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" 

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.