This week I did two things I’ve wanted to do for a long time: I put my first seedlings in soil, and picked up free mulch from the city (anyone else have “pick up free mulch from the city” on their life list? Come on, admit it.)

I needed the mulch because, despite having ripped out our front lawn months ago, grass and weeds were beginning to grow back. Over the past season a number of neighbors re-seeded their lawns, and we also had some pretty gusty days. The winds were kind enough to scatter seeds indiscriminately, and it wasn’t long before blades of grass were starting to poke their pointy little heads up out of our naked soil.

I didn’t (don’t, and never will) want to use an herbicide like Monstanto’s Roundup for a host of environmental, health, social, political, and economic reasons, and I’m not in any particular hurry to get this done (gardening is an exercise in patience, right?), so I decided to try sheet mulching. From what I had heard, sheet mulching was as easy as laying sheets of newspaper down over the weeds, and then covering the newspaper with mulch. This was supposed to deprive the weeds of sunlight and smother them. Then, in a couple of months, the plan was to plant California native wildflower seeds that I had picked up at Theodore Payne.  

To get started, I sent an email out to everyone on our block asking for old newspapers. A handful of neighbors dropped them on our porch, and before long there was a nice-sized stack.

Next, I made a trip to one of the L.A. Bureau of Sanitation's free mulch giveaway sites. The city (and many others across the globe) offers free compost and mulch—all you have to do is pick it up.  In Los Angeles, city compost and mulch is made at three different facilities and is composed of trimmings from residential green bins, greenwaste from Griffith Park, animal waste (zoo doo) from the Los Angeles Zoo, tree trimmings, and horse manure. The zoo doo and horse manure make for a very fragrant mix—so much so that when I spread it out in my front yard, my neighbor across the street said that she and her book group, which was meeting at the time, could smell it wafting in over their bagels and coffee. That said—it’s no worse (and arguably much better) than the completely foul, reeking, retch-worthy fertilizer that was put down on other neighbors’ lawns in October and November.

I had saved the empty topsoil and garden soil bags after filling my raised beds last week, and I brought them with me to the mulch giveaway, along with a shovel and a sense of adventure. The mountain of mulch was steaming as I dug into it, and I filled bag after bag with the stuff.

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