13004 Venice Boulevard: The Learning Garden at Venice High School is Showcase Central

SHOWCASE CENTRAL:  The Learning Garden at Venice High School

We'll kick off the 2018 Mar Vista Green Garden Showcase at 10am with 11th district Councilmember Mike Bonin welcoming visitors at The Learning Garden at Venice High School.  The Learning Garden was the first school garden started by community activists, setting the model for many of the other school gardens in the Mar Vista area. Attaching their endeavors to the existing gardening classes at Venice High School, The Learning Garden has been a beacon for the community since 2002. Great place to start your tour.  Tour this enormous peaceful and sustainable garden and learn about what David King does for the community.  Then pick up a map and figure out your route for the day, apply your sunscreen, talk to experts and meet lots of garden lovers. 

The entirety of The Learning Garden is grown without any pesticides, herbicides or fertilizer and depends on the soil food web to provide the plants with the appropriate nutrients. 

The garden is watered by hand; as a teaching institution, part of learning how to care for plants is watering them. Some passive water saving is employed, capturing runoff and sequestering it back into the aquifer. The gardens are well mulched. There are three or four (depending on the week) different ways of composting in the garden.

Inca berries

You'll also be able to dig deep into the expertise from the Seed Library of LA (SLOLA), the local organization protecting the diversity of our food supply. SLOLA is a collection of seeds and a community of passionate gardeners and volunteers, which facilitates the growth of open-pollinated seeds among residents of the Los Angeles Basin. A hub and repository for seed collection, SLOLA's mission is to educate members about the practice of seed-saving through their free monthly workshop and outreach events, such as MVGGS.  





Please note that you enter through the gate on Walgrove just south of Venice Blvd.

12552 Barbara Avenue

I started the transformation of my yards the same year the financial crisis hit. I thought that if worse came to worst I could sell my high-value fruit at the corner of Venice and Centinela. It was also my bit part to stimulate the local economy and make the world more sustainable. All the hardscape materials were recycled from previous walkways, driveway and the chimney. The fruit trees were selected by my friends who committed to harvesting "their" trees each year. The native plants were selected by my landscape designer for their textures, colors and drought tolerance. Today, I enjoy sitting out in the front patio watching the world go by, greeting the neighborhood dogs and their guardians as well as the young families that frequent my patch of Mar Vista.

This year, I added three more fruit trees in the backyard. My landscape designer tells me "that's it", there is no room for more trees after these three grow up.  I hope to live in my house until I leave feet first. Before that happens, I hope my trees thrive and give many people a taste of their sweetness. Christie Kruse Landscape Gardening designed this garden. She came up with a plan to create an outdoor dining room in the front yard so that 20 people could be invited for a  sit-down dinner.  Irrigation is a combination of soaker hoses, drip, and sprinklers targeted to the fruit trees. In the winter, the irrigation is turned off.  In spring and fall, the garden is watered once a week and twice a week in the summer.  The composter was provided by the city for $20.

I'll have a special guest with me at my garden.  Naomi Curland of Pachamama Alliance, whose mission is to bring forth an environmentally sustainable, socially just, and spiritually fulfilling human presence on this planet. The core outreach of the Pachamama Alliance is the Awakening the Dreamer symposium, but recently they've been developing coursework based on Project Drawdown.  online. Drawdown is the most comprehensive plan ever to reverse global warming and offers the top 100 solutions to do this. Naomi will have information about how we can make changes in our lives and homes right now to become part of this movement to reverse global warming. 

12450 Barbara Avenue

I am so excited to be Chair of the revitalized Mar Vista Green Garden Showcase for 2018 and hope you will visit my garden (front and back are open). Reps from the LADWP will also have a table talking about all the great rebates that are available through the city (cash for turf, irrigation, free trees, etc.).
As you can see from the "before" shot, when I bought the house in 2013, it had a boring lawn, some roses here and there with no beds, pavers, shrubs or drought-tolerant plantings. That blank slate was great in many ways as I could create my own vision. But it also produced in me a horrible period of paralysis. I didn't know what to do and felt overwhelmed. Here's my biggest tip if you find yourself in a similar situation: PINTEREST ROCKS!!! I just devoured hundreds of images of sustainable gardens and pared down what might work for me. And I recalled many of the gardens I had visited on previous Mar Vista Garden Showcases. I was so lucky that a wonderful landscape designer named Michael Todoran lives in my neighborhood and I hired him to create the actual plan for my front garden. Then my longtime gardener Henriis Caballero took over and did the plantings, created the porous fence, installed the drip irrigation system and hopseed perimeter, and laid down the decomposed granite walkways.

Beau Finnegan loves his front garden 

The front yard's half-moon pathway separates beds of echium (Pride of Madeira), society garlic, various sages, butterfly bush, night-blooming iris, milkweed, and Eastern redbud, olive and Jacaranda trees. My sustainable garden dream came true with lots of help...I wish the same for you.

Before shot of front

Backyard "secret garden" 

3379 Stewart

GET THE INSIDE SCOOP ON A BRAND NEW GARDEN.  See how the site plan was devised, what plants were selected and how the garden owners worked with experts on every choice to make their sustainable garden dream come true.  This is a not-to-be-missed opportunity to see sustainable garden design and execution.    

Hi MVGGS visitors, we're Julia and Zach and six-year-old Roman, all of whom love gardens.  We have lived in the Mar Vista neighborhood for 10 years and bought a home here six years ago. It had a sweet English garden look when we bought it with a big green lawn and a white picket fence. A few years ago we decided to let our lawn go and stopped watering it with dreams of transforming it into a water-wise garden. Our brown lawn was dreary and we knew that it was time to do something about it. Julia began a vision board of ocean-friendly landscapes and created a Pinterest garden board.   

Site Plan 

Recently, our front yard was selected as the home makeover for UCLA’s Extension Landscape Architecture course “Building a Garden Ecology with California Natives," taught by UCLA Ecology Professor Alison Lipman, director of environmental non-profit SELVA International, and Steve Williams of Surfrider Ocean Friendly Gardens and Selva EcoGardens. Steve also works as a conservation biologist at Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains. The challenge was to transform a relatively small front yard into an ocean-friendly CA native garden which also allows space for play and relaxation.  We chose a drought-tolerant so cal native zen playscape from the concepts submitted by 25 students. The team of students removed all grass and existing plants and replaced all that with a rain garden, pollinator garden, natural playscape and gorgeous all so cal native plants.

When we couldn't find the perfect water feature Zach designed a gorgeous fountain out of a perfect boulder and made a solar fountain in an afternoon. We also added big colorful boulders around the rain garden for our son to play on. We have plans to put in a zip line and nature-inspired climbing structure for our son's play corner. So far, the yard has been attracting all kinds of birds, bees, and butterflies!  

The garden was installed last December so is only four months old. The plants are still growing their roots now so are still small above ground, but we think it is important to highlight that establishment of a native garden requires a little patience. The plants establish best from 1-gallon containers.  A popular saying about native gardens is, "The first year they sleep, the second they creep, and the third they leap!" 

Steve Williams will be with us in the garden with info about Selva EcoGardens and Surfrider Ocean Friendly Gardens! We will have free low flow shower heads and sink aerators from LADWP for folks in their service area.  

Plan provided options for water and light features

Here are some of the CA native plants you will find in our garden:

• Purple sage
• Hummingbird Sage
• Woolly Bluecurls
• CA buckwheat
• CA fuchsia
• Carmel Sur manzanita
• Yankee Point ceanothus
• Creeping red fescue
• CA wild rose
• Narrow-leaved milkweed

Selva International

Surfrider Ocean Friendly Gardens

Selva EcoGardens 

3300 S. Centinela Ocean View Farms

Don’t miss this Mar Vista treasure! 

Come for the compost tips, stay to tour the gardens!  Visit Ocean View Farms between 10am and 1pm for a tutorial on composting from OVF’s resident compost guru Karl Lisovsky.  One of OVF’s most important long-term commitments is to continually increase its awareness of, and participation in, our neighboring community.  One example of this synergy is a cooperative effort with the City of Los Angeles to reclaim and reuse city-collected stable waste in conjunction with a vigorous internal composting program. Today, OVF's composting program entails mixing reclaimed stable waste with the green organic waste produced in the garden. Last year, over 200 tons of shredded soft green waste, 900 cubic yards of woody material and 80 tons of stable waste were combined to produce a virtually unlimited supply of compost for plots.  Mar Vista Green Garden Showcase visitors are invited to bring home some compost from OVF’s supply.

500+ garden plots overflow with organic veggies, flowers and fruit, all organically grown. From artichokes to agave, OVF has it all. This season gardeners are planting tomatoes, corn, beans, squash, potatoes, chard, lettuces, and onions. Several gardeners have cactus and native plants, and the perimeter of the garden is filled with fig, avocado and citrus trees, as well as pine, eucalyptus, black walnut and palm trees.  Organic Gardening Magazine donated a 1,100 gallon cistern to OVF and it sits at the top of the hill (at the far end of the parking lot) and is connected to one of the dugouts near the Little League baseball field. Just one rainy day collects over 600 gallons of water! The water is piped down to the composting area to be used on the pile. Ocean View Farms is on six acres of land owned by the DWP and under the jurisdiction of the Department of Recreation and Parks and is the largest of more than 60 community gardens in Los Angeles County.

12833 Rose Avenue

Special Guest:  Cindy Hardin of the Los Angeles Audubon Society

Friends and neighbors have told me while visiting my garden that it's a slice of heaven in the neighborhood.  On days when the sunlight hits the garden just right—I definitely agree with everyone, the garden is breathtaking.

The majority of the plants in the garden are succulents, South African and Australian plants. Almost every plant is from a cutting, a seed or a volunteer. At one point I had a strict color palette, but I let that go when I found beautiful volunteer flowering plants brought courtesy of seed deposits from the birds. Happy accidents happen in the garden all the time. Once in a while I'll reward herself with a plant purchase when an amazing plant is too hard to resist.

I don't use any fertilizers or pesticides—which is greatly appreciated by all kinds of butterflies, insects and birds. My only watering method is hand watering and rain from Mother Nature. I do all the maintenance, which is great exercise, rewarding and therapeutic. Another added plus is that since I'm outside all the time, I get to meet all my neighbors and make new friends. I love to give away plants and offer gardening tips and information—after all isn’t that what a garden is for? Great help from XYZ Designers and Best Solar.

11969 Woodbine Street

Inspired by prior Mar Vista Green Garden Showcase events, we resolved that 2015 was the year in which we would remove the old lawn and transform the outdoor living space into a drought-tolerant oasis. The result has cut water usage by more than 50%, and provides interesting colors and textures throughout the year.  Maintenance time in the garden is about the same as before, but gone is the noise of the lawnmower, replaced by the appreciative humming of bees.

Master Gardener Sara Saxonberg will be with us at our garden...so be sure to stop by. And Landscape Designer Linda Levine will be visiting as well.

Resources: 

Rose in Bloom Gardens

David Kent, deck contractor

Go Pavers hardscape

Volt Lighting LED landscape lighting