consider renting a sod cutter to remove the old grass and/or spraying Roundup across the area to make sure it's dead. The way I did it, rototilling the old lawn under, I had to spend a lot of extra time raking out dead grass debris and now I have to worry that I missed some and it may grow back in a few places.

In the other grass area, the one with the clumping grass, I raked & smoothed then bought some Mexican Feather Grass and planted that...

Then my mom and I graded a few parts of the area to resist erosion during heavy downpours.

Currently that part is unfinished. It needs more Mexican Feather Grass but I probably won't be able to find any until the spring.

For the dry streambed, I laid out some guidelines with strings and then dug in.

I read some advice to pile the dug-out dirt along the sides so that the bottom seems deeper. I did this and it worked out well.

Once the hole was there, I laid in some weed fabric and a cubic yard of river rocks. Some big river rocks along the side complete the look.

We will probably enhance that a bit too with some more big rocks and a few plants along the sides.

Finally, to fill in the rest of the area, I wanted to spread some decomposed granite.

First I had to spray it all down with Roundup to kill the vegetation. It's roughly 1100 ft² and it took a couple gallons. A few weeks later, after all the plants are dead, they have to be "scalped" off with a weed whacker. That means running the string of the whacker against the dirt so that all the plants are trimmed off.

After all that dead plant matter is raked up, the spreading of the decomposed granite can begin. I bought 10 cubic yards of the stuff and had them dump it in the driveway. This gives great incentive to finish spreading it so that we can, ahem, use the driveway again.

Our neighbor Dallas and my dad were wonderfully helpful with this process, on Thanksgiving Day no less. The three of us whittled down the pile until there were only a couple cubic yards left.

Finally, the following Sunday, I bit the bullet and finished spreading the rest myself. Then I rented a lawn roller and compacted it.

This leaves us at our current state. I still have a fair amount of expense and detail work ahead, but it already looks great!

...Especially when you compare it to how it looked before. We have received many compliments from neighbors.

(click for bigger version)

For more detailed photos of the process, please visit the photo set at our Flickr page.

There is still plenty to do. We'd like to plant an agave between the streambed and grass patch, plant some plants around the edges of the streambed, put a few more big rocks next to the streambed, install a bench under the big tree, and finish planting Mexican Feather Grass in its patch. But I think for now I may relax during the winter and finish it out come springtime!