Domestically Sustainable Agriculture - Construction, Planting, and Harvesting

Step 5 Prepping the soil

For our first soil preparations, we decided to cut out the grass in our outlined plots, and then just turn them over to give a good beginning layer of soil. When the grass dies, hopefully there will be some good nutrients in our soil, and that way grass won't be poking through when we begin planting.

So begin by taking an edger, and make an edge around the plot, and then edge sections of the plot. This allows the shovel to go in easier and separate the dirt and everything. Just take your shovel, shove it into the edges, and lift up. You will now be able to just grab the soil and lift it up. Now just place it back into the same position as it was; except this time the grass will be facing down with the dirt facing up.

Comments

[pbritton]

I agree with Wayne31r, I have completely converted half of my lawn to a very successful veg garden and we used a combination of news paper and cardboard and have had no problems with any of our crops or weeds for 2 years. you have to hill potatoes but the labor saved is huge.

[wayne31r]

A much easier system, which I've used several times, is to layer the grass with cardboard or newspaper. Wet it a bit to keep it in place and pile on the loam or compost. By the time the plant roots reach that depth, the paper has decomposed along with the sod.

[Civbert]

We didn't bother cutting up the sod. We just placed the filled right over the grass. None of the grass came up through the new soil. So it might be OK to skip this step.

[hogthrob]

Really great instructable - An improvement might be to ditch the turf (its rubbish compost) and turn the soil before topping up with topsoil. This would give you the benefit of a double dig, it gives you extra depth for growing things like potatoes and it never needs digging again!!! yay.

[static]

My thinking was leaning towards using the sod to build something in the garden. What you could build would depend on how large a garden area one makes. The first thing that comes to mind is the walls for the raised beds, the ultimate would be soddy for a garden shed..