Pasadenan Elana O’Brien cut her water costs in half and dramatically reduced her water usage after she chose to redesign the front yard of her Madison Heights home using hügelkultur.
Like many Pasadenans, an inconspicuous lawn adorned her front yard before she became acquainted with hügelkultur, a centuries-old, European horticultural technique that uses a raised mound of compostable material as a bed for plantings.
Hügelkultur– German for “hill culture” – is said to reduce or eliminate irrigation in municipal landscape settings, while helping build up healthy, fertile soil on and around the mound, or “hügel.”
O’Brien first heard of the technique after attending a workshop conducted by Pasadena Water and Power in 2019.
She then decided to emphasize this technique in her front yard and build a water-saving garden instead of the old lawn at her Madison Heights home that she knew was on depleted soil and was using up too much water.
Since then, O’Brien said she cut her water costs and now uses 13,000 gallons of water down from the 50,000 gallons in 2020 before she employed the hügelkultur technique to redesign her front yard.
“I have cut my costs in half and I looked at my PWP bill and my HCF (hundred cubic feet). When I started this in March of 2020, it was at HCF seven and then it went to 11 in ’21 and now it’s at three. So was May and July of this year,” O’Brien explained.
Pasadena’s water bill tells residents how many hundred cubic feet (HCF) of water they have used. Each HCF is 748 gallons of water. O’Brien added that most households with a thousand square foot per feet of grass use about 35,000 to 75,000 gallons of water.
“I did the math, and when I was at 11, which was the second year of doing Hügel, I think it’s because I bought more plants the following year who probably were tending to them more than I was able to the year before. I was at 50,000 gallons and now I’m down to 13,000 gallons.”
“I think my home usage has stayed the same,” O’Brien said about her water use. “I’m pretty conservative inside the house, and I use buckets when I’m warming up my water. So I’m pretty sure my water inside the house has stayed the same, but the outside I think is where the difference is.”
Starting a Hügel Garden in Pasadena
O’Brien started her hügel garden by gathering as much of the materials for free from the City’s tree trimmers or from neighbors.
“The first layer that’s always recommended is the cardboard, because that’s what the worms like, and they’re the ones who are going to do a lot of the work below the ground,” O’Brien continued, “but really you need big chunks of logs, and I got them from trees that were cut down. Coincidentally, right about the time I needed them, the city was cutting down some deceased trees: Magnolias. So I just got the chunk of the trunk. And then my next door neighbor was cutting their camphor tree, which I got.”
The only thing she probably did buy was some of the soil, because she needed more to heap on the mounds made from cut trunks and branches, cardboard, old leaves and grass.
“There’s a couple of soil companies in the vicinity. There’s cow blend soil, there’s also Whittier soil,” she said. “They will sell you soil that you could put on top, or you can dig next to your Hügel, which I did, which were swales and swales are canals that go nowhere, but they collect rainwater. You can use that soil to put it on top of the limbs. So you can actually do this for free. But it’s labor.”
During her free time, when she’s not busy organizing, O’Brien is focusing on adding more California natives to her hügelkultur garden.
“Succulents are pretty, but they don’t contribute. They don’t bring pollinators,” O’Brien said. “Natives bring pollinators, and that’s what we actually need in our challenging environment. I mean we need the pollination; we need everybody doing their job. The thing about succulents is they don’t attract pollinators. So I’m less interested in those as I am in stuff that’s going to do something.”
She’s grateful that PWP was there to start the hügelkultur workshop, and that people from the local landscaping company, Studio Petrichor, are around to help guide people who are interested in preserving their yard while saving on water use.
“It was through them that I learned these techniques,” O’Brien said. “And the city of Pasadena’s water conservation team – they’re doing a lot. They helped me as a resident, but they’ve also done some changes to some of the reservoirs here where they’ve built some hügels on public property.”
Along with creating hügels across Pasadena, the project includes a rigorous data collection and analysis component, and a community outreach component as well to disseminate findings and encourage wide-spread adoption of the technique as a “best practice.”
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