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don’t actually use.
    In early August I took a one-day course called “Killing Your Lawn.” Steve Gerischer, a landscape designer with a trim mustache, taught the course. Standing on the elevated stage of a community center in front of a couple of hundred people in Altadena, California, he began by saying that if you approach gardening as problem solving, “it will rapidly become a bore.” Instead, he advised, look at it as an opportunity to try stuff out. “Ask yourself, ‘What do I get to do?’ not ‘What do I have to do?’ ” Good advice for any DIY pursuit, actually.
    Gerischer said he killed his own lawn years ago, not for any of the “right” environmental reasons but because he loves growing plants and needed enough square footage to grow “one of everything.” In the process, he learned that removing your lawn and replacing it with a garden was good for the planet. “One hour of running a poorly tuned lawnmower equals 340 miles driven in a new car,” he said. “Fifty-four million households get out each weekend to mow, blow, and edge, using 800 million gallons of gas per year, mostly in the spring and summer, when we are the most air-quality challenged.” The audience moaned as Gerischer rattled off these and other facts about the evils of lawns.
    Next, he listed the different ways to kill a lawn. You can rip out the grass with tools, which is hard work but effective if you do it right. You can kill it with chemicals like Roundup, but you run the risk of killing your existing vegetable garden if the herbicide drifts over to it in the breeze. The third option is smothering it by covering it with plastic, or with newspaper and cardboard.
    Death by newspaper appealed to me because it seemed cheaper, easier, and less toxic than the other methods. I’d been saving newspapers since hearing about the method a couple of months earlier. Gerischer said that after laying down the newspapers, you could then cover them with mulch. When it came time to plant, you just poked holes through the newspaper.
    The next day I called a topsoil and mulch supplier in Orange County. Sandy, the woman who answered the phone, was polite and helpful. She told me that mulch prices started at $19 per cubic yard and ran all the way up to $59. The expensive stuff, she said, was a chocolate brown “path mulch” made primarily from tree bark.
    I debated which kind of mulch to buy. It was tempting to buy the cheap stuff, but then I remembered what had happened a week earlier, when I bought a durable black plastic garden cart in anticipation of hauling mulch around. When Carla saw it, she literally groaned at how ugly it was. “Why couldn’t you have bought a metal wheelbarrow with wood handles?” she asked. I explained that I had found the plastic cart on Amazon, liked the reviews, and clicked BUY.
    The plastic cart exemplified Carla’s major complaint about my DIY projects. She was concerned that my amateurish activities would result in more eyesores. As editor in chief of Craft magazine (the sister publication to Make ) she had high standards for aesthetic appeal. “If it looks bad,” she warned me more than once, “I’m going to hire someone to rip it out and do it the right way.”
    With the sting of the garden cart still in my mind, I told Sandy to send me the $59-a-yard mulch. She recommended I get enough to cover my lawn two inches deep. That meant I’d need about thirteen cubic yards. I ordered fifteen just to be safe. I also ordered a fifty-pound bag of gypsum, which Gerischer told me to scatter on the grass before I laid down the cardboard and newspaper, as it would accelerate the process. The total price, including delivery, was $971. It seemed like a lot, but I figured it would pay for itself in a couple of years through reduced water bills.
    Two days later a ZZ Top look-alike drove up in a dump truck. I asked him to drop the load on the driveway. Unfortunately, the telephone wires above it were too low and would