Your L2G Project is Very Important

Thank you for your interest in the L2G program.  We hope these “How-To” will help make your important project even more successful.  Your new Beautiful Long Beach Lawn to garden Project will benefit both you and Long Beach in many ways in addition to “just” conserving water.

Preserve our limited drinking water
Southern California’s water supplies have been permanently reduced.  Your new drought-tolerant landscape may permanently reduce your need for outdoor irrigation by as much as a whopping 80 to 90 percent!

Protect our upstream environment
Half the drinking water consumed in Southern California is imported through hundreds of miles of aqueducts from environmentally sensitive ecosystems.  By conserving water in Long Beach you will help reduce the pressure to extract more water from northern California’s Sacramento Delta and from the Colorado River.Protect our coastal waters

Keep the Long Beach coastal zone healthy for people and marine life by reducing polluted urban runoff
The runoff from lawns very often contains pollutants such as animal waste, grass clippings, fertilizers and herbicides.  This runoff flows into storm-drains where it is transported directly into our coastal waters.  Your L2G landscape will reduce the runoff and the pollution load by greatly reducing the landscape’s need for water, using efficient watering systems that create little to no runoff, demanding little to no chemical treatments, using compost and other material to enrich the soil and slow the flow of water, and, when possible, grading the landscape to keep rainwater on-site.

Beautify our neighborhoods
You’ll beautify your neighborhoods by using richly colored and textured elements for our landscapes from our choice of non-plant material such as rock, and from the thousands of plants that thrive in the Long Beach climate, many of which provide food, habitat and other benefits to birds, butterflies and other wildlife.

Reduce yard maintenance
You should be able to reduce or eliminate the need for weekly mowing and use of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.  Other than occasional watering and weeding, your Beautiful Long Beach Landscape will require less maintenance; freeing you up to enjoy the beautiful new landscape!

Create higher-value spaces
When you add elements like outdoor areas for play, seating or entertaining, you create spaces that are more functional and useful than hundreds of square feet of additional grass.