Replacing our front lawn with a garden

Our front yard was a simple lawn, never used and not really attractive. I should say never used by us because the neighbors were using it for littering and taking their dogs for a walk if you catch my meaning.

So, we decided to replace our front lawn with a low-water, low-maintenance garden that had at least some California natives. Our landlord gave us the go-ahead and we've been doing it in sections. For the last section we (foolishly?) decided to try and dig up the grass completely and use the sod to create mounds to make the yard more interesting.



This was a lot of work so we stopped after getting enough for two mounds. Then today we collected two loads of free soil at a local nursery in our pickup to pile on top of the sod mounds and the rest of the yard.

The soil was really rich and now we just need some plants and mulch to finish the yard.