Sustainable Water Strategies Resource List

Mulch Suppliers

Soil and Sod, Pacoima, 818-686-6445

Foothill Soils, Sylmar, 661-254-0867

Easiest gutter diverter for homeowner rainwater catchment applications

Tanks

Choose tanks that ship from CA. Also sells first flush systems. Etanks is another option.

Native plants that can be used as lawn:

Carex praegracilis: Meadow Sedge, more runner, turf-forming

Carex pansa: Dune Sedge, possibly sturdier/less water use (according to Greenlee Nursery)

I use both interchangeably, retail source is Tree Of Life Nursery, plug 6-12” centers. Also available from Greenlee Nursery.

Festuca rubra: Red Fescue, the lumpy lawn, requires more water than above, but easily available.

Bouteloua gracilis: Blue gramma grass is also very lumpy, looks like a bluer Bermuda, great for desert/hi-elevation applications.

Books and other resources:

Eric D. Stein, Shawna Dark et al, Historical Wetlands of the San Gabriel River

Art Ludwig,

You can buy books, plumbing supplies, etc. from this website. Reading the articles on the website is an education in water storage and reuse. The only source of salt-free dish and laundry that I am aware of.

Ludwig, The New Create an Oasis with Grey Water, Oasis Design

Ludwig, Builder's Grey Water Guide, Oasis Design

Ludwig, Water Storage: Tanks, Cisterns, Aquifers, and Ponds for Domestic Supply, Fire and Emergency Use--Includes How to Make Ferrocement Water Tanks, Oasis Design

Brad Lancaster,

Another excellent resource for water use.

Lancaster, Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands Vol 1 & 2, Rainsource Press

Vol. 1 is overview, Vol. 2 is earthworks

Mollison, Mia Slay, Permaculture: A Designers' Manual, Tagari Publications

Hemenway, Gaia’s Garden, Chelsea Green

Orchid

Reading List Week Two: Books About Sustainable Design Principles

Principles of Ecological Design, Ludwig, Art, ©1989 Oasis Design, oasisdesign.net. This short manual gives rules for ecological design that are both simple and profound. An excellent companion to his other books which deal with greywater and water storage.

Gaia’s Garden, Hemenway, Tony, © 2000 Chelsea Green. This is the most accessible book about Permaculture for gardeners, especially for the West Coast.

Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, Holmgren, David, © 2002, Holmgren Design Services. A more theoretical approach to sustainable design concepts.

Permaculture: A Designers' Manual, Mollison, Bill, © 1988 Tagari Publications. This comprehensive book is the textbook for the Permaculture Design class. A reference for those who have already been introduced to the principles, as well as a dual duty doorstop and blunt instrument :-). It is on this list for the sake of comprehensiveness.

Design with Nature, McHarg, Ian, © 1982 John Wiley and Sons, Inc. This book is more a lanscape-level and regional-planning book, but has beautiful graphics and exposition about where to site projects. This book addresses the too-rarely asked question, “where is this project?” when designing.


 
The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art and Architecture, Gyorgy Doczi, © 1981 Shambhala Publications, Inc. How the Fibonacci sequence and other aspects of the golden mean underlie proportions in nature, and how this has been used historically in good design.
Orchid

Greener Gardens: Sustainable Garden Practices BIOLOGY X498.10

COURSE SYLLABUS

Instructors: David King and Orchid Black

Email: greenteach@gmail.com    orchid@pitchersage.com

Phone: redacted

COURSE TITLE AND NUMBER: Greener Gardens: Sustainable Garden Practices BIOLOGY X498.10

There are no prerequisites for this course. We will meet from April 05 through June 12 for 12 meetings. There are three field trips as indicated in our schedule (below). All class meetings on campus occur 6:30 PM in Boelter Hall, Room 2760 on Monday evenings.

Course Purpose:

Sustainability is today's buzzword and many people seek to create a lifestyle with a more favorable impact on the environment. From home gardens to school and commercial sites, our gardens present the perfect place to start. Designed for horticulture students, gardening professionals, educators, and home gardeners, this course focuses on turning your green thumb into a "greener" garden. Topics include composting, irrigation, water harvesting, water wise plants, eating and growing local produce, recycling, and moving towards a sustainable lifestyle when choosing materials and tools. Includes weekend field trips to the Los Angeles River to see our relationship with water in the L.A. Basin, as well as a native garden with sustainable features, focusing not only on California native plants but also on water-conserving planting design. Students also visit the John T. Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies at Cal Poly Pomona, which advances the principles of environmentally sustainable living through education, research, demonstration, and community outreach. This course will enable students to understand and appreciate the changes we will need to make in our gardens to achieve ‘sustainability.’ A multitude of differing strategies will be presented allowing students to choose the extent of their involvement with more sustainable gardens and, ultimately, a more sustainable life style.

Course Objectives:

1. 
   
   
   Understand the concept of sustainability and its relevance to the modern garden.
2. 
   
   
   The reasons to consider sustainability.
3. 
   
   
   Be able to use the concept of sustainability in the creation of a garden and its maintenance.
4. 
   
   
   Understand and be able to present to others the concepts and ideas of sustainability and the myriad of alternatives to an overtly consumptive garden style.

Application:

This course is designed to be practical. Upon completion, students will be able to employ many different strategies to reduce consumption of water and oil-produced products and create beautiful and productive gardens that comprise a much smaller carbon footprint than most contemporary gardens.

Text for this course:

This course will not have a text. There will be an extensive bibliography from which the material presented has been gleaned; some books will be practical, some books theoretical, while others will present an overview of our current situation and the problems that affect our daily lives and the gardens we grow.

Course Schedule:

Mtg. Date Topic

1 05 April Introduction to Sustainability

2 12 April Design for Conservation of Resources

3 19 April Soils, Composting and Worm Bins

4 26 April Water I: Water Conservation

5 03 May Water II: Water Harvesting

6 08 May Garden Garden Field Trip

7 10 May Habitat and Hardscape

8 17 May Sustainable Planting Palette

9 24 May Sustainability of Front Yard Food

10 29 May LA River Field Trip (or 15 May) Unconfirmed

11 07 June Sustainable Gardening: The Next Frontier

12 12 June Lyle Field Trip

Your grade will be predicated on class participation and your choice of two papers of no less than 5 pages or two projects (or a combination of one of each) on aspects of sustainability; topics and project possibilities will be discussed in class. We encourage students to use their own area of interests when choosing their topic or project.

Office Hours:

We will have no set office hours, however, we will be available by phone and by email. We are willing to meet with students by appointment.

After class is usually not a very good time because that’s when all students vie for answers and we are all tired after a long day. You can get a more thoughtful answer by contacting us another time.

Updates and Handouts

For this course we will utilize a blog page (lagardennotes.blogspot.com) to post handouts and extra material to the class. There is an RSS feed through which each posting is automatically forwarded to your email so you can have access to handouts whenever they are posted. This approach is most handy when dealing with field trips because links to maps can be posted and any last minute updates are easily available. If this technology is new to you, another classmate or David will guide you through it. It is not difficult.

Sheet Mulching

Cardboarding Pasadena Backyard © 2008 Orchid Black

At times it is necessary to eliminate plants from a large area - in Los Angeles, this is most often grass - and sheet mulching is the way to do it. Here is a lovely post about ridding a Bermuda grass lawn - one of the most persistent weeds a garden can have. Without chemicals and without a lot of heavy sweating, any lawn can be history.

This technique not only doesn't use chemicals and hard labor, it also leaves the soil in much better condition than it was as a lawn. It seems to me to be a win/win/win situation. It does require patience, but, while patience may be a virtue to the general population, in gardeners it is essential!

david